Weeds, Small Time Gangster, Redfern Now, Lost and Parks and Recreation light up summer TV

Got some time to binge on the classic TV drama series you’ve missed lately? Here are the best shows streaming right now.

Undated : Actress Mary-Louise Parker from tv series 'Weeds'.

“No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment,” Aldous Huxley wrote in Crome Yellow, and he might have been talking about summer television viewing, the season when we have more time to watch but there often seems to be nothing on.

The commercial networks disdainfully dump shows between the ratings months, “new episodes” of faltering series jettisoned in haste as they gear up for a sporting summer of big bashing cricket and big grunting tennis. This is knowingly characterised in the industry as zombie programming; no wonder people get the holiday blues (aka seasonal affective disorder) when there no TV to divert us.

This year, though, is different because, well, everything seems to be on — and available on countless screens and outlets. Streaming services have changed the landscape completely, offering vast libraries of movies, docos and TV shows of all kinds.

It’s even possible to watch a half-dozen shows more or less simultaneously, and if you want to play around after a day at the beach and the fourth gin and tonic, you can take control of montage and turn your TV receiver into a bottomless pit of footage. Of course, nearly all of it has been on before, much of it tucked away on Foxtel — it proves yet again there can never be a television future without a past.

On streaming service Netflix check out Small Time Gangster, the terrific local series from 2011, written with mischievous wit by Gareth Calverley and Andrew McInally, starring Steve Le Marquand and Gary Sweet, and directed with a cutting-edge sheen by Jeffrey Walker. It’s a grim but very funny comedy built around the clear boundaries that exist between criminality and respectability, and the way the transgressive energies of life at the margins are so segregated from mainstream Australian society. Perfect viewing after you see off fractious rellies.

Mary-Louise Parker stars in Weeds.

Then, still trawling through Netflix, spend a few very laid-back hours with Weeds, the classic US comedy about a desperate housewife, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), who becomes a marijuana dealer to pay the bills, a show that was originally a critical success for cable channel Showtime. While displaying no discernible career skills, Nancy dutifully goes to her sons’ soccer matches, keeps an upscale house and Latina maid, displays an insatiable appetite for iced latte, Diet Coke and large glasses of red wine, and deals weed to make it possible.

Irresistible mind-altering comedy for the summer that will have you consorting with all kinds of stoners, jokers and crooks as you lounge back with a cold one.

Or, if you’re in the mood for some epistemological complexity after too many G & Ts, you could go back to the beginning of Lost— also in Netflix’s huge archive — which probably left you infuriatingly and wretchedly in the dark the first time around. Its complex and cryptic storyline and elaborate fractured narratives about a handful of plane crash survivors on a not-so-deserted island, will spawn numerous unresolved questions to keep you pondering until the sunburn fades away.

Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation.

A recent offering from Presto, perkiest of the new streamers, isParks and Recreation, the award-winning mockumentary set in the world of small-town politics and centred on a group of workers in the parks department of the fictional midwestern city of Pawnee. The luminous Amy Poehler stars as Leslie Knope, an ambitious small-town government worker, heading a cast of characters who are broad comic types as well as sincerely, often hopelessly inept, fully realised three-dimensional personalities. It’s one for a long afternoon with a big jug of Pimm’s.

Generation Kill, Presto streaming. This compelling and ultra-realistic Iraq war series is still one the best shows on local television and now showing on this enterprising streaming service. The Wire’s writer-producers David Simon and Ed Burns have turned embedded reporter Evan Wright’s book of the same name, based on his three-part series for Rolling Stone called The Killer Elite, into relentless TV. The apparently random plot structure follows the course taken by one marine recon battalion in 2003 as the war unfolds, up to the taking of Baghdad. They gather intelligence and engage with the enemy as they carry “the scribe” (Lee Tergesen) into battle. Hardly welcomed at first, the writer is assumed to be a “dope-smoking peace freak”, then the guys find out he used to write for Hustler.

Boardwalk Empire, Presto on demand. This is remarkable lengthy period drama from Martin Scorsese, the director embracing TV’s digital world without losing any of his traditional filmmaking fluency or classical skills. The brainchild of Terence Winter, the writer behind The Sopranos, the series is described by Scorsese as “an epic spectacle of American history, or culture I should say, American culture”. Based on Nelson Johnson’s nonfiction book of the same name, the series meticulously re-creates Atlantic City during the roaring 20s, resurrecting an era of corrupt politicians, big bands, suffragettes, showgirls, bootleggers and capricious criminal masterminds such as Al Capone. Like illicit, sinful liquor, the series, starring Steve Buscemi, packs a wallop.

