Sitting in silence in the lounge with the curtains drawn, staring at the coffin in the middle of the room, Shiv Sheridan’s parents have no idea that this is just the first part of a double-whammy of bad news. Their unreliable 35-year-old daughter isn’t just back from London to attend her nan’s wake – she’s about to tell them that she’s decided to move back home for a bit while she gets her life sorted out.
Shiv (Roisin Gallagher) is five months, 17 days and, at the exact moment she arrives on her parents’ doorstep, six hours sober, and she’s walking into her toughest test yet – a boozy Irish wake featuring the type of family that would drive anyone to drink.
“Sorry,” her little brother mumbles as she watches him load box after box of wine into the boot on the supermarket run. “Let’s get some drinks in and I’ll show you my studio,” offers a charismatically ruffled gent in a leather jacket and fedora, with whom she shares some kind of romantic history.
These awkward moments are nothing, of course, compared to Shiv’s interactions with her mum (the scene-stealing Pom Boyd). Seldom has a character said so much in so few words – moments like her delivering the line “You?” after Shiv says she might cook the family dinner one night truly can’t be done justice in writing.
Made by the same production company that made Normal People, this is a tremendously understated and true family comedy full of those little moments that show rather than tell and packed with low-key incredible characters – even the ones who only stick around for a scene or two. If you enjoyed Fleabag, This Way Up or Back to Life (or any other recent British comedy-drama about a millennial woman whose life’s a bit of a mess), don’t scroll past The Dry.
Treason (Netflix)
This five-part British spy drama starts with the chief of the MI6 getting poisoned, and only gets more scandalous from there. The spectacularly named Sir Martin Angelis (Ciaran Hinds) is replaced by the boringly named officer Adam Lawrence (Charlie Cox), but his tenure gets off to the rockiest possible start when it’s revealed the main suspect in Angelis’ poisoning is his former lover(!) who also happens to be a Russian spy(!!) and now his whole family is in grave danger.
The series was created by Matt Charman, whose spy drama pedigree includes writing the screenplay for Tom Hanks’ Bridge of Spies.
Treason. Charlie Cox as Adam Lawrence and Oona Chapman as Maddy in Treason.
Hello Tomorrow! (Apple TV+)
Hello Tomorrow on Apple TV+
Is it time to reconsider the prospect of living on the moon? The Jetsons made it seem like it would be a done deal by 2023, but somewhere along the line we took our eye off the ball.
Well, the dream of The Jetsons is alive and well in Apple’s strange new retro-futurist drama, which stars Billy Crudup as a travelling salesman driving his hover car around pristine 60s suburbs hawking timeshares on the moon with the use of a very persuasive scale model. His belief in this brighter future is infectious, but … it’s probably too good to be true, isn’t it.
Not Dead Yet (Disney+)
Not Dead Yet (Disney+)
Gina Rodriguez’s character in Not Dead yet is like Carrie Bradshaw, if instead of a dating column she wrote the obituaries – and if instead of being friends with four of the most highly-strung women in New York City she was friends with the ghosts of the people she was writing about. So not really that much like Carrie Bradshaw at all, but still, nice to have the Jane the Virgin star back on our screens. The supernatural sitcom features a different guest ghost each week, who fortunately for all involved passes through to the other side the moment their obit is filed.
Movie of the Week: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Neon)
This is the role Nicholas Cage has spent his whole career preparing to play: Nicholas Cage, a massive movie star who fears his best days are behind him and for whom the big roles are getting fewer and farther between. So when the fictionalised Cage’s agent presents him with a million-dollar offer to attend a billionaire super-fan’s birthday party, he decides to take it. But that super-fan, played by man-of-the-moment Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us), also happens to be suspected by the CIA of arms dealing and kidnapping, and they rope Cage into their investigation. Action comedies don’t come much better, or meta, than this.
From the Vault: Love/Hate (2010) (TVNZ+)
It’s close to 10 years since the final episode of this gritty Irish crime drama was originally broadcast, but the series is still fresh and still picking up new fans around the world today. It is to Dublin what The Wire is to Baltimore or The Sopranos is to New Jersey, to put it simply, following the dangerous and violent exploits of a gang of surprisingly well-written and three-dimensional characters with unapologetically heavy Irish accents and nicknames like “John Boy”, “Stumpy” and “Nidge”.
Game of Thrones’ Aidan Gillen, Misfits’ Robert Sheehan, Happy Valley’s Charlie Murphy and a lot of other familiar Irish faces appear across the five short seasons.
Podcast of the Week: Stolen Hearts
On paper – and, indeed, in audio – Stolen Hearts sounds more like a Coronation Street storyline than a true crime podcast. Sergeant Jill Evans is the series regular – a chronically unlucky-in-love copper living in small-town Wales, who one day in the early 2000s meets the man of her dreams via internet dating.
Introducing new character Dean – a smooth-talking body-wash entrepreneur from London who sweeps Jill off her feet by saying things like “all right darling” and “cup of tea my lovely?” in a deep voice. Even though it’s a podcast, you can just tell he’s wearing a leather jacket.
It’s not that Dean isn’t who he says is, exactly – Jill does her due diligence and he really does seem to own a men’s grooming company called “Gladiator” – but he’s also a lot more.
That much starts to become clear when he doesn’t text or call back one Halloween night. (He’s not a werewolf, if that’s what you’re thinking.)
Narrated by actor Kerry Godliman, this is a true crime series so British that each episode begins with a glossary of terms for American listeners. “The old bill” means police, “you’re nicked” means you’re under arrest, and “cracking yarn” means it’s a very entertaining story.
