The ultimate TV binge list

From The Underground Railroad to The Americans and Wentworth, the small screen has your back when it comes to home entertainment. These are our TV critic’s picks

From The Underground Railroad to The Americans and The Sopranos, the small screen has your back when it comes to home entertainment.

Young Rock (Binge)

Dwayne Douglas Johnson, one-time famous wrestler but probably best known as a star of the Fast and the Furious series of movies and the film Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, along with TV’s Ballers, stars in his own comedy series in which, bursting with testosterone and the most self-effacing grin in Hollywood history, he’s running for president of the United States. And no-one, especially the Rock himself, knows whether it’s a kind of serious test run or simply a rather disarming fairytale. This device frames a highly entertaining time-warping romp through Johnson’s early years and his life with his battling, itinerant parents, his mother Ata Johnson – born Feagaimaleata Fitisemanu Maivia, of Samoan heritage – and his father, the black Canadian professional wrestler Rocky Johnson, of black Nova Scotian descent.

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The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime)

The Underground Railroad is from Oscar-winning Barry Jenkins, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title. It’s the story of Cora Randall, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia on a train that travels beneath the earth and that takes her around America, every episode conjuring a different look into her emerging consciousness. This is TV that shimmers with creative power and sings out so passionately about racial injustice and white supremacy in ways that makes you weep.

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Rosehaven (ABC iview)

A comedy to relax with set in picturesque rural Tasmania, and stylishly produced with a small budget and a largely Tasmanian cast and crew. Created by its stars, the popular comedians Luke McGregor and Celia Pacquola, it follows the adventures of McGregor’s Daniel McCallum, who returned to his rural hometown to help his intimidating mother Barbara, played drolly by the redoubtable Kris McQuade, with her real estate business. Then, to the great surprise of the hapless Daniel, his best friend from the mainland, Pacquola’s Emma, arrived in town on the run from a marriage.

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The Americans (Foxtel On Demand)

This is for the long binge, six seasons and 75 episodes of Joe Weisberg’s espionage drama set mainly in ’80s’ America in which sleeper Russian spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, played splendidly by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, commit heinous acts, though not without a sense of moral consequence, as they attempt to save the motherland, even as it’s under attack from within. You’ll be thrilled by shootouts, car chases, countless disguises and those wigs, and the seemingly endless near misses for the agents posing as travel agents and living with their two kids, fascinated by the way their zealous mission becomes so compromised by their affluent American lifestyle.

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The Bureau (SBS ON Demand)

And if you are not exhausted by the nefarious activities of the Jennings move on to the brilliant contemporary French espionage series The Bureau, be smitten with the performance of Mathieu Kassovitz as Guillaume Debailly, an intelligence officer aka “Malotru” who’s called back to Paris after six years undercover in Damascus. Like The Americans, it’s about the human impact of what John Le Carre calls “the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people”. It’s highly intelligent, sophisticated and addictive.

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Midnight Diner (Netflix)

This little known anthology series is perfect for isolation. Each episode centres on a dish ordered by customers at the 12-seat counter of a tiny izakaya, a casual bar in the backstreets of Shinjuku, Tokyo’s entertainment district. The modest diner opens from midnight to 7am, catering to late workers who may not be in a hurry, for various reasons, including loneliness, to go home. The sharing of comfort food is at the heart of all these tales, along with the personal stories and aspirations of an unlikely community, drawn together in a confessional-like space, adrift on the fringes of one of the world’s largest cities.

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Wentworth (Foxtel On Demand)

This is Australia’s most successful drama, a prison series that features a cast of splendidly strong, female characters inhabited with wonderful humanity by one of the best ensemble casts we’ve seen in local TV. With cinematic style to burn, and moments of oddly illuminating humour, it deals with the pathways, either chosen or imposed, that put women in the criminal justice system, and what really happens to them in the conditions of quarantine.

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Making A Murderer (Netflix)

This extraordinary piece of investigative journalism started what’s become known as prestige true crime. Producers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos spent 10 years recording the story of Steven Avery, the Wisconsin man wrongly convicted of attempted murder and rape and eventually exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence. As so many of us know now, on release, he was quickly charged with another crime – the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach – and sentenced to life in prison. Anyone who has watched it now has their own ideas of who else might have been responsible, and will almost certainly be convinced of Avery’s innocence. And so I reckon will you.

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Detectorists (Netflix)

This is simply a wonderful and quite addictive series, its unusual comic piquancy turning it into a cult classic. It stars the familiar Mackenzie Crook as Andy Stone, a temp worker with vague dreams of becoming an archaeologist, who also writes and directs. He and his friend Lance Slater, a forklift driver, played beautifully by Toby Jones, both belong to the Danebury Metal Detecting Society, its minuscule membership as eccentric as they are.

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The Sopranos (Foxtel On Demand)

Now you’ve got time, check out the classics you missed over the years starting with fabled mob drama, the series that represents the turning point when TV shows became better than mainstream movies. You’ll love its Byzantine plotting, psychological intricacies, the fine and committed acting, and the way creator David Chase took risks, asking questions instead of providing answers. Once the first episode starts to enthral you’ll be delighted to see that there are 85 more to go, each around an hour in length.

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In Review: More TV reviews including Graeme Blundell on true crime series The Act.