The spy series topping the Netflix charts

A good old-fashioned political thriller, vicious housewives, a Yakuza caper, and everything else worth watching this week.

Luciane Buchanan as Rose Larkin and Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland in The Night Agent, a ‘bog-standard spy thriller with a political lilt’. Picture: Netflix

The Night Agent

Netflix

When was the last time a good old-fashion political thriller had everyone talking? Sorry to say but it’s been five years since Bodyguard. A bog-standard spy thriller with a political lilt is exactly what The Night Agent is, and it’s the number one show on Netflix right now. There’s nothing about this that reinvents the wheel: the plot is simple and predictable, with enough twists to satisfy; the violence is swift and plentiful, there’s kills, explosions, and car crashes by the dozen; and a romantic subplot you won’t care about. After our hero, an FBI agent called Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso, an actor worth keeping an eye on), saves a bunch of civvies from a bomb on a subway train, his valour is rewarded with a dreary desk job in the basement of The White House, manning a helpline phone that agents in the field call when things go pear-shaped. The phone never rings. Until it does. From then, it’s non-stop action. This is a well-done show capped off with great acting across the board. Oscar-nominee Hong Chau, is excellent as per yoozh — even if her shoddy grey wig threatens to derail the show.

It’s A Sin

Stan

Spare a thought for the unsuspecting pillow your fist will surely wallop in fury after watching Russel T Davies’ brilliant, funny, and devastating show about the 1980s AIDs epidemic, and the appalling way that gay men were treated. This six-part miniseries is as good as the Pet Shop Boys song it borrows its title from: that is to say, it’s utterly perfect. The show centres on a group of friends living together in a flat christened “The Pink Palace” during the first decade of the AIDS crisis: Ritchie (the miraculous Olly Alexander), who is closeted at his family home, on the Isle of White (which, as the old joke goes, lags 20 years behind the rest of the UK), but is splendidly unchained among his new-found friends in London; Jill (the lovely Lydia West), a drama student and Ritchie’s best friend, who desperately tries to educate herself about the mysterious sickness that is taking out her circle of friends; Colin (Callum Scott Howells), a bashful apprentice tailor on Savile Rowe; and Roscoe (Omari Douglas), who flees the home of his conservative Nigerian parents to live freely and fiercely.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Binge

So it’s dignified to fork out tens of thousands of dollars on a Masters of Anthropology degree, but observing the women of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for 11 seasons is a “waste of time”? Whatever. Pooh-pooh this as mind-numbing drivel if you like, but you’ll be the one missing out on reality TV at its best and most vicious. The women of Housewives are go-for-broke bulldogs who, to borrow a lyric from Fiona Apple, could roll their eyes at you and kill. The 11th season, with its true crime edge, is the juiciest: housewife Erika Jayne was embroiled in a real-life legal scandal. Jayne and her renowned lawyer husband were accused of misappropriating millions of dollars from vulnerable clients — including burn victims and the families of those killed in the 2018 Lion Air crash — to support their lavish lifestyle. Total depravity. Amazing entertainment.

Stephen

Three-part series premieres on SBS at 9:30pm, Thursday 20 April, continuing on 27 April and 4 May

This is a weird role for Steve Coogan — so far removed from the bumbling, incompetent Alan Partridge — but he smashes it out of the park. He is at the centre of Stephen, a gripping and quietly heartbreaking true crime drama about an 18-year-old boy, Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in an unprovoked racist attack in 1993. The Metropolitan police failed to catch his killers, and, as the title card framing the series reads, a public inquiry found them to be “incompetent and institutionally racist.” This three-part miniseries is set in 2006, 13 years after Stephen’s murder, Coogan plays the compassionate and rule-abiding Detective Chief Inspector Clive Driscoll, who, against the resistance of the force, convinces his superiors to allow him to investigate the case from the very beginning.

Tokyo Vice

Watch on Paramount+

Michael Mann directs the first episode of this series, so you already know the show looks immaculate — all cool-toned and neon lit, with plenty of fabulous trench coats. This vibey Yakuza caper is loosely based on American writer Jake Adelstein’s memoir about his time as the first non-Japanese staff writer at the YomiuriShimbun, the biggest newspaper in the world. It stars Ansel Elgort, who you probably recognise as the cherub-faced lead from the John Green weepy The Fault In Our Stars. He’s now lost the baby fat and is towering (quite literally) as an aspiring Missouri journalist at a Yomiuri-like paper in 1999, who is attempting to uncover ties between the police, politicians and Tokyo’s criminal netherworld, as he brushes up against the culture clashes, hierarchy, and spiky office politics of Japan. Ken Watanabe, a scene stealer in just about everything, plays a hard line Detective who takes our budding journalist under his wing.