Five shows to watch this weekend

Chimp Crazy, HBO’s documentary series about the private ownership of chimpanzees, is directed by Tiger King’s Eric Goode. So yes, it’s bonkers and full of kooks. Plus, epic slow-burn historical drama, and bloody look at Ancient Rome.

Tonia Haddix in a scene from Chimp Crazy on Binge

Chimp Crazy

Binge

The first thing you need to know about Chimp Crazy, HBO’s four-part documentary series about the private ownership of chimpanzees, is that it’s directed by Tiger King’s Eric Goode. So yes, it’s bonkers and full of kooks (e.g. a woman who breastfed a premature chimp baby alongside her human daughter), and you’ll find your jaw continuously hitting the floor. But there is a real sadness to this story that wasn’t there in Tiger King. Where Joe Exotic was an unapologetically rancid exploiter, Chimp Crazy’s hero, a woman named Tonia Haddix, is a more complicated, sympathetic figure. Haddix is a nurse from Missouri who, with her mountain of blonde curls, pinky frosty lips, and spidery false lashes, looks like a character from Female Trouble condemned to spend eternity in a solarium. She refers to herself as “the Dolly Parton of the chimps” and cares for seven captive chimps whom she trains as talent for films. Among them is 32-year-old Tonka, a Hollywood veteran who appeared in George of the Jungle, Babe: Pig in the City, and Buddy (his co-star Alan Cumming plays a bit part in this story). Haddix describes their bond in almost spiritual terms: “It was just natural, and Tonka loved me as much as I love Tonka. It’s like your love for God”.

Pachinko

Apple TV+

Pachinko is quietly one of the finest dramas available today. It’s possible the Apple TV+ adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s sprawling 2017 novel didn’t make a bigger splash due to the nature of the show itself. It’s a slow burn – epic in scope, yet unafraid to linger on emotional minutiae. While much of television seems obsessed with being compulsively watchable, Pachinko is a rare production that encourages and rewards patience. The story spans four generations of a Korean family, beginning in a small fishing village in Yeongdo in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20th century and stretching to the vibrant chaos of Tokyo and New York in the 1980s, before the second season dives into the thick of World War II. There’s no shortage of visually stunning historical dramas, but this one stands out – perhaps bested only by Disney+’s Shogun (which also features Emmy-nominated actor Anna Sawai). Stately and extraordinarily acted, Pachinko is about as good as it gets.

Those About to Die

Prime Video

At the polar opposite end of the historical drama spectrum is Those About to Die. Where Pachinko is patient and gentle, this bloodthirsty romp through Ancient Rome is historical hokum that thrills at every turn. It stars Anthony Hopkins, who is having far too much fun playing the ageing Emperor Vespasian, ruling AD79 after surviving the anarchy of Nero’s suicide. Vespasian’s plight is that he must choose which of his two rotten sons will be his successor; there’s Domitian (Jojo Macari), a wily, plotting politician, and Titus (Tom Hughes), a blank, brutal soldier. Iwan Rheon, best known as the sadistic castrator Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones, has a fabulous little role as Tenax, a bookmaker looking to secure his place in high society. This series, based on the novel that inspired Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, is by no means great television (the script is often laughably bad). But if you’re in the mood for musclebound gladiators pillaging, skewering, and screwing each other, then welcome to the Colosseum.

OceanXplorers

Disney+

James Cameron just can’t quit. The Titanic director has unfinished business at the bottom of the ocean. In OceanXplorers, an absorbing six-part National Geographic documentary, Cameron produces and narrates the journey of the OceanXplorer – the most advanced research vessel ever built – as it ventures into some of the most remote, mysterious regions of the ocean, including the Azores, the Bahamas, and the Arctic. Cameron’s knack for crafting a compelling narrative, combined with the breathtaking natural beauty of marine life, makes for immediately engaging television.

My So-Called Life

Disney+

Give it a month before TikTok teens start raiding their dads’ closets for faded flannel shirts, in a wave of “Angela Chase-core” outfit videos. This week marks 30 years since My So-Called Life, the moody teen drama from Winnie Holzman, first aired. Though it never made it past its first season, the show has become a gone-too-soon cult classic, much like Freaks and Geeks – adored and mourned because nothing on TV today quite captures that same magic. A baby-faced Claire Danes stars as Angela Chase, a 15-year-old wallflower navigating high school in Pittsburgh. Her introspective monologues give the show its diaristic tone (“People always say how you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing, like a toaster or something”). Angela is a refreshingly normal teen with ordinary, middle-class problems: she harbours a life-ruining crush on leather-choker-wearing heart-throb Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto) and is too shy to act on it. Her two best friends have big personalities and even bigger hair: the wild Rayanne Graff (AJ Langer) and Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), one of prime- time television’s first openly gay teenagers. This show is a strangely melancholy time capsule of adolescent angst in the 90s, but its resonance is anything but dated – it still sucks to grow up.