Documentary Now! (AMC+, new season from Wednesday). Photo / Supplied
Documentary Now! (AMC+, new season from Wednesday). Photo / Supplied
This England (TVNZ+, TVNZ 1, 8.30pm Sunday)
When it comes to current events sometimes all you can say is "you couldn't make it up". How bad would it be if you did make it up, though? New drama series This England, which dramatises the disastrous prime ministerial reign of Boris Johnson like a profoundly unfunny season of The Thick of It, works as a kind of experiment.
Even with the talent of Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, The Trip) in the director's chair, and even with the acting might of Sir Kenneth Branagh underneath the prosthetic makeup and flaxen wig, the first episode mostly just feels like watching an hour-long montage of thuddingly heavy-handed juxtapositions: Here's Boris bumbling his way through the filming of a Christmas message, while over in Wuhan someone chops up a bat. Here's Boris and his new wife Carrie seeing in 2020 on a boat in the Caribbean while an ambulance speeds to a Chinese hospital. While he welcomes his staff back to Downing St, a patient writhes in agony, and on it goes as the pandemic gets ever closer to bringing the country to its knees.
Billing itself as "a fiction based on real events", the six-part series' main problem may be that it's simply too soon – it was already in post-production by the time the Partygate scandal broke, for example, so the version of events it's dramatising is now less complete than the version everybody already knows.
This England (TVNZ+, TVNZ 1, 8.30pm Sunday). Photo / Supplied
What makes it worth watching anyway is Branagh's uncanny impersonation of the former Prime Minister. The closest reference for his portrayal might actually be Danny De Vito as the Penguin in Batman Returns – hunched, lurching, talking like he's got a mouth full of fish – it is something that really has to be seen to be believed.
A Friend of the Family (TVNZ+)
The story of Robert Berchtold, who kidnapped the daughter of his close family friends the Brobergs not once but twice in the 1970s, gave everybody the creeps when the documentary Abducted in Plain Sight arrived on Netflix a couple of years ago. Now it's been turned into a drama series, starring Jake Lacy (the highly strung newlywed from The White Lotus) as Berchtold and Anna Paquin and Colin Hanks as the Broberg parents. This strong cast, directed by Eliza Hittman (the highly-rated film Never Rarely Sometimes Always), makes it one of the better dramas based on a true-crime documentary.
A Friend of the Family (TVNZ+). Photo / Peacock
The Empress (Netflix)
When you think about it, plenty of European countries have royal families and a lot of them have even weirder and wilder histories than their English counterparts – where have shows like The Empress been all our lives? The fun, lavish German series tells the 19th-century tale of Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi" to friends and family), as she falls in love with her sister's intended fiance Emperor Franz Josef (of glacier fame), marries him and moves into the imperial palace in Vienna, which is full of all the meddling and plotting and scheming you might expect. It's all the classic stuff you want from a period drama, only in German.
The Empress (Netflix). Photo / Supplied
Documentary Now! (AMC+, new season from Wednesday)
Never mind awards and reviews, the highest honour for any work of art is to be parodied. What Weird Al Yankovic was to music in the 1980s and 90s, Documentary Now! is to documentaries … now. The fourth season of the series from SNL alums Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Meyers and Rhys Thomas arrives on AMC+ this week with another set of mockumentaries paying homage to classic docs, including When We Were Kings and My Octopus Teacher ("My Monkey Grifter"). The first three seasons – all presented by Dame Helen Mirren – are available to watch now, and they're a real treat.
Movie of the Week: King Richard (Neon)
One day this will be the answer to a pub-quiz question: When Will Smith got up and slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, it overshadowed his best actor win for which movie? Men in Black? Hitch? No, it must have been Pursuit of Happyness. You're all wrong, it was King Richard, the one where he plays Venus and Serena Williams' dad and childhood tennis coach. His performance as one of the sport's most infamous parents is indeed impressive, and hopefully paves the way for Queen Judy, a biopic about Andy Murray's mum.
It first aired in 1997, a good decade before the dawn of social media, yet in Hank, Bill, Dale and Boomhauer, King of the Hill somehow managed to predict the four main types of men you encounter online in the year 2022 more accurately than any modern show. It's just one of the many things that make rewatching the series today a richly rewarding experience. The series from the 90s animation dream team of Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head) and Greg Daniels (The Simpsons) deserves to be up there with The Simpsons, Friends and The Office in the soothing nostalgic comedy comfort-watch stakes, and now you can do exactly that with all 13 seasons on Disney+.
Podcast of the Week: Death of an Artist
It's a story that was bound to get turned into a true-crime podcast sooner or later: in 1985, Cuban avant-garde artist Ana Mendieta died after falling from the window of the 34th-floor New York City apartment where she lived with her husband of eight months, famous sculptor Carl Andre. His version of events, which the court ultimately believed when he was acquitted of murder, was that they were having an argument (about , he explained in his 911 call " the fact that I was more exposed to the public than she was") when she jumped to her death. To this day, however, this version of events attracts a significant amount of doubt.
In Death of an Artist, esteemed curator Helen Molesworth approaches the story of Mendieta's life, death and legacy as more than just your average true-crime whodunnit – instead, it digs deeper to explore what the case reveals about the inner workings of the art world, how the firmly entrenched power dynamics worked in Andre's favour while all but writing Mendieta out of the art history books. If enough people are reluctant to talk there's probably a story there, and as Molesworth says, the silence just makes her more determined to tell it.
