What to watch this week: The Great, A Small Light, White House Plumbers

The Great — a scabrously funny, ‘occasionally true’ period drama — returns...and it makes Bridgerton look positively prudish.

Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great, in The Great (Stan)

The Great – Season 3

Stan

Huzza! The Great is back for its third season. This scabrously funny, “occasionally true” period drama makes Bridgerton look positively prudish. Penned by Tony McNamara, who won an Oscar for co-writing 2018’s The Favourite, the show stars Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great, an idealist plunged into the godless court of Tsar Peter III — a monstrous manbaby played to petulant perfection by Nicholas Hoult. While the first two seasons focus on the mutual antagonism and power struggle within their relationship (“Marriage is a cage, except it’s also a deathmatch”), in season 3, the couple reaches a kind of equilibrium. After Catherine’s botched assassination attempt on Peter (she mistakenly knifed his doppelganger, Pugachev), the two undertake whatever is the Age of Enlightenment’s equivalent of marriage counselling (which, in this case, involves a lot of badminton) and attempt to peacefully raise their newborn child.

L’Opera

SBS on Demand

Director Cecile Ducrocq was inspired by Rocky when she concocted this sumptuous and cutthroat drama. The French series, set in the prestigious Palais Garnier, the nation’s pre-eminent ballet and opera company, centres on three ambitious characters. Ariane Labed is Zoé, a complicated, 30-something, prima ballerina whose hardcore partying habits and taste for self-destruction have left her career hanging in the balance. Suzy Bemba, meanwhile, is Flora, a young black dancer fighting for recognition in a company with a diversity problem. Then there’s Raphaël Personnaz’s audacious Sébastien, the new director of dance, who has grandiose plans to put L’Opéra on the map. Visually it’s one of the most elegant shows in recent memory — the dance sequences are infused with a rawness and carnality you’d associate with a ring fight. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it was filmed in the glimmering, ornate jewel box that is the Palais Garnier.

Normal People

Premieres at 8.30pm Thursday, May 25 on SBS; also available on Stan

If you somehow missed Normal People, Hulu’s perfect adaptation of the Sally Rooney bestseller, when it emotionally steamrolled the rest of us in the thick of the pandemic, SBS is airing the series in May. The coming-of-age drama, set in Ireland in the early 2010s, centres on the on-again-off-again relationship between final-form and then university students Marianne and Connell. Connell (Paul Mescal) is working-class, athletic, and popular; Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is wealthy, prickly, and passionately disliked at school. Connell’s mother works as a cleaner at Marianne’s house and their nervous, fumbling conversations lead to a sexual relationship that Connell insists on keeping secret. This show works on every level, but especially because the chemistry of its two extraordinary leads is perfect — even if said chemistry exists mostly in miscommunication (arm these two with a Dale Carnegie tome and the show would be over in an hour) — Mescal and Edgar-Jones dance around each other so believably that it genuinely aches watching it all fall apart.

White House Plumbers

Binge

It’s bizarre that less than a year after Gaslit — the universally ignored Julia Roberts and Sean Penn-led Watergate drama — finished airing, TV would come out with another take on that same scandal. Alas, we have White House Plumbers, a “slapstick tragedy” that this time focuses on the bumbling buffoons behind the crime: former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy (played by Justin Theroux, sporting a ridiculous moustache) and ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson), who were hired by the Nixon administration as “plumbers” to identify and stop leaks. Penned by Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck, known for their work on Veep, the satire appeared promising in theory but ultimately falls short in execution. The show is often muddled and fails to deliver the laughs that it promises. Despite being only five episodes in length, it feels as though it has overstayed its welcome. That said, Theroux is on top form, and the supporting cast of Lena Headey, Domhnall Gleeson, Kiernan Shipka, and Kathleen Turner provide enough entertainment to serve as background noise while you’re folding your ironing.

A Small Light

Disney+

The true story of Hermine “Miep” Gies, Otto Frank’s secretary, who aided in hiding him, his teenage daughter Anne, and others in an attic annex above Otto’s spice company in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam until they were betrayed by an anonymous informant is the subject of Disney+’s new drama, A Small Light. The Anne Frank story is oft-told, but this lesser-known, astonishing history is fresh and compelling with its modern dialogue and direction clearly tailored to a younger audience. Bel Powley, with her ginormous, darting eyes, is Miep. When we meet her, in a flashback to 1933, she is hungover, jobless, husbandless, and kvetching with her parents. She has a zippy energy that feels as though she’s accidentally wandered off the set of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, and it’s hard to say where this series will head. But as the series progresses, her party girl defiance matures into courage and loyalty.