Don’t let the big-name cast (David Tennant, Stanley Tucci) and acclaimed series creator (Sherlock’s Steven Moffat) fool you – Inside Man is about as silly as TV dramas get.
Tennant plays the vicar of a leafy English parish in the four-part BBC miniseries (released internationally on Netflix), while on the other side of the Atlantic, Tucci is a death-row prisoner with a preternatural gift for solving crimes. The unlikely series of events that ultimately connects these two disparate lives begins on an English commuter train, where the quick thinking of local maths tutor Janice Fife (Dolly Wells) helps defuse a tense situation involving a young man making a pest of himself to investigative reporter Beth Davenport (Lydia West), who, sensing a story, arranges a time to interview her about it.
Meanwhile, in some stiflingly hot, dry part of the US, criminology professor, convicted murderer and death-row inmate Jefferson Grieff is using his impressive Sherlock-meets-Hannibal Lecter powers of logic and deduction to solve his latest case, all the while dropping clever bon mots such as “Everyone is a murderer – you just have to meet the right person.”
This brings us to the vicar, Harry Watling (Tennant), who, after making a string of mind-bogglingly bad decisions involving a parishioner’s flash drive, ends up accidentally holding his son’s maths tutor hostage in his basement. And when Janice Fife doesn’t pick up Beth Davenport’s call, the globetrotting journalist enlists the help of her last interview – one Professor Grieff.
If you’re the type of TV watcher whose blood pressure spikes any time something happens that makes you sigh and splutter “that would never happen”, this might be one to avoid. But if you’re simply in the market for an enjoyably undemanding four hours of pure entertainment featuring some good actors doing what they do best? Congratulations, you’ve just hit the jackpot.
Inside Man (Netflix). Photo / Supplied
The English (Prime Video)
At first, you might think Emily Blunt has wandered onto the wrong set. What’s an aristocratic English Lady doing in the middle of a Western? What she’s doing is looking for the man who killed her son, and she’ll stop at nothing to find that no-good murderer and exact her revenge. Along the way she teams up with Pawnee ex-cavalry scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer) for an epic, scary journey through an 1890s middle America absolutely packed to the rafters with twisted characters. It’s a vivid, modern take on the Western for sure, but all but the dustiest old traditionalists should find plenty to enjoy about it.
Hang on a minute. A couple of weeks ago, James Corden made headlines for being rude to the staff of a fancy New York restaurant over his wife’s omelette. Now he’s the star of a new series in which he plays … a short-tempered Michelin-starred chef. Was it all some weird guerrilla marketing stunt? Are we to believe the Cats and Peter Rabbit star had gone “full method”? The series, written by acclaimed playwright Jez Butterworth, is about how the chef’s life implodes when he finds out his wife is cheating on him, so … who can really say for sure where fact ends and fiction begins.
Mammals (Prime Video). Photo / Supplied
Tulsa King (TVNZ+)
If you’re not impressed enough by Sylvester Stallone in an expensive suit, how’s this – Tulsa King was created by one of the creators of Yellowstone and executive produced by one of the executive producers of The Sopranos. You can’t argue with those credentials, and nor can you argue with Stallone’s character Dwight “The General” Manfredi – a big mafia guy. When he gets out after 25 years in prison, his boss sends him to Tulsa, Oklahoma to set up a satellite branch of the mob there. He understandably gets the pip and decides to start his own criminal empire instead, and that’s how he becomes the Tulsa King.
Movie of the Week: Downton Abbey: A New Era (Neon)
Hard to top the 2019′s Downton Abbey movie, which featured a visit from the king and an assassin on the loose, but this new sequel, set a year later in 1928, gives it a good go. This time Downton is being used as the location for a silent movie, and while the staff stay behind to look after the stars of the silver screen the Crawleys scurry off to the south of France to visit the villa left to Violet by the Marquis de Montmirail. For the Downton faithful, it’s another very successful outing indeed.
From the Vault: The Addams Family (TVNZ+)
They’re creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, and about due for a massive revival. The Addams Family’s stocks are about to skyrocket with the release of the new Tim Burton-directed Netflix series Wednesday in a couple of weeks, so get on the bandwagon early by watching the 90s reboot movies (Addams Family Values is also on TVNZ+) before TikTok gets overrun with Morticia Addams makeup tutorials and Cousin Itt cosplay.
Podcast of the Week: Stealing Superman
As crime podcasts go, the crime at the heart of Stealing Superman is relatively low stakes. No one dies or even gets hurt, and the victim is only relieved of assets totalling maybe one per cent of their net worth at most – and their insurance pays out almost immediately. But luckily it turns out there’s little correlation between the seriousness of the crime and the quality of the crime yarn.
From the makers of last year’s equally inconsequential yet enjoyable Haileywood, a strange saga about Bruce Willis buying up a whole small town in rural Idaho in the 1990s comes the unusual true story of an art heist involving Nicholas Cage’s rare comic book collection. Back in 2000, after a party at the actor’s Hollywood mansion, four comic books – among them the legendarily rare Action Comics No.1 and Detective Comics No.27 (Batman’s first appearance) – were reported missing.
Host Dana Schwartz picks up the case, talking to everybody from rare comics experts to a reformed Cockney art thief who explains very loudly what the thieves were possibly thinking. There are twists, and turns – one of the comics turns up on eBay being sold by someone in Connecticut – mysteries, theories … everything you could possibly want and more, surely.
