Our brave new world of 2020 (tele)vision

From a new series by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge to local offerings such as Hungry Ghosts, this year will spoil viewers with choice.

Al Pacino and Logan Lerman in Hunters.

Last year saw the remaining boundaries between television and film largely vanishing; 2019 was a defining time for the disruptive forces of streaming and at times we seemed swamped by clever and compelling stories that reflected who we were in so many different forms. Many were visually stunning. Genre conventions were inventively challenged, there were refreshingly cynical takes on the way we live and there were characters of wonderfully diverse racial, sexual and gender identities.

It was dizzying for critics and at times ­fatiguing. But 2019 TV also seemed to many of us to represent a watershed that finally marked a new freedom to watch, freed from the supervisory demands of advertisers. There’s little doubt TV has changed its fundamental nature into something more individualised and private as so many screens of different sizes proliferate.

And we watch in so many diverse ways: solitary viewing on phones in cabs, banks and trains, and often through social networks, the opinions of friends pushing us constantly to new shows, as audience choice is intensely fragmented.

And, while it may be true that the increasing demand for new content means quantity is sometimes prized over quality, there is nonetheless a lot to look forward to this year.

Amazon’s Hunters looks particularly binge-able. It is promoted as an action drama with a rather juicy pulpy plot line centred on vigilante justice that follows a group of Nazi hunters in 1977 New York on the trail of a large group of escaped Nazis who have managed to find refuge in America. According to Amazon’s promotional campaign, in setting to exact vengeance on the surviving Third Reich members they discover a far-reaching conspiracy involving plans for a new genocide. What’s particularly enticing is that this 10-part Amazon original features Al Pacino as Meyer Offerman, the Auschwitz-surviving leader of these vigilantes, in his first TV role.

There’s a new HBO series from David Simon, the visionary who gave us not only The Wire but the recent underrated The Deuce, his stunning recreation of 1970s Times Square in the moment when the underground pornography industry moved into the mainstream and large-scale porn production was born. His new alternate history series, The Plot Against America, is adapted from the Philip Roth novel in which aviator-hero and xenophobic populist Charles Lindbergh, believed by many to have Nazi sympathies, is elected president.

Simon says he was compelled to do the story because he is fascinated by what makes a nation elect a demagogue. The six-parter stars Winona Ryder and the always excellent John Turturro. Like anything Simon does, it’s sure to disturb and needle as much as it entertains and amuses. (While an airing date is still unknown HBO shows usually find their way to Foxtel’s ­Showcase.)

Hunters is an upcoming American drama web television series, created by David Weil.

HBO also has Run from Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge – her Killing Eve also returns for a third season – in which she co-stars with Domhnall Gleeson and Merritt Wever, a classy cast indeed. Not much is known yet but from HBO’s description it appears to be another series about a woman’s reinvention: “Ruby, a woman living a humdrum existence, gets a text inviting her to fulfil a youthful pact promising true love and self-reinvention by stepping out of her life to take a journey with her oldest flame.”

And the busy, competitive HBO will also bring us Nine Perfect Strangers, another series following Big Little Lies, based on the Liane Moriarty novel and again starring Nicole Kidman. She’s also appearing in the HBO limited series, The Undoing, with Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland, based on the provocative literary novel, You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz and adapted by David E. Kelley, a writer suddenly again very much in demand after some years out of the mainstream. I’m also looking forward to HBO’s Perry Mason, a detective drama apparently based on characters from Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels. It’s directed by HBO veteran Tim Van Patten, responsible for many of the best episodes of Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos and Deadwood.

Ryan Murphy’s Impeachment, the latest instalment of his American Crime Story, should come to Foxtel later in the year, and while the use of the word itself has become somewhat tiresome, Murphy’s re-examination of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal should be as illuminating as diverting in this US election year.

Clive Owen is Clinton and Lady Bird star Beanie Feldstein is Lewinsky, with the versatile Sarah Paulson, a Murphy favourite, as the intern’s work associate, Linda Tripp, who exposed the affair. Murphy, now producing for Netflix under a wonderfully extravagant deal, will also release his new project, called Hollywood, later this year on the streaming behemoth.