City Homicide, Streaming on Presto. Hidden away among many of the gems now appearing on this streaming service is City Homicide, one of the great underrated local cop shows, though it did prove popular with audiences when it appeared in 2007, notching up 66 episodes before it ended in March 2011. Its final season was one out of the ordinary - a six-episode miniseries titled No Greater Honour was shown instead of the conventional one-case-an-ep format, and if you get to the end on Presto you’ll find one of the guest stars was none other than your humble columnist. Seen through the eyes of four young detectives and their superiors, the series weaves character and event, plot and detail together with acute dramatic skill. Shane Bourne and Noni Hazlehurst play their bosses.

Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar in Narcos.

Narcos, Netflix streaming. This original series chronicles the real-life stories of drug kingpins of the late 1980s led by the notorious Pablo Escobar, and the bloody conflict that resulted from their clash with law enforcement. Escobar was wanted for the killing of a justice minister, a presidential candidate and a crusading anti-drug newspaper editor; for masterminding the midair bombing of a Colombian jetliner in 1989 that killed 110 people; and for shipping tonnes of cocaine to the US and Europe. Promoted with a tagline that says it all - There’s No Business Like Blow Business - it’s full of action-movie fireworks, set-piece escapes and gunfights, along with a persuasive message: the drug policy pursued so vigorously by the US government during the past 30 years just has not worked.

Dig, Stan on demand. This terrific crime caper is a big-budget adventure worth settling in for across the week, if the hustling first episode is any indication of what will follow. Dig is a delectable concoction of suspense and psychological drama, fantasy, and doomsday-clock-ticking-down thriller with touches of crime and espionage fiction tossed stylishly into the melting pot.

McLeod’s Daughters, Stan, on demand. This highly successful local drama series is a great one for summer family viewing. It stopped production a few years ago but should attract an entirely new audience. There are no weekly victims, no serial killers, no drunken coppers seeking redemption, no hospital patients, no car crashes, no cold cases and no diseases. It’s a one-an-episode story series with a complex set of intricately traced family connections between characters. It remains arguably Australia’s most successful television drama. The series offers humanity, romance and innocence - and especially the girl-power vibe of sexy young blondes shooting guns and galloping on large horses.

A scene from Redfern Now.

And Stan, the other major streaming service, has picked up the ABC’s Redfern Now, the first series to be written, directed and produced by indigenous Australians. It’s centred on a diverse group of individuals from six families whose lives are changed by a freakish or serendipitous occurrence. Each episode is like a beautifully constructed short story that goes straight to the fragile hearts of Redfern Now’s characters, without becoming sentimental or obdurately political. Intense viewing but profoundly rewarding on a late summer’s meditative evening.

Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons in Fargo.

The second season of Fargo (available to buy or rent on iTunes) is possibly the show of the year, again based on Joel and Ethan Coen’s cinematically mischievous movie of the same name and starring Kirsten Dunst and Ted Danson. It’s another mesmerising 10-part prairie noir tale from creator Noah Hawley about a group of good Minnesota folks driven to the brink by anger and stupidity. The whole thing is infused with that quality of so-called “Minnesota nice” — the culture of perpetual cheeriness and over-the-top politeness to strangers — that made the movie so popular.

Set post-Vietnam in 1979, this new chapter of what looks like a long-running anthology series is a loose prequel to last year’s first series, with a stand-alone plot and a cast of mostly new characters. Like a Coen brothers movie, everything is tight, neat, elided. Sometimes scenes are interrupted with blackouts, then picked up as if seconds later, reminding you of Elmore Leonard’s remark that as a crime novelist he always cut the bits that people skip when reading.

Hawley delivers a classic crime thriller in a shadowy setting of dark icy roads and frozen skies — the shadows themselves assume a narrative dimension, what WH Auden called “the Great Wrong Place” — and creates a dreamscape that echoes not Cormac McCarthy, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola and the gangster movies of Martin Scorsese but the many films of the Coens, especially Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing. Each of Hawley’s characters occupies a bleak icy landscape — the melancholy interiors straight out of Edward Hopper’s paintings — the sparse information that connects their worlds whispered and scattered in unlikely ­places, thickly coded and freighted with ambiguity.