December is the month for watching things about big-city people returning to their humble small towns and having some sort of life-changing personal epiphany. The major advantage Aftertaste has over all the others is that it’s not a corny American Christmas movie, but an actually quite funny Australian satire.
And the big city type here is mercifully not some 20-something “copywriter” but a washed-up 50-something celebrity chef. Easton West (Erik Thomson with a cool beard and a sad little grey ponytail) has just burned his last bridge in the global fine-dining industry, taking the whole farm-to-table concept a bit too literally during a violent outburst at his Shanghai eatery. Now for the first time in decades, he’s back in Uraidla, a tiny town in the Adelaide hills, where his family are . . . not particularly excited to see him.”
Your room’s in the same spot,” his classic rural Aussie dad (Peter Carroll) tells him. “It’s like you are now – full of s***.” After decades of everybody worshipping at the feet of the arrogant, angry male chefs, now suddenly no one wants a bar of it, and Easton (real name Jimmy) West is completely unmoored. “Find a new narrative,” urges Ben Zhao (Remy Hii), proprietor of the Adelaide Hills’ fanciest restaurant, Zhao’s, which represents the new wave of pretentious fine dining. “For me,” Ben Zhao begins, unprompted, “it’s about being able to describe my life journey through food”.
Well, Ben Zhao can get stuffed, and so can the rest of the fine dining world. Easton West is going to bring Michelin-star dining to the Adelaide Hills! And he’s going to do it with the help of his niece – and the show’s real star – Diana (Natalie Abbott), whose culinary credentials begin and end at running a highly unsuccessful baking stall called Hot Buns. What could possibly go wrong?
In the first episode of Mo, the title character loses his job because the owner is afraid of being raided by immigration authorities, and then he gets shot while buying cat food at the grocery store. It is also, somehow, one of the funniest episodes of TV to come out this year. Comedian Mo Amer (who plays Ramy’s friend in the similarly titled series Ramy) created and stars in the series following the day-to-day life of a Palestinian refugee who’s lived most of his life in Houston, Texas, but is still waiting to be granted asylum so he can do things like get a regular above-board job that’s not selling counterfeit Yeezys out of his car boot – a job he is remarkably good at.
Here’s hoping whoever was behind the 2000s New Zealand anti-drinking ad featuring “Dennis from accounts” is getting paid by the makers of this Australian series, who appear to have adapted our iconic ad character into a sitcom character, Ted Lasso style.
Colin From Accounts (TVNZ+). Photo / Supplied
The unconventional rom-com stars real-life married couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer as a couple who are brought together when he accidentally runs over a dog. While this incident is thankfully made up, many of the other classic scrapes the flawed pair get into were inspired by the creators’ actual relationship.
Willow (Disney+)
Someone, somewhere, has been waiting a very long time for a TV sequel to the 1988 fantasy adventure film Willow, and it’s hard not to feel excited for them this week. That person is George Lucas, who originally had the idea for the movie (parts of which were filmed in New Zealand) way back in 1972, before getting distracted by making the Star Wars trilogy. When he returned to the idea, he cast one of the Ewoks as the title character, and now more than three decades later Warwick Davis is reprising the role in this series.
Willow (Disney+). Photo / Supplied
Movie of the Week: Boiling Point (Prime Video)
Did you watch The Bear and wonder how it could be made even more stressful? What about if it was a movie filmed in a single continuous shot like 1917? That’s the basic premise of Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point, which follows a painfully under-the-pump British chef (This Is England’s Stephen Graham) over the course of his restaurant’s busiest night of the year. It starts with the fine-dining establishment getting its health rating downgraded, which leads to the staff getting a bollocking in the kitchen, and things only go downhill from there. It’s an unflinching, unrelenting, utterly absorbing kitchen nightmare.
From the Vault: Ally McBeal (1997) (Disney+)
The cultural legacy of Ally McBeal has been whittled down over time to pretty much just that weird gif of a dancing baby. But nobody ever seems to stop and ask what a weird gif of a dancing baby was doing in a mainstream comedy-drama series in the first place. The answer is that Ally McBeal was just a really weird show, in a way that makes it way more fun to rewatch 25 years later than most of its contemporaries. The surreal interludes, the “Fishisms”, the powerfully 90s Vonda Shepard soundtrack, the many tense scenes set in the law firm’s gender-neutral toilet, Jane Krakowski describing everybody as “snappish”, a lot of stuff that you probably couldn’t get away with these days … this is the golden age of TV right here.
Podcast of the Week: The Sporkful
What do Yemeni coffee, an obscure bottle of vintage whiskey and Nigella Lawson have in common? They’ve all been the subjects of excellent episodes of The Sporkful in the past two months.
The evergreen podcast has been running for more than a decade now, taking a very broad approach to telling stories about food. One week you might get an interview with Nigella Lawson talking about how she carries a tube of Colman’s mustard around in her purse, the next an epic saga set in the international speciality coffee trade, about a guy who went to life-risking lengths to import “the best coffee in the world” to America from war-torn Yemen.
Then there’s “A New Jersey Whiskey Mystery”, which starts out as a seemingly trivial tale about a couple trying to establish the provenance of a half-bottle of Scotch they bought at an estate sale but which ends up having an emotional climax to match the most tear-jerking episode of Heavyweight.
Host Dan Pashman leaves no stone of the social and cultural side of food unturned in his search for stories, and the result is a must-follow podcast that’s never more than a couple of episodes away from something you never realised you want to hear all about.
