TV Planner: McMafia; Dirty John; The Umbrella Academy; Gardening Australia
After premiering on the BBC last year and turning up locally on Amazon Prime Video, McMafia makes its free-to-air debut.
Justin Burke gives his top recommendations for this week’s viewing on the box.
Saturday, February 9th to Friday, February 15th
FREE-TO-AIR
TOP PICK
After premiering on the BBC last year and turning up locally on Amazon Prime Video at the same time, McMafia now makes its free-to-air debut.
Inspired by the nonfiction book of the same name by Misha Glenny, McMafia is the story of Alex Godman (James Norton), an English-raised son of a family of Russian exiles.
Godman has spent his life trying to escape the shadow of his family’s mafia past, but as he starts building his own legitimate business and a life with his girlfriend Rebecca (Juliet Rylance), that past returns to threaten them. David Strathairn also stars as Russian Israeli businessman Semiyon Kleiman.
Writer and director James Watkins says he and co-writer Hossein Amini were inspired — in part — by David Simon’s The Wire.
“We spoke a lot about The Wire and how it was the story of a city and how McMafia is the story of an interconnected global city, so we thought it would be really interesting to explore,” he says. “There’s a reality in the world of the mafia and it seems very zeitgeisty in terms of the corporate becoming criminal and the criminal becoming corporate.”
Watkins directed all eight episodes, in locations across London, Croatia, Serbia, Qatar, India, Turkey, the Czech Republic and Israel.
“It was a difficult decision because it was a 27-week long shoot and you don’t do that lightly. It also meant I could keep a strong tonal authorship over the material, so I feel pleased to have made that decision,” he says.
“Between huge-budget franchise films and micro indie movies, the film industry has become a difficult place and the freedom you have in television means you can explore the stories in a richer and deeper way.”
McMafia, Wednesday, 8.30pm, SBS
- OTHER PICKS
1. SINGING: Eurovision: Australia Decides, Saturday, 8.30pm, SBS (QLD, 7.30pm; SA, 8pm; WA, 5.30pm)
2. COMEDY: Get Krack!n, Wednesday, 9pm, ABC
3. REALITY: Gogglebox, Thursday, 9pm, Ten
4. QUIZ SHOW: Show Me The Movie!, Friday, 7.30pm, Ten
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BURKE’S BITES
Sunday
Magical Land of Oz, February 10th, 7.40pm, ABC
Barry Humphries narrates this magnificent three-part documentary series. (His resume in the production notes states that he hasn’t had much previous experience with wildlife; but once worked with a cinematographer whose nipple was bitten off by a koala. Which is something.) Episode one is about ocean wildlife, followed by land animals, and finally fauna that inhabits the human environment. The series is attractively shot and will be a real family-pleaser.
***
Sunday
Mrs Wilson, February 10th, 9.40pm, ABC
Here is something you don’t see every day: Ruth Wilson playing her own grandmother Alison, in a three-part drama inspired by the latter’s memoirs. After the sudden death of her ex-spook husband Alexander (Game of Thrones’ Iain Glen), Alison begins to investigate the mysteries of his past, starting with the woman who turns up claiming to be his real wife. “I would tell various people the story, and they all said to me, ‘you’ve got to get this made’,” says Ruth (Luther, The Affair). “I met (executive producer) Neil Blair who said to me, ‘You could get the books published but you could also make a drama out of this.’ I didn’t necessarily want to get it made, but it was an amazing story and the more I told it the more things we kept finding out.” The results are very satisfactory.
***
Friday
Gardening Australia — 30th birthday, February 15th, 7.30pm, ABC
A shoutout from comedians Roy and HG opens this 30th-birthday episode of Gardening Australia; though Slaven (John Doyle) insists he’s been watching it since 1958 (and they are still re-potting azaleas). Later scenes prove him half right. It wasn’t GA, but gardening segments and series have featured on the ABC since the black-and-white days. Bill Nicholls hosted the first such segment in 1957 titled In Your Garden, which aired weekly on Thursday nights. Later, Kevin Heinze hosted a program called Sow What from 1967. It is fascinating. This episode features lots of behind-the-scenes footage (including bloopers), plenty of memories of beloved former hosts including Jane Edmanson and the great Peter Cundall, and Costa Georgiadis even reveals what he looked like three decades ago — without a beard. Even for the intermittent viewer, this is a joyful experience.
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FREE-TO-AIR FILMS
Saturday
Take it as an admission that Eurovision: Australia Decides on SBS is the only game in town for free-to-air at 8.30pm tonight. Why else would we be seeing 1986’s Crocodile Dundee (Saturday, 8.45pm, Nine) again? Another explanation might be the forthcoming film The Very Excellent Mr Dundee! which apparently sees Paul Hogan playing himself on the brink of a knighthood for services to comedy before seeing his name and reputation “hilariously” destroyed. (We will be the judge of that, thank you.)
***
Saturday
Much stronger competition for audience’s eyeballs in this timeslot comes from Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (Saturday, 8.30pm, SBS Viceland) starring Zhang Ziyi. It is an example of what is called the Wuxia genre, which typically features martial arts heroes and melodramatic romance.
