Shrinking, the new series from the people who made Ted Lasso and features Harrison Ford. Come for that and stay for Jason Segel’s performance as a therapist grieving the death of his wife. Photo / Supplied
Shrinking, the new series from the people who made Ted Lasso and features Harrison Ford. Come for that and stay for Jason Segel’s performance as a therapist grieving the death of his wife. Photo / Supplied
The Makanai: Cooking For the Maiko House (Netflix)
New Japanese drama series The Makanai on Netflix. Photo / Supplied
For a brief moment in time, before it turned into a bleak content megamall dominated by true crime docos and uniquely soulless reality franchises, Netflix offered a utopian vision of the future. This great global streaming platform was meant to be the place where we’d watch all the best new TV shows and movies from all over the world, finally freed from all geographical and budgetary constraints. Remember the month we all went mad for Squid Game? Imagine if it was like that all the time!
New Japanese drama series The Makanai couldn’t be further from Squid Game, but it’s proof the dream isn’t totally dead yet. Adapted from a popular manga series by Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda, it’s the gentle and heartwarming story of two 16-year-old girls who leave home and head to Kyoto to begin training as maiko, or apprentice geisha.The elegant Sumire shows an instant aptitude for all the things it takes to be a top maiko, but her determined best friend Kiyo – who arrives at the Maiko House wearing the widest backpack you’ve ever seen – can’t put a foot right. But just as she’s about to be given a bus ticket back to Aomori, her talent reveals itself: she’s really good at cooking, so they make her the new makanai – basically the in-house chef for the maiko.
Like in so many other great Japanese series on Netflix (Midnight Diner, Samurai Gourmet, even Terrace House) food is obviously a focal point, from the opening scenes slurping grandma’s dumpling soup to the gently simmering pot of Kiyo’s signature oyakodon. Like those shows it might take a couple of episodes to get into the rhythm of things, and there’s a lot you’ll probably have to google later – or not, if you prefer to simply enjoy the vibe – but when you get into the flow it’s a rare TV treat to savour.
In Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne plays an amateur detective with an uncanny ability to tell when people are lying. Photo / Supplied
You might think Rian Johnson’s whole life is dedicated to thinking up new and even more unguessable Knives Out plotlines, but actually he’s managed to find time to make a whole TV series as well. In Poker Face, Natasha Lyonne plays an amateur detective with an uncanny ability to tell when people are lying, who drives around solving a different strange crime each week and encountering an impressive list of guest stars on the way. There are nods to classic detective shows of yesteryear, in much the same way Knives Out nods to cinema’s golden age of whodunnits.
Shrinking (Apple TV+)
Shrinking, the new series from the people who made Ted Lasso and features Harrison Ford. Come for that and stay for Jason Segel’s performance as a therapist grieving the death of his wife. Photo / Supplied
Shrinking’s two biggest draws are that it’s the new series from the people who made Ted Lasso, and that they got Harrison Ford to be in it. Come for that and stay for Jason Segel’s performance as a therapist grieving the death of his wife, who is in no fit state to sit there and listen to his clients complain about their own lives all day. When he finally breaks and decides to throw the therapy ethics rulebook out the window and start telling these people what he really thinks they should do about their problems? That’s when things get interesting.
So Help Me Todd (TVNZ+)
So Help Me Todd, a light-hearted US network legal drama about a straight-laced lawyer and overbearing mum (Marcia Gay Harden) who takes on her rule-bending private investigator son Todd (Skylar Astin) as her in-house investigator. Photo / Supplied
The name of this show was either the very first or very last detail the creators came up with, and we’ll never know which. That’s the real mystery of So Help Me Todd, a light-hearted US network legal drama about a straight-laced lawyer and overbearing mum (Marcia Gay Harden) who takes on her rule-bending private investigator son Todd (Skylar Astin) as her in-house investigator. Like the good old legal dramas of the 1990s, each case is satisfyingly resolved in the space of a single episode, with minimal brain work required from the audience.
Movie of the Week: Barbarian (Disney+)
Conventional wisdom would suggest if you show up to your Airbnb to find it double-booked by a strange man who looks like the clown from It, you should probably find somewhere else to stay – even if he does offer to sleep on the couch. But if characters in horror movies always obeyed these rules we wouldn’t have much to watch, would we. The house, unsurprisingly, is a grade-A house of horrors, though maybe not quite in the way you’re imagining. If you’re in the market for a good, unpredictable, properly scary movie, look no further.
From the Vault: 11.22.63 (2016) (Three Now)
Not your typical Stephen King novel, 11/22/63, and 11.22.63 is not quite your typical Stephen King TV adaptation either. James Franco plays a high school teacher whose local diner owner lets him in on a little secret: there’s a time portal back to 1960 in his restaurant. At his old friend’s request, Franco goes back in time to try and prevent the assassination of president John F Kennedy – but the closer he gets, the more the past doesn’t want him to be there. This uncommonly gritty and realistic time travel tale split opinion when it came out back in 2016 – now it’s washed up on Three Now of all places and is worth a second look.
When fifty-something British journalist Simon de Bruxelles got a Twitter DM from a kind stranger complimenting him on his photography skills(!) he didn’t immediately twig that he was being lined up for a romance scam. That came later, when the photography-loving Shirley started spelling her own name wrong and saying things like “you are my king and goddess”, and asking him for money.
Enough lonely gents fall for this sort of thing to make it an extremely lucrative business, but not Simon. He put his journalist hat on and did some digging and discovered that Shirley and all the other ladies now sliding into his DMs were all using photos of the same adult entertainer, who he discovered goes by the name of Janessa Brazil. So Simon decided to try and get a hold of Janessa and ask if she was aware this was going on. That’s when he started getting scammed all over again.
Nigeria-based BBC reporter Hannah Ajala picks up the case, and her search for the real Janessa Brazil uncovers a complex global network of online scammers using her image. The eight-part series is kind of like the Knives Out of catfish podcasts, where nothing ever quite goes the way you expect.