Details are scarce but he calls it a “love letter to Tinsletown”. We do know it’s set in the 1940s and like his popular horror anthology series American Horror Story will cover multiple narratives and intertwining story arcs. (The indefatigable Murphy is also working with Paulson on a series called Ratched, following a younger Nurse Mildred Ratched, the sadistic character from One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest played by Louise Fletcher and due to air later in the year on Netflix. Expect a female Breaking Bad set in 1946, apparently.)

And joy of joys, after a long hiatus, Fargo returns (on SBS once more, too) with a great cast including Chris Rock, Jack Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Ben Whishaw and Timothy Olyphant. The official synopsis states: “It’s a story of immigration and assimilation, and the things we do for money. And as always, a story of basically decent people who are probably in over their heads. You know, Fargo.”

Again, it’s created, written and directed by Noah Hawley and appears to be set in the 1950s, this time in Kansas City, where two criminal syndicates murderously jostle each other in their attempts to control their drug empires; the bosses it seems even exchanging sons to keep the peace.

Premiering on Foxtel’s BBC First will be The Trial of Christine Keeler, a compelling six-part series from writer Amanda Coe and director Andrea Harkin, starring Sophie Cookson, from Kingsman: The Secret Service as Keeler and McMafia’s James Norton as osteopath Stephen Ward, reviving one of the most infamous British stories of the 1960s, the Profumo Affair.

Drolly described as “a soft-porn version of The Crown” by some UK critics, the Independent’s Ed Cummings, like other reviewers, highlighted the way Coe and Harkin embrace a central theme of powerful men abusing their positions.

If it’s half as good as last year’s A Very English Scandal, from writer Russell T Davies, directed by the illustrious Stephen Frears, which told the true story of the 1970s Thorpe affair, the British political and sex scandal that ended the career of Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal Party, it will be quickly consumed.

And also on BBC First Broadchurch’s reliably versatile David Tennant returns in a delicious-sounding domestic thriller, Deadwater Fell, written by Grantchester’s Daisy Coulam, which follows the repercussions of the murder of a seemingly happy and admired Scottish family. Coulam says it’s one of those mysteries predicated on the way “no one knows what goes on behind closed doors”, about victims “who deserve to be remembered as more than a smiling face in a faded photograph”.

And later in the year expect a BBC series from the fiendishly clever Sarah Phelps, another Agatha Christie reimagining, this time Christie’s 1961 novel, The Pale Horse, about a man whose name is found inside the shoe of a dead woman. Phelps says it’s set “against the backdrop of the Eichmann Trial, the escalation of the Cold War and Vietnam”, and the BAFTA-award winning screenwriter promises “a shivery, paranoid story about superstition, love gone wrong, guilt and grief”. What Phelps gives us in this series of reimaginings, of which this is the fourth, are nuances of insight into people and society that are far more imaginative and resonant than any abstract emphasis on the twists and turns of mystification so usually associated with Christie.

On the local front, Stan has already given us the awesomely prescient The Commons, and the disturbing The Gloaming, from Tasmanian writer Victoria Madden, who created the beguiling The Kettering Incident a few years ago and once again she delivers a cracking atmospheric drama. What a writer she is.

SBS has two interesting local dramas screening later this year too with rather beguiling plots. Hungry Ghosts stars Catherine Van-Davies, Bryan Brown and Ryan Corr in the supernatural story of a vengeful spirit unleashed when a tomb is opened in Vietnam, which appears to bring the dead with it, creating disorder and confusion in Melbourne’s Vietnamese community, people still distressed by war. And I like the sound of New Gold Mountain, directed by The Hunting’s Ana Kokkinos, described as “a revisionist western”, a murder mystery set in the Chinese mining camps in 1855 as gold fever grips Australia.

The ABC has its best and certainly most diverse slate we’ve seen in recent years. Standouts include a new drama from Rake’s Peter Duncan, Fallout, set in 1956 and centred on the British atomic bomb testing at remote Maralinga in outback South Australia; Sarah Ferguson’s documentary series, Revelation, taking us inside the courtrooms as two of the Catholic Church’s alleged child abusers go on trial; and Stateless, a drama directed by the formidable Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse about a group of strangers whose lives collide at an immigration detention centre.

In this new age of TV, choice increasingly and attractively fragmented across so many exciting new platforms and channels, we’ll never again be able to say there’s nothing to watch.

Hunters is streaming on Amazon Prime.