What to stream this week: Five new shows and a movie to add to your list

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basketball comedy with Ted Lasso vibes, a globe-trotting cooking show with a Queer Eye star and an Australian-made comedy with a Northern Exposure feel are some of the shows to track down this week.

RUNNING POINT ★★★½ (Netflix)

Scott MacArthur as Ness Gordon, Kate Hudson as Isla Gordon and Drew Carver as Sandy Gordon in Running Point.

Every time you think this professional sports comedy has been Ted Lasso-ed, there’s a vituperative line of dialogue that torpedoes the sentimentality. In the first episode, Kate Hudson’s reformed party girl, Isla Gordon, learns she is being promoted to president of the high-profile family business: the storied Los Angeles Waves basketball franchise. Her siblings suggest she shouldn’t go online. Turns out she’s been described as a nepo baby, but mature. “You’re like a nepo crone,” they helpfully point out.

A blithe half-hour that admirably aspires to Hacks but can’t quite reach those rarefied heights, Running Point’s creators include Mindy Kaling and her The Mindy Project co-star Ike Barinholtz. The humour is rapid-fire and spiky when it wants to be, particularly as it relates to family. Isla’s late father, Jack Gordon, was a problematic old-school mogul whose adult children were left warped by his failings. In Isla’s case, she doubts herself. A quickly annulled marriage to 90210 star Brian Austin Green doesn’t help.

Hudson, free to rampage in a way her romcom movie career never allowed, plays Isla with an earthy, impetuous energy. When her predecessor as president, older brother Cam (Justin Theroux, guest starring with gusto), reveals he’s going to rehab because of his crack addiction, Isla admits, “I kinda always wanted to try crack.” The inappropriate is always an easy option here, especially as the Gordons are billionaire progeny. The show is smart enough to at least tweak their privilege.

Drew Tarver as Sandy Gordon, Justin Theroux as Cam Gordon and Scott MacArthur as Ness Gordon in Running Point.

With her best friend and colleague, Ali Lee (Brenda Song), as her truth-teller, basketball obsessive Isla has to navigate sponsors, sports media, and entitled star players while staying connected to her paediatrician fiance, Lev Levenson (Max Greenfield). She gets to do some Moneyball-style trading, but her new job mainly exists to test her personal resolve and connection to her other brothers. Ness (Scott MacArthur) is a lovable idiot, while Sandy (Drew Tarver) is so scared of his family’s flaws he won’t introduce his boyfriend to anyone.

The show’s optimism comes not from fundamentally changing for the better but from learning that the past doesn’t define you. It’s more of a traditional comedy than Netflix’s last winning half-hour, Nobody Wants This, but it has some of the same uncomfortable choices and ludicrous LA mores. Some of the best lines start at funny and end at painful, such as Sandy, younger and with a different mother, admitting he stopped reading his father’s memoir when he saw his own name was misspelt. It’s silly, but it stings. That’s how Running Point succeeds.

No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski ★★★ (Disney+)

Antoni Porowski, Florence Pugh and Megan Owens are served a Victoria sponge layer cake with jam at the Zetter Townhouse in No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski.

Queer Eye’s food and wine expert, Antoni Porowski, goes solo with this purposeful series where traditional family recipes are the skeleton key that unlocks the celebrity guests’ ancestral roots. With a healthy nod to Who Do You Think You Are? this is a mix of detail, dish, and discovery where the high-profile Hollywood actors are willing guests as Porowski meets their families before guiding them through kitchen visits and genealogy lessons.

The six-part show falls under the National Geographic banner and the production values are even more indulgent than the Victoria sponge Porowski and Florence Pugh sample in a London tearoom. James Marsden’s episode starts on a Texan cattle ranch, but his German heritage soon has him on a Bavarian mountain. Some destinations are familiar; some aren’t: Justin Theroux ends up in Italy, but Issa Rae’s episode is an enlightening journey to her father’s homeland of Senegal.

Porowski rarely cooks, although he does shepherd’s pie prep work for three generations of Pugh women, but he’s a solid guide and fellow taster to his attentive subjects. His honking laugh is disarming, although the way he says, “I found …” to introduce historic documents when a team of archivists plainly did all the leg work could do with some seasoning. Ultimately, the production’s care wins through: it’s a thoughtful celebrity economy endeavour. No one’s phoning it in.

Good Cop/Bad Cop ★★★ (Stan*)

Leighton Meester, Clancy Brown and Luke Cook in Good Cop/Bad Cop.

With trace elements of Northern Exposure and Murder, She Wrote, this police procedural set in the fictional Oregon town of Eden Vale (but shot in Queensland) does just enough to be more than a cosy, comforting case-of-the-week series. Much credit goes to the dynamic between Gossip Girl graduate Leighton Meester and Australian actor Luke Cook, who play partners and dysfunctional siblings Lou and Henry Seekman. She’s savvy, he’s abrasive, and they have to deal with their canny father, chief of police Hank (Clancy Brown). The 43-minute episodes run smoothly.

Babes ★★★★ (Netflix)

Broad City’s Ilana Glazer stars in Babes.

Broad City’s Ilana Glazer co-wrote and stars in this feisty, complicated paean to friendship, which is directed by Better Things creator Pamela Adlon. Glazer plays Eden, a somewhat chaotic New York yoga teacher whose bestie connection with buttoned-up dentist, wife, and mother Dawn (Michelle Buteau), gets stress-tested by their respective pregnancies. The two leads have a freewheeling comic dynamic while suggesting a bond that goes back to the schoolyard. The mix of gross-out humour and tough conversations recalls a stand-out predecessor: Bridesmaids.

Newtopia ★★★ (Amazon Prime Video)

Park Jeon-min (left) as Jae-yoon and Jisoo as Young-ju in Newtopia.

You’re going to have to accept the methodical – some might say slow – pacing that is par for the course with many Korean series. In other words, this is a zombie apocalypse romantic-comedy that has no zombie sightings in the first episode. Set in Seoul, it stars Blackpink’s Jisoo as Young-ju, whose relationship with boyfriend Jae-yoon (Park Jeon-min) hits rocky ground during his absence on national service. Their attempts to meet up in Seoul are complicated by an undead-like epidemic – shades of Shaun of the Dead – that eventually gets bloody. So far, there’s some promise

Yellowjackets ★★★½(Paramount+)

Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), with husband Jeff (Warren Kole), is Yellowjackets’ most complex character.Credit: Paramount+

Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, the creators of this wilderness teen cannibals crossed with 40-something existential nightmare drama, have always stated the series has a five-season plan. Now, the third instalment has debuted, and it’s time to see some more evidence. So many wild things have happened on this show it’s easy not to query their order or their ramifications. The then and now casts, featuring Sophie Thatcher, Courtney Eaton, Christina Ricci, and Melanie Lynskey, remain first-rate, but the show has to finally decide whether its horror is supernatural or not.

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