What to watch in March, from Bridgerton to The Dropout
A huge month of television is ahead, from scammer stories to headline-grabbing reality television to the return of some of your favourite series.
The Dropout begins at the end. Elizabeth Holmes, played with eerie, dead-eyed precision by Amanda Seyfried in what is undoubtedly a career-best performance, gives testimony about her failed health start-up, Theranos, which claimed to have the ability to test a vial of blood for hundreds of diseases with just one prick of a needle. Spoiler alert, just in case you weren’t listening to podcasts or reading newspaper headlines in the years 2015 to 2019, Theranos didn’t, and it couldn’t. And Holmes, once touted as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, was found guilty of 11 counts of fraud.
The great Theranos downfall, and that of Holmes herself, is just one of many scammer stories holding our attention in a vice-like grip these past few years. Holmes joins the ranks of people such as Anna Sorokin, the fake German heiress who swindled hotels, banks and even one of her close friends out of tens of thousands of dollars in the pursuit of a particular Instagram-friendly lifestyle.
And then there’s Adam Neumann and wife Rebekah, the real-life couple behind co-working start-up WeWork, a company that was either God’s gift to the office or a business that never quite realised its lofty ambitions, depending on the day (and who you ask). All three of these figures and their failed business ventures dominated headlines at one point or another over the past few years. And now all three are the subject of competing miniseries: on Disney+, Netflix and AppleTV+ respectively this month.
All this coming hot on the heels of The Tinder Swindler, the chilling Netflix docu-series that followed con artist Simon Leviev, who cheated a number of online dates out of some $10m in order to fund his own luxurious lifestyle. He was only caught after the women banded together to take him down; you can bet a Netflix executive is already pitching a dramatised version of the cautionary tale. It’s too good a story to leave at one documentary.
Why are we so obsessed with scammer television? Is it pure schadenfreude, that smug feeling of watching someone be so completely taken in, while knowing, of course, that you would never allow yourself to be put in that position?
Or is it even simpler?
There’s nothing more compelling than seeing someone almost pull off something so outrageous and audacious and brazen as asking a friend to put a luxury Moroccan villa on their work credit card while you await the arrival of a wire transfer from Germany, for example. Scams make for a great story – as long as you’re not the one left with the bill.
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Killing Eve
The end of Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh’s assassin comedy-drama, Killing Eve, is upon us, and though the series never quite lived up to its immaculate first season, it will nevertheless be sorely missed. Female characters like Comer’s Villanelle and Oh’s Eve are sadly all too rare, even in this golden age of television, and both actors gave their all to these unique roles.
Can Killing Eve do that other sadly all too rare thing and give fans the kind of finale they’ve been holding out for? We’ll soon find out.
Weekly on ABC iView now.
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This Is Going To Hurt
Are you one of the 1.5 million people around the world who bought a copy of Adam Kay’s best-selling memoir, This Is Going To Hurt? Even if you’re not, you’ll no doubt enjoy watching the livewire adaptation, starring Ben Whishaw, streaming this month on Binge.
The series follows a young doctor reminiscing about his frenetic years spent working in the “brats and twats” ward – also known as obstetrics – of a busy NHS hospital. Equal parts intense and tender, this series truly captures the gruelling reality of life for young doctors in the hospital system.
On Binge now.
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Our Flag Means Death
Whenever Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby team up, you know it’s going to be a wild ride. Our Flag Means Death is the pair’s silly and shambolic comedy series about a gentleman pirate, played elegantly by Darby, who crosses paths with the fearsome Blackbeard (Waititi, who else?)
On Binge from Thursday.
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The Dropout
In the opening scene of The Dropout, Amanda Seyfried pointedly sings along to Alabama’s I’m in a Hurry to Get Things Done, just in case you were wondering what kind of a miniseries this was going to be. By which we mean knowing, without ever tipping into overly smug on-the-nose territory, which is a dangerous tightrope to walk for any series that looks back on recent events with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. (We’re looking at you: Inventing Anna.)
Instead, The Dropout uses its impeccably researched source material – the popular podcast of the same name – as a jumping-off point for a clever investigation of how one woman managed to dupe Silicon Valley so thoroughly.
It’s anchored by a truly outstanding Seyfried performance, portraying Holmes as a precocious, occasionally naive and ultimately calculating woman desperate to leave her mark in the field of science at any cost. And there’s a stacked supporting cast, with dramatic heavy lifting done by Stephen Fry, Naveen Andrews, Laurie Metcalf and Alan Ruck, fresh from the set of Succession, as a winningly gullible Walgreens executive. This is a precise and perfectly calibrated miniseries that unfolds chronologically with slow-building tension, drawing you into the Theranos web until it’s almost too late.
Weekly on Disney+ from Thursday.
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Pieces of Her
Remember when it felt like all of Hollywood had decamped to Australia to make television during the pandemic? Two shows releasing this month are the result of that. First up, this Netflix thriller starring Toni Collette, Bella Heathcote and David Wenham about a mother and daughter discovering a secret buried deep in their family’s past. Here, western Sydney stands in for small-town Georgia.
On Netflix from Friday.
