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From Dope Thief to Families Like Ours, here’s what to watch on every streamer
Beyond big-hitters like Adolescence and The White Lotus, there are countless cracking shows that have gone under the radar. Here are our favourites on Apple TV+, My5, ITVX and more |
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| Gwilym Mumford |
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It’s time for another instalment of A Show for Every Streamer, where we recommend a TV series to watch on each of the approximately 3,082 streaming services currently vying for your limited recreational time. (You can read our previous attempts here and here). As ever, we’ve focused on series that haven’t been discussed endlessly – so no Adolescence or The White Lotus. Instead, you’ll find Danish flooding sagas, football-based gastronomy and Martin Clunes attempting a Welsh accent …
Apple TV+ | Dope Thief
The “Apple paradox”, where incredibly talented people combine to make shows that no one seems to watch, is alive and well here. Despite having Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura as leads and a pilot episode directed by Ridley Scott, this crime comedy-drama about two childhood friends who pose as drug agents to rob dealers seems to have had next to no cut-through. A shame, as it builds to a tense, dark and funny climax.
BBC iPlayer | Families Like Ours
The title screams daytime soap, but this is actually something far more intriguing: a climate-change drama from Festen director Thomas Vinterberg. Families Like Ours imagines a Denmark where citizens have to evacuate the country due to flooding. It’s a terrifying prospect that Vinterberg handles with Dogme 95 levels of naturalism, finding small personal stories amid the creeping apocalypse.
Channel 4 | GBH
We’ve flagged a new C4 release in Take Five (see below) so instead here’s a word for its cavernous archive, which contains many of its most groundbreaking dramas over the decades: A Very British Coup, Queer as Folk, This is England and GBH, an ever-timely 1991 drama from Alan Bleasdale about city council corruption, featuring a ferocious performance from Robert Lindsay.
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Disney+ | Suspect: The Killing of Jean Charles de Menezes
The politically charged new series of Andor is Disney’s water-cooler show of the moment, but that has received props elsewhere. So instead let’s spotlight this four-part drama (pictured above) about the notorious 2005 police shooting from socially conscious TV king Jeff Pope. It’s a meticulously researched and utterly damning piece of procedural drama, with a cast that includes Russell Tovey, Conleth Hill and Emily Mortimer.
Discovery+ | Adam Richman Eats Football
We could flag any number of grubby true-crime dramas here: Discovery churns them out at such a rate that you wonder if they may soon run out of murders to almost solve. But let’s sidestep the slaughter and instead flag this cheerful series, which sees Man v Food star Richman piggyback on the “footy scran” trend and try matchday delicacies across the UK, from pie and mash at West Ham to haggis and whiskey pizza at Celtic.
ITVX | Out There
“Martin Clunes plays a vigilante farmer taking aim at county lines drug runners” sounds like the sort of pitch you might get from a malfunctioning TV commissioning chatbot. But no, this revenge thriller is real and, more remarkably, Clunes – Mr Cosy Early-Evening Drama himself – is rather good in an uncharacteristic role, even if his west Walian accent is a bit off.
My5 | The Good Wife
As you might expect from a platform with a strand titled Lawless Britain, Channel 5’s free streaming service largely trades in the trashy and prurient. But there are gems to be found if you look hard enough, such as all 156 episodes of the excellent Julianna Margulies (pictured below) led legal drama, which is also available to stream on Paramount+ too.
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Netflix | Turning Point: The Vietnam War
It was only a matter of time that, having conquered the rest of TV, Netflix would come for Ken Burns’s turf. This five-part documentary from Brian Knappenberger (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz) relitigates Vietnam, making use of talking heads on both sides of the conflict and sifting through hours of US presidents’ Oval Office meetings and phone calls, to argue that the war paved the way for a more cynical, distrustful America.