***
Sunday
Passengers (Sunday, 8.30pm, GO!) is an underrated sci-fi gem, starring Martin Sheen, Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. The latter two are passengers on a colonial spaceship which runs into bother; the former is an indefatigable robot barman who may or may not be deliberately propelling the narrative. It makes you think about the notion of enjoying life’s journey and not fretting too much over the destination.
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PAY-TV
TOP PICK
The trickle of podcasts being turned into television series is rapidly turning into a flood. Hot on the heels of Amazon’s excellent Homecoming with Julia Roberts, and following reports My Dad Wrote A Porno and S-Town are destined for the small screen, comes Netflix’s Dirty John, based on the popular true crime podcast of the same name hosted by Christopher Goffard.
Connie Britton (Nashville, Friday Night Lights) stars as Debra Newell, a successful interior designer and business owner who is looking for romance online after several divorces. She meets John Meehan, a too-good-to-be-true anaesthetist played by Eric Bana. Newell’s cynical daughters are played by Juno Temple (Atonement) and Julia Garner (Ozark).
It tells the story of how the romance spiralled into secrets, manipulation and ultimately survival. Britton says she felt sympathy for her character.
“I totally understood where she was coming from. It’s easy to blame the victim and that wasn’t my impulse at all,” she told Vulture.
“I was much more interested in what shaped her into this very complicated woman who was vulnerable to a man like that coming into her life.”
She adds that meeting her character in real life as part of her research was “fantastic”.
“She was incredibly warm and helpful. I met her daughter Terra (played by Garner) as well, so I got to see them together and how they interact,” she says. “It was really wonderful to have her be so forthcoming with her own experience and vulnerability.”
Dirty John is billed as an anthology series, which presumably means further seasons are coming, exploring new true crime stories with similar themes.
Dirty John, streaming on Netflix from Thursday.
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OTHER PICKS
1. COMEDY: Crashing, Saturday, 9.30pm, Fox Showcase
2. COMEDY: High Maintenance, Saturday, 10pm, Fox Showcase
3. HORROR: The Walking Dead, Monday, 2pm, Fox Showcase
4. COMEDY: Will & Grace, Streaming on Stan, Fridays
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BURKE’S BITES
Streaming
The Umbrella Academy, streaming on Netflix
The phenomenon of screen adaptations from the Marvel and DC Comics stables is very well known. But how many Dark Horse Comics titles could you name? To date, the most notable examples have been on film, from The Mask (1994), to Hellboy (2004), and Sin City (2005) and 300 (2007) to name but a few. In fact The Umbrella Academy was being developed as a film before entering so-called “development hell” and finally emerging as a TV series. Starring Ellen Page (Juno, Inception), as well as Tom Hopper (Game of Thrones) and Mary J. Blige, among others, it tells the story of seven babies born on the same day in 1989, to seemingly random women across the world who showed no signs of pregnancy the day before. They are adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), a billionaire industrialist who creates The Umbrella Academy and prepares his “children” to save the world. But, just a little like the family in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, things go awry as the children become teenagers. This series begins when the six surviving 30-something adopted siblings reunite upon the news of Hargreeves’ mildly suspicious death. And the world is ending. It is pretty great.
***
Sunday
Pen15, streaming on Stan, from February 10th
Molly Shannon once played a high school outcast called Mary Katherine Gallagher in the film Superstar with Will Ferrell. Shannon is clearly an adult, which makes the whole enterprise even weirder and funnier. There is more than a touch of Superstar in Pen15, which stars Maya Erskine (31) and Anna Konkle (24) as two semi-fictional versions of themselves on their first day of middle school circa 2000. Maya has the misfortune of being immediately dubbed “UGIS” or ugliest girl in school, but proves more than a match for her adversaries. The fact the rest of the cast are actual children makes it even funnier. You will fall in love with this bittersweet series.
***
Wednesday
Miracle Workers, Streaming on Stan, from February 13th
Based on the novel What In God’s Name, this black comedy stars Daniel Radcliffe, Steve Buscemi and Australian actor Geraldine Viswanathan, in a story about doing God’s work. Literally.
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PAY-TV FILMS
Saturday
It takes some courage to name a film The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Saturday, 8.30pm, Masterpiece). I can think of half a dozen places where that title wouldn’t fit. But it does communicate a certain confidence that the film delivers on in spades. Based on the best-selling novel, and starring Lily James, Michiel Huisman, Glen Powell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew Goode, Tom Courtenay and Penelope Wilton, it tells a story of a fancy journalist (James) who learns of the existence of the eponymous club which formed during the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. James’ character decides to travel to Guernsey and write about the club, which changes her life forever.
***
Wednesday
It is more than 20 years since this remake of Lost in Space (Wednesday, 9.15pm, Family) starring William Hurt, Matt LeBlanc, Gary Oldman, Heather Graham and Party of Five’s Lacey Chabert. It is, of course, based on the 1960s television series, and has since been remade by Netflix.
***
Friday
Michael Douglas is so terrific in The Kominsky Method — Netflix again — playing an old actor struggling for relevance; check him out in his heyday in Romancing the Stone (Friday, 10.20pm, Movie Greats).
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