What to watch this week: Only Murders in the Building, Minx, The Fall
Only Murders in the Building returns for a third season, plus a forgotten gem from the writer of Happy Valley.
Disney+
Disney+
Nobody had a comedy-mystery centred on the trio of septuagenarian legends Steve Martin and Martin Short, and Disney Channel alumna Selena Gomez, on their TV bingo cards. Yet, we have Only Murders in the Building. This savvy show, which was one of the great comfort watches during lockdown, returns for a third season – and it’s brought Meryl Streep into the fold. Charles (Martin), a crabby, once-famous actor; Oliver (Short), a once-successful Broadway director with the airs and graces of Quentin Crisp; and deadpan, mysterious Mabel (Gomez) are neighbours in the Upper West Side apartment building Arconia. The three have little to do with each other, but they share an obsession with true-crime podcasts. When a fellow tenant turns up brutally murdered, the three team up to form a vigilante detective squad – and record their escapades for a podcast. Martin and Short are in great form, and Gomez meets them beat for beat – the chemistry is delightful. Add a lashing of Wes Anderson-lite cinematography, and you’ve got yourself a winner.
Minx
Stan
Minx is going through a dreaded sophomore slump. After its firecracker first season, the HBO comedy is back for round two with diminishing returns. Scrumptious era sets can only entertain you for so long before you pack it in and opt for rewatching Mad Men. For those who missed it the first time round, it’s a sunny comedy set in 1970s Southern California. Ophelia Lovibond stars as Joyce, a snobby not-quite-Ivy League-educated journalist with ambitions to start a feminist magazine — its working title is “The Matriarchy Awakens”. After a failed attempt to shop the premise around to media moguls, Joyce meets Doug (New Girl’s Jake Johnson), the sleazy yet charming head of Bottom Dollar, a softcore porn publisher who makes magazines with titles like “Secretary Secrets” and “Feet, Feet, Feet”. They team up to create Minx, a publication that is part serious journalism and part erotica made for women.
Unforgiven
Stan
As the Hollywood strikes rage on, stalling productions and leaving us on our respective cliffhangers, now is as opportune time as ever to dig through the archives in search of forgotten gems. This brings us to 2010s Unforgiven, a miniseries from Sally Wainwright, the brain behind Happy Valley. Suranne Jones, who is one of those British television actors whose name you can never recall but is reliably brilliant in everything, plays Ruth Slater — a lifer newly released from prison after shooting two policemen dead when she was 17. She’s spent 15 years in the slammer and is determined to find her younger sister who was put up for adoption. If you have a weakness for character-driven dramas set in bleak English towns, then this is a show for you. The supporting cast includes Siobhan Finneran, who plays the useless hippy-dippy Clare in Happy Valley. It’s classic, twisty Wainwright writing — the only complaint is that there are just three episodes.
The Fall
Binge
A decade after its release, this BBC serial killer thriller stands as the genre’s most effective and menacing. Gillian Anderson is Stella Gibson, an ice queen police investigator who has been shipped over by the Met to take a defibrillator to a stalled case in Belfast: the murder of a young, female architect. Stella, who could not be more out of place among local law enforcement with her tastefully unbuttoned silk shirts, neck-snapping stilettos, and tut-tutting demeanour, soon draws a link between this case and a different unsolved murder. We learn early on that the exceptionally handsome Jamie Dornan is the serial killer Paul Spector – a grief counsellor and a loving family man, with a propensity for dropping Nietzsche quotes. The casting of Dornan, who would later go on to star in 50 Shades of Grey, is a stroke of genius – he, like the show, is repulsive and arousing in equal measures.
Marriage
ABC, Saturday 10.42pm
ABC iview
Here is a show about an ordinary, boring couple falling apart in the same ordinary, boring ways as the rest of us. Except this couple is Sean Bean and Nicola Walker, so playing witness to their benign bickering is infinitely more compelling and enjoyable than actually enduring the drudgery of domestic anxiety. In Marriage, Bean and Walker play a couple who have been together for 27 years. Bean’s Ian is a lumpen man who has just been made redundant, Walker’s Emma is a stressed out solicitor at a local legal firm. When we meet them, they are having a barney in the airport over a jacket potato. This show is full of tiny, low-stakes arguments: shampoo, ketchup, and dishwashers all take centre stage over the course of its one-hour runtime. If you watch television to escape the mundanity of real life, this will not do it for you. If you like to see real life reflected back at you in oppressive, painstaking detail, there’s something quite mesmerising about it all.