Little America will air on Apple TV Plus. Photo / Supplied
Little America (Apple TV+)
With the holidays fast approaching and the weather looking patchy at best, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll end up in front of the telly at some point. As the type of person who reads the “what to watch” pages of the Sunday newspaper, it is likely the task of choosing what to watch will fall to you.
At this moment you’ll need to read the room and show agility and precision with the remote. Little America on Apple TV+ might just be the ace up your sleeve.
Produced by The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, the anthology series (adapted from a series of real-life reads published in Epic magazine) offers a collection of bittersweet tales of immigrant life, which pack more emotional weight into their 30 minutes than a lot of movies manage in two hours.
Can’t decide between a movie or a TV show? Here’s the best of both worlds.
Memorable episodes from the first season include the story of a Nigerian cowboy in Oklahoma, a 12-year-old Indian boy left to run his family’s motel after his parents are deported and a French woman who falls in love with a fellow meditator on a silent retreat.
That one was directed by CODA director Sian Heder, who returns in the just-released second season to co-write (with Master of None’s Alan Yang) the heartstring-tugging opener Mr Song. It’s the story of an unlikely friendship struck up between Luke Song, the son of a Korean hatmaker, and DJ Martha Jean the Queen, a “church lady” who comes into his mum’s Detroit store one day and changes their lives with a shout-out on the radio. This encounter has some far-reaching and unexpected repercussions – and as the credits roll half an hour later, the reveal of what it meant for the real-life Luke Song wraps it all up with a perfect bow.
Tell Me Everything (TVNZ+)
This new British series is described everywhere as “Skins for Gen Z” because it’s about teenagers with depression and doing drugs while also spending half the show on their phones. Specifically, 16-year-old Jonny, who’s dealing with the sudden death of his dad while trying to trick the world into thinking he’s okay when a new girl so alternative and cool you think she might be a figment of his imagination shows up and teaches him it’s okay to be not okay.
If it’s meant to be edgy, the edges are charmingly soft and familiar – sure they get wasted and go a bit wild, but they do it on the bumper cars at the village fair.
After the Trial (TVNZ+)
Australia’s latest courtroom drama begins at the end of the trial. Not guilty is the verdict – but then the doubt begins to creep in as four of the jurors are haunted by the possibility they might have let a guilty woman walk free. So, naturally, they decide to make a podca– no, but close enough, they decide to do their own independent investigations into what really happened and it ends up throwing their personal lives into complete and utter turmoil. In the tradition of all the best Australian dramas, it’s also a bit funny (Kath and Kim’s Magda Szubanski plays a butcher with a heart of gold etc), and very easy to watch.
Princess of Chaos (TVNZ+)
You know how when you hear a song you’d completely forgotten but somehow still remember every note on some deep-brain level? That’s how it feels to watch this telemovie based on the Len Brown / Bevan Chuang scandal of 2013. All the supporting characters you hadn’t thought about in years (Slater, Palino, Luigi Wewege), spooked spin doctors telling the mayor “Whale Oil thinks ya soft”, the full body cringe every time he utters the words “Geisha girl”. Michael Hurst gives a remarkable portrayal of the famously daggy mayor, while Xana Tang puts in a perception-shifting performance as Chuang. All considered, way better than it has any right to be.
Movie of the Week: Knives Out: Glass Onion (Netflix, from Friday)
Christmas is coming exactly two days early this year with the hotly-anticipated new Knives Out sequel dropping on Netflix on December 23. Now you don’t even have to think about what movie to put on when everybody gets tired of talking to each other and just wants to sit down and chew on a cleverly-plotted murder mystery for a couple of hours. Daniel Craig reprises his role as detective Benoit Blanc, and is joined this time by Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe and Kate Hudson, among others.
From the Vault: Knives Out (2019)If you’ve forgotten why everyone’s so excited about a new Knives Out – or managed to miss the bandwagon altogether – it’s only a $5 rental at Academy OnDemand. (Or a dollar more if you prefer the conveniences of Apple TV). Worth it!
Podcast of the Week: Where There’s A Will There’s A Wake
Think about all the thousands and thousands of podcasts out there in the world – what are the odds that one of the most popular out of all of them is one where celebrity guests describe their dream restaurant while James Acaster (a genie waiter) screams “poppadoms or bread” at them? The success of Off Menu (which, unlike a lot of the other most popular podcasts in the world, is actually very good) meant it was probably only a matter of time before we got other podcasts based around dream scenarios. Dream funeral, anyone?
British comedy legend Kathy Burke is the abrasive undertaker planning every detail of guests’ funerals in Where There’s A Will There’s A Wake, which is a lot funnier than it probably sounds. No matter how long it ends up running for, it might never top the the first episode with Dawn French – the two old mates making each other laugh by talking absolute rubbish about everything from the Vicar of Dibley star’s dream death to who she wants to speak at her funeral, the stingy catering at her wake to her actually deranged wishes for her corpse. It’s pretty much 100 per cent unpublishable, so you’ll just have to listen.
The digitally savvy director’s fixed-perspective experiment takes us back to the future.