NOW | The Righteous Gemstones
Pour one out for Danny McBride’s comedy about a family of loathsome televangelists (pictured below), which has just finished the fourth and final season of an impressively consistent run. In its latest outing, the show grows loopier and more ambitious, including a stand-alone episode set in the American civil war, and Bradley Cooper guest starring. As ever, it’s Walton Goggins – man of the hour due to The White Lotus – who steals the show.
Paramount+ | Mobland
A Guy Ritchie crime drama starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren? Frankly, we didn’t know Paramount+ had that level of clout, but here we are. Written and created by Ronan Bennett (with assistance from Jez Butterworth) this London gangster series, which sees Hardy’s fixer tasked with keeping the lid on a potentially devastating mob war, does very little that’s radical but manages the familiar with an engaging slickness.
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PlutoTV | 21 Jump Street
Cheerful and cheaper than cheap, this streamer seems to be mostly made up of half-remembered crime dramas from the 80s and 90s. Given that it’s free, we probably shouldn’t complain about a service that includes Prisoner Cell Block H, The Dick Van Dyke Show and the original TV version of 21 Jump Street, featuring a pre-everything Johnny Depp. It’s got a surprisingly tolerable film library too.
Prime Video | Bosch: Legacy
While Amazon ploughs cash into costly clunkers like its Citadel universe of shows or its notorious golden handcuffs deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its Bosch franchise trundles efficiently on. A fast-paced modern detective procedural, it’s marked out by Titus Welliver’s gruff anguished turn as its titular LAPD gumshoe. A spin-off from the original Bosch series, Legacy has just dropped its final season on Prime, and it sees Harry Bosch juggling a missing family investigation and a probe into his own conduct.
U | Silence is Golden
Another Prime series we could have flagged is Last One Laughing UK, its hugely successful comedy gameshow where stand-ups staying together in a Big Brother-style house try to not laugh in each other’s company. But as you’ve almost certainly seen that, how about a similarly premised show on UKTV’s streaming service to keep you diverted while you wait for series two? In Silence is Golden, it’s the studio audience who have to avoid tittering in the presence of comics. Do so, and they’ll collectively win a cool £250,000.
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Take Five |
Each week we run down the five essential pieces of pop culture we’re watching, reading and listening to |
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ALBUM – Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke: Tall Tales
The second name in this duo you will recognise; the first may be less familiar. But Mark Pritchard has been an important and slightly Zelig-ish figure in the history of British dance music, rocking up as a producer in every scene and subculture from jungle to ambient to grime. He and Thom Yorke first collaborated in 2016, but Covid allowed them to work together more extensively (if remotely). The result is Tall Tales, a jagged collection of forward-thinking dance music, not wildly dissimilar to the more electronic end of Radiohead’s output, though more playful: Gangsters imagines Yorke fronting Kraftwerk, while Happy Days somehow sounds like a techno take on a Soviet battle hymn. Rod Liddle said in the Spectator that the album made him “cry with boredom”, in case you wanted any further recommendation. Out now.
Want more? The great, funny Welsh noise-rock band Mclusky are back with their first album in two decades: The World Is Still Here and So Are We. For the rest of our music reviews, click here. |
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PODCAST – The Rewatchables
This long-running movie podcast, which entertainingly recaps films deemed rewatchable, has somehow never tackled Star Wars. That’s despite doing episodes on the distinctly un-rewatchable likes of snuff movie horror 8mm. This week they finally rectify that oversight, with a mammoth two-parter considering the film’s massive influence, for good or ill, on movie culture, and wondering whether Chewbacca was actually good at his job.
Want more? To tie in with VE Day, Today in Focus has released a fascinating episode about Frederick Voigt, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent who observed – and warned about – Hitler’s rise. Plus, here’s what to listen to this week. |
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FILM – The Surfer
We’re in Nic Cage season, that post-Oscar, pre-summer-blockbuster silly season where the great man does his finest, strangest work. The Surfer (pictured above) is classic Cage: a preposterous B-movie revenge thriller about a middle-aged schlub who returns with his son to the Australian bay of his birth to ride the waves, only to be thwarted by a group of local toughs who don’t take kindly to outsiders. Let Cage surf, dammit! Out now – and if you want some more Cage, check out the Guardian’s reader interview with him, where he discusses Terry Wogan and eating rats, naturally.
