Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
The Rising (Neon, from Monday)
We've all at some point in our lives imagined what it might be like to attend our own funeral. New British ghost crime drama The Rising takes this thought experiment a few steps further: what if we got to solve our own murder?
This is the opportunity that presents itself to 19-year-old motocross rider Neve (Clara Rugaard) when she wakes up in the middle of a lake the morning after an all-night motocross rave. She stumbles home to explain to her worried mum how she just partied too hard and fell asleep in a body of water, but mum gives her the cold shoulder and carries on reporting her disappearance to the police. In a rage, she smashes a vase on the floor, but still no reaction.
You like to imagine you'd figure out you're a ghost straight away, but these things take a while to sink in. For Neve the penny finally drops when she undresses to take a shower and finds her body covered in cuts and bruises – it doesn't take a forensic pathologist to determine these wounds are consistent with being beaten and strangled. She has a shower anyway.
In this particular spirit realm, it seems you can do whatever you want (smash a vase, use all the hot water) and those in the land of the living won't register so much as a shiver down their spine. Or so Neve thinks at first. But as she returns to the motocross club to join her own search party, she starts to realise there may be a few exceptions to this rule, which she'll need to exploit in order to solve her own murder.
Based on a Belgian series from 2017, The Rising might not be what you'd call a prestige drama. What it does have is an undeniably entertaining concept – and these days, that's a lot harder to find.
Ms Marvel (Disney+, from Wednesday)
The more the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands, the weirder and cooler it gets. Kind of annoying for those of us who want so badly to make fun of it but are instead forced to concede that actually WandaVision was a pretty buzzy show. The studio's latest series is about nerdy 16-year-old Pakistani-American Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), an Avengers superfan (she writes fanfiction!) who gains superpowers of her own and assumes the title of Ms Marvel when Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) graduates to become Captain Marvel. Watch this and you'll be able to understand the forthcoming 2023 movie The Marvels, and once you're on the train you'll never be able to get off.
Pivoting (Neon)
If you're a commitment-phobic type of TV watcher who baulks at the prospect of endless seasons inevitably getting worse and worse then Pivoting is the show for you – it's already been cancelled, meaning the first season's 10 episodes are it. And if you think a show getting cancelled after only one season is any reflection on its quality, please reflect upon one of the greatest shows ever made, Freaks and Geeks. Pivoting is about three 30-something friends (Ginnifer Goodwin, Maggie Q, Eliza Coupe) who decide they need to pivot their lives to find happiness after their friend dies. A low-commitment, high-enjoyment TV proposition.
Prehistoric Planet (Apple TV+)
It's been more than 20 years since we went Walking With Dinosaurs, and almost 30 since we first visited Jurassic Park. You could say we're long overdue a big, mind-blowing dinosaur experience, and that's exactly what we've got in Apple TV+'s five-part Prehistoric Planet. The pitch is simple and irresistible: imagine a David Attenborough nature documentary, but with dinosaurs. They've pulled out all the stops, too – the great man himself on the narration, Hans Zimmer on the score, CGI so convincing you forget it's not real. They'll be playing this on the display TVs at Harvey Norman for years to come.
Movie of the Week: Minari (Neon)
If you stayed away from Minari at the movies because you were worried you might start crying and not be able to stop, now's your chance to cry openly and freely to it in the comfort of your own home. The hit 2020 drama follows a family of Korean immigrants trying to make it in rural Arkansas in the 1980s, semi-autobiographically based on the childhood of writer and director Lee Isaac Chung. Intimate, beautiful, heartbreaking and featuring incredible performances across the board, it remains an absolute must-see.
From the Vault: Glee (2009) (Disney+)
When you look at it as a number on a page, the year 2009 doesn't seem that long ago. But when you think of it as the year the first season of Glee came out, it suddenly feels like a whole lifetime ago. Director Ryan Murphy's first really big (and arguably still biggest) hit hasn't aged particularly well, but that's part of the appeal of a rewatch. On the flip side, watching the show choir blast their way through Journey's Don't Stop Believin' in the first episode hits kind of different with the knowledge of the tragic paths a bunch of the actors' lives took. On second thoughts, maybe don't rewatch it.
Podcast of the Week: Unreal: A Critical History of Reality TV
We love to hate and hate to love reality television, and increasingly we also love to make podcasts critically re-examining it. Last year it was American-made series Spectacle, now it's BBC Radio 4 series Unreal.
Each episode sees hosts Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale roll back the years to examine a different reality phenomenon, charting the troubled course of how we got from Big Brother to Love Island. The first episode of the series strikes an enjoyable balance of nostalgia and criticism, with the hosts recapping some of Big Brother's most enduring storylines, controversies and characters and dipping into what it all means as they go. One minute we're hearing from Nasty Nick about what it was like being a pioneer of reality TV villainy, the next we're hearing from former University of Auckland media studies legend Misha Kavka about how reality TV holds a mirror up to society.
One thing that soon becomes apparent is that even the best reality franchises turn to mush after a few seasons. Here we always thought it was because of our shallow talent pool, but maybe it's just built into the genre's DNA – it's in a constant state of evolution. Or devolution – who can really say for sure.
