Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
Heels (TVNZ OnDemand, from today)
When we think of professional wrestling we tend to think of the bright lights, big crowds and larger-than-life characters of the WWE, of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin v The Undertaker on Monday Night Raw in 1999. But as Netflix's 1980s-set Glow has shown, that's just the tip of the wrestling iceberg – there's a whole ecosystem that exists below it, full of young hopefuls and old battlers coming off the top rope in small-town gymnasiums and events centres every weekend. This is the setting for unflashy but effective new drama series Heels, which looks to be to wrestling what Friday Night Lights was to football.
In wrestling terms, a heel is the baddie, the wrestler fans love to hate – in smalltown Georgia's Duffy Wrestling League, that role is played by owner Jack Spade (Stephen Amell). The opposite of the heel, the wrestler everybody cheers for, is called the face – that's Jack's brother Ace (Alexander Ludwig), though away from the ring the distinction between good and bad is a little less straightforward.
Jack inherited the DWL from their father, the local legend King Spade, but In the kind of town where the water tower is by far the tallest building, keeping the doors of the rusting DuffyDome open is a constant struggle. And when their dad's old rival "Wild Bill" Hancock (Chris Bauer) shows up with plans to scout Ace to join a bigger, better league in Florida, things look set to get even more difficult.
Like Friday Night Lights, Heels works by balancing the week-to-week dramas in the ring with the day-to-day family dramas beyond it, with compelling characters and storylines on both sides of the rope. The type of good, honest drama that doesn't generate much hype, but in time still finds plenty of fans.
Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol (Neon, from Monday)
As Nickelback are to music, Dan Brown is to literature – the default object of derision for anyone who wants to signal they have "good taste". If that's you, you can safely give this TV adaptation of his 2009 follow-up to The Da Vinci Code a miss – they've even considerately put his name in the title so you don't get tricked into liking it. But if you enjoyed the book or the Tom Hanks movie trilogy (to which this is the prequel), the sight of Robert Langdon (played here by Ashley Zuckerman) solving Freemason puzzles on the small screen will be Christmas come early.
Scribe: Return of the Crusader (TVNZ OnDemand)
Aotearoa's brightest hip-hop star of the early 2000s and probably ever, Scribe has had more than his share of struggles since "Not Many – The Remix" catapulted him to fame in 2003. This heartbreaking, mind-changing docu-series goes very deep and very personal in telling his story – from his rise to the kind of sudden fame for which no one is really equipped, to the dark years battling drug addiction and mental health problems, to the hard-fought-for hopefulness of the present. Eight short (12-minute) episodes you'll be thinking about for a long time.
Voir (Netflix, from Monday)
Pretentious? Quite possibly. But this David Fincher curated series of "visual essays" celebrating the magic of cinema could also be really good. The trailer doesn't give too much away, but according to writer Drew McWeeny, who's been working on the project for the past couple of years, it's "not like any other show about movies that you've seen." Each standalone episode runs between 10 and 30 minutes and features a different film person talking about their relationship to movies with a focus on something that "intrigues or upsets" them. For now, this should fall into the "intriguing" category for anyone who identifies as a film nerd.
Movie of the Week: 'Twas the Fight before Christmas (Apple TV+)
There must be hundreds of Christmas movies to choose from across the various streaming platforms at the moment, most of them fundamentally the same. Then there's 'Twas the Fight Before Christmas. The Apple TV+ documentary is a larger-than-life story of yuletide disharmony, about a Christmas cheer-obsessed man who singlehandedly turned his quiet American neighbourhood into Auckland's Franklin Rd on steroids and then claimed "religious discrimination" when he was asked to please tone it down. If you are actively trying to manage your blood pressure this one might not be for you, but if you enjoy a good documentary with a very annoying man at the centre, this is the Christmas movie you've been waiting for.
From the Vault: The Matrix (1999) (Neon, from today)
What was once cutting-edge science fiction is now beginning to look more like a vision of our dystopian future. Is this … the metaverse? Are leather trench coats and those little sunglasses about to make a comeback? Would the world be a better place if this movie never introduced us to the whole stupid red pill/blue pill thing? Wonder all these things and more when you watch The Matrix (and its two(?!) sequels) with fresh eyes.
Podcast of the Week: Operator
The greatest generational divide between Millennials and Gen Xers – ability to afford a home aside – has to be willingness to talk on the phone. Not only to friends and family but to sultry-voiced strangers at the other end of 0900 numbers who charge by the minute. Although we may never be able to fully understand what drove older generations to seek company this way, there's still a lot to enjoy about the story of America's largest phone sex provider, as told in the new Wondery podcast series, Operator.
The unsexy-sounding American Telnet was the hub for countless steamy 1-900 lines in the 1990s phone sex heyday. The company's story, as told over eight entertaining episodes by podcaster and former sex worker Tina Horn, begins with a big idea from enigmatic founder Mike Pardes (aka the self-proclaimed "telephone pimp") and charts its rapid ascent to a multi-million dollar enterprise until it inevitably all falls apart. But more than just a story of business and innovation, a lot of the focus is on those right at the heart of the operation and what the experience of being a phone sex worker was like for them. Spoiler alert: not always that great.
