Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and co: your essential TV guide

Nicole Kidman’s star turn on the small screen is worth a visit. And that’s just the beginning.

Matilda De Angelis and Nicole Kidman in Binge’s The Undoing

The Undoing

Binge

Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are in fine form in HBO’s middling marital melodrama-cum-murder mystery The Undoing, David E. Kelley’s (Big Little Lies) aggravating adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel You Should Have Known. Grant is Jonathan Fraser, the slick, and very British paediatric oncologist and husband to Kidman’s Grace, a Harvard-educated, native New Yorker heiress and psychotherapist. The Frasers live blissfully with their son in their lush, art-filled Upper East Side penthouse. That bliss is interrupted when Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), the younger, sensuous “scholarship mum” of the Fraser’s elite private school is found bludgeoned to death in her art studio, and Jonathan is accused of the murder. What follows is a hokey “did he? didn’t he?” whodunit, a bunch of boring, protracted court scenes, oh, and a gratuitous helicopter chase. It’s hammy, but the leads are irresistible.

Fleishman Is in Trouble

Disney+

While we’re talking marital strife in the Upper East Side … you should be watching Fleishman Is in Trouble, Hulu’s adaptation of New York Times’ writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s literary runaway. The book was great, and the show is a notch better. Jesse Eisenberg is as grating as ever as Toby Fleishman, a neurotic hepatologist in his 40s in the midst of a bitter divorce with his wife, the ambitious and hard-to-reach theatre director Rachel (Claire Danes, perfect as always). In the middle of the night, Rachel dumps their two pre-teen kids at Toby’s new characterless pad and drops off the face of the earth. Left juggling a missing ex, parenthood, a high-stakes job, and new-found singlehood, Toby reconnects with his two college buds: Libby (Lizzy Caplan, who narrates the show) a former journalist, now dissatisfied housewife, and permanent bachelor Seth (Adam Brody), both of whom are navigating midlife crises of their own.

The Lying Life of Adults

Netflix

Every adaptation of the work of cult, mysteriously pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante has been a slam-dunk. There’s HBO’s gorgeous My Brilliant Friend and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Oscar-nominated The Lost Daughter. Edoardo De Angelis’s take on The Lying Life of Adults is no exception. The six-episode Netflix coming-of-age drama, set in ’90s Naples, follows Giovanna (a compelling Giordana Marengo, who looks a whole lot like Timothée Chalamet) the adrift teenage daughter of progressive upper-middle-class intellectuals, who is meandering her way through adolescence, smoking weed and sweating in anarchist mosh pits. When Giovanna overhears her father, upset that she’s flunking out of school, saying that she’s “starting to look like my sister”, the estranged family monster Vittoria, it unleashes shame and curiosity in the girl. She tracks down her aunt, a livewire living in the ghettos of industrial Naples, where family secrets are revealed. A warning to those sensitive to gorgeous interiors: the set design is infuriatingly beautiful, and you’ll lose a good weekend trying to track down swatch-designed landline phones.

Dune

Nine Go, Saturday, 4.45pm

It’s The Watchlist’s civic duty to let you know that Nine Go is airing Dune this weekend. No, not the revered (though admittedly, ironed out) Denis Villeneuve epic, but David Lynch’s 1984 box-office turkey. A movie so chaotic and incomprehensible that Lynch tried to scrub his name from the credits. Many have contemplated adapting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece: Ridley Scott dropped out of the Dino De Laurentiis production, and Chilean avant-garde maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky’s (El Topo, Holy Mountain) painstaking effort to
bring a 12-hour adaptation to the screen was tracked in the 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (worth watching). Reviled as it may be, time has been kind to Lynch’s Dune — it’s choppy, yes, but undeniably compelling. The sets and costumes are intricate and grand, the
world-building teems with imagination, and Lynch, that eternal freak, didn’t shy away from the weirder details in Herbert’s story. It’s your Sunday, choose to spend it wisely by watching a floppy-haired and definitely not 15-year-old Kyle MacLachlan fight
Sting to the death in a battle of spice melange.

Watch On

Stan

In the spirit of award season and The Banshees of Inisherin being the talk of the town, consider watching John McDonagh’s (brother of Banshees director Martin) Calvary. Father James (in a towering performance by Brendan Gleeson) is a widower and a Catholic priest, with a country parish in Ireland. In the first scene, an unidentified man in the confessional says that, in retribution for abuse suffered as a boy at the hands of the church, he will kill Father James in a week’s time. Father James has been chosen as a sacrificial
victim because he is decent, and the killer
believes killing a good priest is more salient than killing a guilty one. McDonagh’s trenchant gallows comedy, flavoured with existentialism, is an exploration of a faithless and fractured community.