Joe vs Carole
The second local pandemic production to hit streaming this month, Stan’s Joe vs Carole is a fictionalised account of Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin’s feud, as immortalised in the documentary Tiger King. Watching Kate McKinnon gloriously ham it up as Baskin is worth whatever the Stan equivalent of price of admission is alone. And just as a little trivia sidebar: McKinnon dropped out of playing Elizabeth Holmes in, ahem, The Dropout, in order to join Joe vs Carole.
On Stan from Friday.
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Outlander
Fans of this time-travelling romantic romp – there really isn’t a better way to describe Outlander – call this period the “Droughtlander”, meaning the long stretches spent waiting in between seasons of their beloved show. For Outlander devotees it has been a dispiriting two-year break between season five and this month’s season six, returning to Foxtel and reuniting stars Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan. If you’ve never watched the series, you have a bit of catching up to do, but basically Claire (Balfe) has time-travelled back to 18th-century Scotland, where she falls in love with the rugged Jamie (Heughan), though by season six the couple find themselves making a new life in America.
Weekly on Foxtel from March 7.
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Winning Time
The pedigree for this series couldn’t be more prestigious. Adam McKay – director of The Big Short and creator of Succession – at the helm, with stars including John C. Reilly, Adrien Brody, Jason Segel, Sally Field and Australian Jason Clarke, and subject matter that doesn’t come more shiny: the Los Angeles Lakers in their heyday.
Weekly on Binge from March 7.
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Byron Baes
What is there to say, really, about Byron Baes? It feels like the whole of the Northern Rivers region protested its very existence when it was first announced in 2021, and yet here the Netflix reality series is, launching in mid-March with a cast of influencers heading to Byron Bay for some “sun, surf and sound-healing” – their words, not ours. The internet is going to lose its mind over this show.
On Netflix from March 9.
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The Responder
A gritty police drama starring Martin Freeman as a first responder dispatched to the scenes of gruesome crimes in Liverpool? Consider us locked in. The tone is high-octane; think recent hits Trigger Point and Bodyguard, for example, but more realistic, which you can chalk down to an absolutely phenomenal lead performance from Freeman as a man for whom this job is everything.
On SBS from March 16.
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WeCrashed
The scammer television era continues with WeCrashed, a glossy AppleTV+ drama starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as husband-and-wife team Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the couple behind WeWork. Just like The Dropout, WeCrashed begins at the end, with a crisis board meeting called before WeWork’s infamous failed IPO in 2019 to oust Adam – played by Leto as a distant but demanding guru-like leader very content to wander his expensive offices shoeless – from his position as head of the company.
Weekly on AppleTV+ from March 18.
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Sanditon
Fandoms don’t always get what they want when it comes to cancelled television shows; despite camping outside the head offices of Netflix in 2019, the streaming platform never renewed Brit Marling series The OA. But fans of Sanditon got lucky, when an online campaign demanding a second season of this surprisingly steamy adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished final novel was successful. This month’s new episodes, still centred on our heroine, Charlotte (Rose Williams), are the result of that campaign. The internet can be a force for good, after all.
On BBC First from March 24.
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Bridgerton
All of these earlier March television shows are foreplay, really, for this month’s main event: the long-awaited and breathlessly anticipated second season of Bridgerton. You know you love it, this saucy Regency romance, and we know you’re going to love the new season, even if it doesn’t feature the Duke of Hastings (Rege-Jean Page), who has quit the ’Ton in season two for pastures greener. (A Dungeons & Dragons movie adaptation, apparently. Best of luck to him.) Bridgerton brother Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) is stepping into his leading man shoes – and out of his leading man shirts and breeches – admirably, while Sex Education’s radiant heroine, Simone Ashley, joins him as a love interest. Quite frankly, it’s the most fun you’ll have watching television this month.
On Netflix from March 25.
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Pachinko
Rich and immersive, this AppleTV+ miniseries is an ambitious and generation-spanning family saga set across multiple decades in Korea, Japan and the US, with three different languages, a sprawling cast and two exciting Korean-American filmmakers – Kogonada (After Yang) and Justin Chon (Blue Bayou) – at the helm. Based on Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name, first published in 2017 and a bestseller ever since, this eight-episode television show is a passionate and lush imagining of a truly beloved story, with a cast of Korean superstars including Oscar-winning Youn Yuh-jung and the dashing Lee Min-ho. Absolutely stunning television.
Weekly on AppleTV+ from March 25.
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Moon Knight
Oscar Isaac. Ethan Hawke. Brand-new Marvel television series. What more do you need to know? Sure, Isaac has been in a Marvel project before, and the less said about that the better. (X-Men: Apocalypse, a true blight on the X-Men franchise.) But this is Marvel Marvel, overseen by studio head Kevin Feige, introducing a new and enigmatic multi-identity vigilante character to the franchise, with Hawke serving as the series villain. The first trailer raised a few eyebrows when it was released, in particular on account of Isaac’s choice to embody Moon Knight with an English accent giving Dick Van Dyke levels of cockney realness. But hey, a trailer is just a trailer. In true Marvel fashion, we really know nothing about what this series will actually be like. And honestly, just the promise of an Isaac v Hawke showdown has us very hyped.
Weekly on Disney+ from March 30.