Stuck for something to watch this weekend? We have you covered
Craving more of the brilliant Stephen Graham after Adolescence? Have we got a series for you. On the lighter side, a peek inside rarefied world of ballet – think Wife Swap, but with jetes.
Etoile
Prime Video from April 24
Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, the husband-and-wife team behind Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, turn their attention to the rarefied world of ballet in Etoile, a glossy, globetrotting new series set between New York and Paris. The premise? Two crumbling ballet companies — one in Paris, one in New York — decide to swap their top dancers in a desperate bid to stay relevant. Think Wife Swap, but with jetes.
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Genevieve, the interim head of l’Opera Francais and Le Ballet National, opposite Luke Kirby’s director of the New York company. It has all the pleasures of Emily in Paris – which is to say, watching Americans in Paris – but the series is elevated by its cast of real-life dancers. It’s a side of Gainsbourg we haven’t really seen before, and she seems like she’s having a lot of fun.
Black Mirror
Netflix
Seven seasons in, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror still hasn’t lost its edge. The latest instalment of his sci-fi anthology opens with Common People, a bleak and eerie riff on subscription culture, in which Rashida Jones plays a schoolteacher diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. A new service, RiverMind, offers to make a digital copy of her brain and stream it right back to her. But as streaming costs rise, her thoughts are flooded with adverts she can’t afford to remove.
Her hangdog husband, played by Chris O’Dowd, starts maiming himself on social media to cover the mounting fees. It isn’t subtle, but it’s absorbing. Brooker’s targets are as sharp as ever. One of the pleasures of Black Mirror is its inconsistency – some episodes simply bang harder than others. There’s a whiff of fan service in USS Callister: Into Infinity, a feature-length sequel to the beloved Season 4 episode, and easily the weakest of the bunch. But otherwise, it’s a strong, stylish return. The cast is stacked: Paul Giamatti, Emma Corrin and Will Poulter all make appearances.
The Rehearsal
Max from 21 April
Batten down the hatches – Nathan Fielder is back. The first season of The Rehearsal was perhaps the most excruciatingly awkward television ever made – at least until he followed it up with The Curse. In Season 1, I routinely had to pause and leave the room just to recover from the sheer discomfort. And yet, somehow, Fielder keeps you coming back. For the uninitiated: The Rehearsal is a reality show in which Fielder helps real people prepare for life’s trickiest confrontations.
Recruited via Craigslist, these volunteers bring him their problems – a man who wants to confess to lying about his master’s degree to his long-term trivia team, a woman unsure about motherhood – and Fielder constructs elaborate simulations to help them rehearse. He builds painstakingly accurate sets and hires actors to run through every possible outcome. His theory, as laid out in episode one, is that he’s “very good at predicting how people will react”. Season 2 takes an even stranger turn. After developing a personal obsession with aviation disasters (a “hobby”, he insists), Fielder sets out to fix the issue of cockpit miscommunication. It’s utterly mad – and a reminder of why we should keep giving TV budgets to genuine freaks.
Boiling Point
SBS on Demand
Much has been made of Adolescence’s brilliant single-shot direction — and rightly so. But for us Stephen Graham-heads, it was hardly a revelation. Adolescence marked a reunion between Graham and director Philip Barantini, who previously collaborated on the anxiety-inducing one-take film Boiling Point, later expanded into an exceptional four-part TV series.
Set in a high-end London restaurant, the series follows a team struggling to keep the place from going under, night after night. Graham’s character, Andy, is still around but largely sidelined – those who’ve seen the film will know why; for everyone else, best not to spoil it. The spotlight now shifts to Carly (Vinette Robinson), the warm but steely head chef and co-owner of a new venture, Point North. The drama is not unlike Bake Off — think chocolate sauce mistaken for jus – if Bake Off made you want to tear off your own skin from stress.
The Leftovers
Max
It’s hard to muster the willpower to start something new when Max – which landed in Australia last month – keeps smacking you in the face with its glittering HBO back catalogue. The Sopranos! Succession! The Leftovers! Fine, just one episode, you think. Two couldn’t hurt. Oh no! It’s 3am? The Leftovers is one of those rare cases where the TV show completely outpaces its source material.
Tom Perrotta’s novel is good, but he never quite follows through on the full implications of his own premise: that two per cent of the world’s population suddenly vanishes. Enter Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof, who drags it into something stranger and far more ambitious. This is a rich, apocalyptic epic about grief, belief and the insatiable need for meaning. Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Regina King and future superstar Margaret Qualley are all astonishing. Plus: Ann Dowd as the leader of a chain-smoking cult.
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