Six reasons to stay home in April
From spy thrillers by the Russo brothers to Australian romantic dramas, here’s our guide to the best shows streaming on Binge, Netflix, Prime Video and more this month.
The close of March and the beginning of April brings a spate of fresh shows and seasons for streaming favourites old and new this autumn. March, a mega-month thanks to The Mandalorian, Ted Lasso, Yellowjackets and Daisy Jones & the Six, is going out with a bang. The final season of HBO’s Succession also kicked off on Binge earlier this week, with nine more episodes being released weekly from now through to May.
If you’re on the hunt for something to ease into the weekday evening or simply something to fill up a wayward weekend, it doesn’t get better than watching Roy siblings Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) go head-to-head with media mogul and family patriarch Logan (played by the formidable Brian Cox).
As for the shows reaching your favourite streaming platforms come April, there’s certainly no shortage. Some, like Succession, welcome long-awaited chapters. Drama comedy The Marvelous Mrs Maisel steps into its final season this month, while family drama Love Me, starring Hugo Weaving, ushers in a second season on Binge. Others are sparkling new additions to the scene, from spy thriller Citadel to crime drama Love & Death.
Here, our official guide to the must-stream shows this April.
Love Me, season 2
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Bojana Novakovic, Bob Morley, William Lodder
Love Me, the Australian romantic and family drama and the first original production to stream on Binge, airs its second season this month after a critically acclaimed debut last year during which the show scooped up a staggering seven awards at the 2022 Logies. Set in Melbourne and based on the Swedish series Alska mig, the series follows a family at three different points in their life. Hugo Weaving plays Glenn Mathieson, father to Clara (Bojana Novakovic) and Aaron (William Lodder). We watch as each Mathieson experiences the trials and tribulations of modern love while coming to terms with the death of their wife and mother. This season, the cast welcomes three new faces: Nicole Da Silva, Kim Gyngell and Eryn Jean Norvill. Expect the six episodes to touch on everything from grief to friendship and heartbreak. This is one to savour and to curl up with on a cool autumn evening.
(Binge, April 6)
Beef
Starring: Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, Joseph Lee
Lee Sung Jin and A24 bring us Beef, a comedy-drama series fronted by Steven Yeun (of The Walking Dead, Minari and Nope fame) and Ali Wong (of Always Be My Maybe, and Netflix stand-up specials Baby Cobra and Don Wong). The 10-episode dramedy will follow contractor Danny Cho (Yeun) and business owner Amy Lau (Wong) as a road rage incident brings them together in unexpected and darkly comic ways. As Danny and Amy become consumed by their encounter, they attempt to ruin each other’s lives, and are confronted by their own families, relationships and fundamental unhappiness.
(Netflix, April 6)
Tiny Beautiful Things
Starring: Kathryn Hahn, Sarah Pidgeon, Quentin Plair, Tanzyn Crawford
By now you’ve probably heard of Hello Sunshine, the production company run by Reese Witherspoon that has brought acclaimed TV series such as The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere and most recently Daisy Jones & the Six, starring Riley Keough and Sam Claflin. In April, Tiny Beautiful Things joins the Hello Sunshine repertoire, a show based on Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name. The idea to adapt the novel came about when Laura Dern, Strayed and Witherspoon were working together on the 2014 film Wild. All three serve as executive producers on the new series, which follows advice columnist Clare (Kathryn Hahn) as she navigates her deteriorating marriage and a complicated relationship with her teenage daughter.
(Disney+ April 7)
The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, season 5
Starring: Rachel Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, Alex Borstein, Marin Hinkle
The fifth and final season of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, the 20 Emmy-award winning show about a Jewish-American housewife (Miriam “Midge” Maisel, played by Rachel Brosnahan) in the 1950s who pursues a career in stand-up comedy, hits Prime Video in April, and is bound to elicit laughs and tears in equal measure. Though the series, created by showrunners Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, is mostly fictional, the character Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) is based on the real-life comedian of the same name. This season will deal in part with his early death in 1966 after a drug overdose. The Marvelous Mrs Maisel opens with a three-episode premiere and new episodes weekly until the finale on May 26.
(Prime Video, April 14)
Love & Death
Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Jesse Plemons, Lily Rabe, Patrick Fugit, Keir Gilchrist, Elizabeth Marvel, Tom Pelphrey, Krysten Ritter
Elizabeth Olsen is just one of the acting titans starring in Binge’s latest crime thriller, Love & Death, the new series from Big Little Lies writer David E. Kelley. Based on the true story of Candy Montgomery, accused of murdering friend Betty Gore with an axe, the series is set in 1980s Texas and draws its details from Jim Atkinson and Joe Bob Briggs’s Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs, an account of the killing, and articles published at the time in the Texas Monthly. Olsen plays Candy, the accused, while Patrick Fugit plays her husband, Pat.
Jesse Plemons and Lily Rabe are Allan and Betty Gore, a churchgoing couple who are friends with the Montgomeries. As Candy begins an affair with Allan, things go awry. There’ll be seven episodes in this series.
(Binge, April 27)
Citadel
Starring: Richard Madden, Priyanka Chopra, Stanley Tucci, Lesley Manville
From the minds of the Russo brothers (of Marvel, Arrested Development and Community fame) comes their latest project Citadel, a spy drama rivalling their previous espionage thriller, Netflix’s The Gray Man (starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas), in cast, proportion and budget. This time, the Russos have tapped Game of Thrones’s Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra to lead. Madden and Chopra play Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh, agents who had their memories wiped after their spy agency, Citadel, was destroyed by a syndicate. The show picks up eight years after the downfall of Citadel when a former colleague of Mason, Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), asks for his help in stopping that same syndicate, Manticore. Two episodes will premiere at the end of the month, with four episodes aired weekly to follow.
(Prime Video, April 28)
Also coming in May
Lovers of period dramas will rejoice when May arrives.
Netflix’s six-episode Bridgerton prequel, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, will land on May 4, followed by season three of Elle Fanning’s The Great on May 12, and Dickensian miniseries Great Expectations, starring Olivia Colman as Miss Havisham and Australian actor Shalom Brune-Franklin as Estella, premieres on May 26.
For edge-of-your-seat adrenaline, 1987’s Fatal Attraction gets the small-screen treatment. Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan star in a reimagining of the cult classic, which lands on May 1.
Also pencil in May 24 in your calendar, which is when action-comedy series American Born Chinese premieres on Disney+. The show, based on an acclaimed 2006 graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, will reunite the three leads of Oscar-sweeping film Everything Everywhere All at Once (Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Stephanie Hsu).
A thrilling end to Scotland’s top drama
Shetland’s Mark Bonnar and Game of Thrones’ Jamie Sives return as brothers in Guilt, a wicked parable about the futility of trying to outrun your own past.
A crucial part of our cultural fabric
Sharing his ‘life on screen’, Bluey creator Joe Brumm has raised the standard worldwide for children’s entertainment, enjoying a sensational year as he ponders his future.