Want more? New documentary Riefenstahl looks at how the German film-maker hid her Nazi complicity from the world. Also out now. Plus, here are seven more films to watch at home.
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TV – The Handmaid’s Tale
It’s been a strange old journey for this TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s landmark dystopian novel. Its arrival, just as Trump was entering the White House for his first term, seemed eerily well timed, and its first series rode a resistance wave to Emmy and ratings glory. But some of its audience soon checked out to its overbearing mood of gloom, not to mention the slightly sketchy plotting to which the show resorted, having run out of source material. Now it enters its final season with Trump back in the White House and more unrestrained than ever: hopefully June’s ending will be happier. New episodes available Saturday, Channel 4.
Want more? Hurrah! Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne’s stoner take on Columbo, is back for series two. Its first three eps are available now on Now. Watch out for more shows to stream this week. |
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BOOK – Gunk by Saba Sams
Sams’s debut, the short-story collection Send Nudes, was deservedly a big hit. In her next project, a novel called Gunk, her style continues to feel fresh: tender sentences, vivid imagery, deep empathy for difficult characters. Following a nightclub manager, the novel explores different forms of love and family. “At the heart of Gunk is a profound message about the insufficiency of the nuclear family, and a suggestion of possible alternatives. It’s a radical thought, one that Sams is well placed to articulate,” writes Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in a Guardian review.
Want more? In The Illegals, Guardian central and eastern Europe correspondent Shaun Walker takes on Russia’s espionage programme, looking at the lives of the spies sent on deep-cover missions abroad. Steven Poole reviews the book here. For more of the Guardian’s books coverage, click here. |
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Read On |
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Stuart Heritage looks at the strange world of TV merch tie-ins, from The Last of Us mushroom coffee (ugh, no thanks) to Doc Martin clotted cream fudge (go on, then). |
As part of its centenary celebrations, the New Yorker offers a tasteful glimpse into the living rooms of notable NYC citizens (Martin Scorsese’s is quite the gaff). |
A single school in Copenhagen seems to be producing every new left-field pop star on the planet. For the Guardian, Sam Davies visits the Rhythmic Music Conservatory to find out why its hit rate is so high. |
Is pop culture getting worse? A host of cultural critics reckon so. The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber meets these new cultural doomsayers. |
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You be the Guide |
To quote Chief Wiggum, “they only come out at night or, in this case, in the daytime”: last week we asked for the scariest scenes in film, TV or literature that take place in broad daylight. Here’s what gave you nightmares in the daytime:
“What’s round the back of Winkie’s? Something absolutely awful. In Mullholland Drive, David Lynch created such a sense of sweaty-palmed, I-can’t-bear-to-look dread I’ve never forgotten it, over 20 years later. A packed cinema silently cringing at what the camera might reveal, round the back of the cheery diner in sunny LA. Nobody did atmosphere like Lynch. I miss him being alive.” – Suzanne Stockton
“In the modern masterpiece It Follows, the malevolent entity is a shapeshifting, slow-walking, sinister stalker, so you find yourself scouring the background of every scene, paranoid that it’s there in a new form. About halfway through the film, the camera pans agonisingly around in two full turns as the protagonist walks through a high school. You could easily miss it, but there’s a long-haired girl walking straight towards the camera, head down, reminiscent of Ringu. It’s not one of the headline horrific or jumpy scenes in the film, but the patient direction, eerie music, and obliviousness of the characters adds up to something terrifying, even while the plot advances in the foreground. Writing this out gives me the shivers.” – Theo Boardman-Pretty
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