Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
Sherwood (TVNZ+, from Tuesday)
The first thing you learn about the Nottinghamshire village of Sherwood is that everybody there seems to hate each other's guts. And you don't need to go looking far for the source of their bad blood – the BBC crime drama opens with a montage of footage from the miners' strikes in the 1980s, the fractures from which still run deep. Series creator James Graham (Quiz, Benedict Cumberbatch's Brexit miniseries) grew up in Notts, and the series is loosely based on a pair of real-life murders in his hometown when he was a kid.
In crime drama terms, all this means everyone's a suspect long before we even find out who the victim is. A haggard young man driving a taxi sends shivers down the spine of an older gent kicking a ball around with some kids. What's he up to? A different young man keeps his bedroom door locked at all times while he's doing computer hacking and looking at websites with names like "Counternews". Yikes.
A woman knocks on the door of the old bloke, the one who got spooked by the taxi, and asks his wife to tell him to stop burning rubbish because her husband's having a hard time breathing. She relays the news to him and he just mutters "Arsehole" and gets back to his fire. "That's me sister," she replies. Later at the pub – which they call the "clubby" – a glass gets thrown at the wall after he utters the four-letter word: "scab".
Viewers in the UK, where the series just wrapped up, have been completely obsessed with Sherwood over the past six weeks. It's easy to see why – this is one of those rare crime dramas that would be just as good even if no one was murdered.
Life After Life (TVNZ+)
Last time Thomasin McKenzie was on a TV show was when her character Pixie got killed off from Shortland Street. Since then she's been in movies directed by Taika Waititi, Edgar Wright, Jane Campion and M Night Shyamalan and basically become a proper Hollywood movie actor. Now she returns to the small screen for the BBC adaptation of Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life as Ursula Todd, an early 20th-century Englishwoman who keeps dying and being reborn to start all over again. It's a tearjerker, but will it be as sad as Pixie dying of pneumonia? Hard to say.
Black Bird (Apple TV+)
Taron Egerton, the only actor in the history of film to play Eddie the Eagle, Robin Hood and Elton John, is now a convicted drug dealer who gets made an offer he can't refuse in Black Bird. Based on James Keene's autobiographical book In With the Devil, the offer is this: freedom, in exchange for getting a confession from his serial killer cellmate Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser, star of the movie Richard Jewell) and finding out where the bodies are buried. Greg Kinnear and Ray Liotta also star in a miniseries that is probably not going to be a relaxing watch, but a good one.
Pirate Gold of Adak Island (Netflix)
If the beautifully bucolic Detectorists gave you an insatiable taste for watching blokes slowly scan a field with metal detectors then this may be the documentary you've been waiting for. It's set on the remote Alaskan island of Adak (which is actually closer to Japan than it is to the contiguous US), where in the 1800s a pirate allegedly buried hundreds of tins of gold coins. A couple have been found, but now the island's mayor wants to find the rest to save the island, so the experts have been called in. Beneath the macho Nat Geo channel narration it's actually a pleasantly slow and nerdy hunt, regardless of what they do or don't end up finding.
Movie of the Week: Last Night in Soho (Neon)
Thomasin McKenzie is a fashion student who moves into a bedsit owned by a nice old lady and starts having extremely vivid dreams in which she's back in the 1960s hanging out with a modish nightclub singer (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Queen's Gambit) and at one point Cilla Black. But if you think Last Night in Soho sounds like some whimsical Midnight in Paris type jaunt, think again – the latest movie from Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Sean of the Dead and plenty of other far more recent stuff) is more of an edgy psychological horror. Lines of reality begin to blur in a big way, terrifying visions appear, and the 60s maybe aren't quite as groovy as Austin Powers led us to believe.
From the Vault: The Hunger Games (2012) (Neon)
Should you be unlucky enough to have to spend a week at home any time soon, take some minor consolation in the fact at least now all the Hunger Games movies are available to stream in one place. Whether spread across four increasingly stressful nights or condensed into a pair of epic double-headers, the adaptation of Suzanne Collins' best-selling novels is one of the best franchise movie series you can get – arguably better than the Harry Potters and maybe even up there with the original Star Wars trilogy. And it's technically not over yet – there's a prequel meant to be coming late next year, too.
Podcast of the Week: Motherlode
When you think of Melbourne you probably think of Aussie Rules football or trendy coffee shops. One thing that doesn't generally come to mind when you think of Melbourne is computer hacking. But back in the late-1980s, as the podcast series Motherlode details, it was a global epicentre of cybercrime.
This explains how, back in 1989, a bunch of Nasa scientists turned on their computers to see the message "You've been wanked" along with anti-war Midnight Oil lyrics. These days considered the first-ever example of "hacktivism", the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) worm was deployed in protest at the space agency's use of nuclear power on its latest missions.
Who was behind the worm that introduced thousands of Nasa boffins to this vital Australian slang? Those who know won't say, but let's just say the name Julian Assange comes up a lot in that episode. The WikiLeaks founder cut his hacking teeth in the Melbourne scene in the 80s and 90s, and although they didn't get to talk to him for the series we hear from plenty of his contemporaries – along with some of the cops, who'd probably never seen a computer before in their lives at that stage, whose job it was to catch these young cyberpunks.
