Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (Amazon Prime Video)
A cool teen opens the door of her wardrobe and finds a freshly severed goat's head hanging among her frocks, and a chilling message smeared in lipstick on the mirror: The more things change, the more they stay the same.
That's not really what the message says, what it says is of course I Know What You Did Last Summer, but for millennial veterans of the 1997 teen slasher movie (which was itself based on a 1973 novel) it's just another reminder that we have now lived through one full rotation of the popular culture cycle.
It's reassuring to find the I Know What You Did Last Summer class of 2021 are just as brooding and intense as their '97 predecessors were after they accidentally killed someone in a hit-and-run and disposed of the body. They have, of course, been put through a Euphoria filter to make them a little more diverse and a lot more au fait with recreational drugs use, and one of them also has a mukbang (popular Korean eating videos) YouTube channel. But perhaps the most important difference is that the killer who knows what they did last summer has their cellphone numbers this time around.
Although the movie version is of a gilded era when movies clocked in at an easy 100 minutes, it takes almost that long just for the first guilty teen to be picked off in the TV version. There's a lot of neon-lit partying and pensively looking at phones wondering who keeps sending the clown emoji to get through until then, but once the gruesome murder footage starts pinging up in everyone's inbox the old familiar fun of trying to guess who the killer is – and who's next on their list – finally begins.
Barkley Manor (TVNZ 1, 8pm Monday)
From A Dog's Show to Tux Wonder Dogs to Purina Pound Pups, New Zealand has never made a bad TV show about dogs – and there's no reason to believe that will change when Barkley Manor premieres this week. The series goes behind the gates of one of Auckland's most prestigious doggy daycare facilities to meet the pampered pooches within and the humans in charge of training them, grooming them and apparently pushing some of them around in prams. Hosted by Doc Martin himself, Martin Clunes, it's exactly the kind of heartwarming thing we need right now.
The Pact (TVNZ OnDemand, from Monday)
Betty (Irene Wood) and Frank (Ian Mune) are a couple of classic oldies, the kind you see in the paper celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and think, how nice. Chuck their chaotic good daughter, high-achieving son and precocious granddaughter into the mix and you've got a delightful little family unit, which, in The Pact, begins to unravel after one of them becomes terminally ill. Sorry! Some big end-of-life discussions need to be had, and some rather opposing viewpoints need to be worked out to put the family back on course through troubled waters in this new local series created by Harry MacNaughton and Natalie Medlock.
Succession (SoHo and Neon, from Monday)
Everybody's favourite family of loosely fictional media titans, the Roy family are back this week for more Murdochian misadventures. Season three of the HBO series finds patriarch Logan still spitting tacks over an act of skulduggery that took place at the end of season two, at war with one of his terrible sons while the rest of the family back him up out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. The show doesn't take a backward step this season – it's as dramatic and funny and if anything even more intense than before. Take it an episode at a time.
Movie of the Week: Wonder Woman 1984 (Neon)
At some point in the past couple of decades, a lot of the classic superheroes started taking themselves way too seriously – Batman the worst of the lot. Not Wonder Woman, though! The latest one, set in (you guessed it) 1984, may not be especially good by any of the traditional measures of quality, but it still feels like a breath of fresh air – harking back to the days of yore when superhero movies were still made to be watched by children. Much easier to forgive wooden acting and dialogue that sounds like it was written by AI when the movie looks and feels as fun and exciting as they used to.
From the Vault: Phone Booth (2003) (Disney Plus)
If you've already enjoyed Guilty, the new Netflix movie where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a bad-tempered cop managing an intense situation over the phone in an emergency response call centre, why not try Phone Booth. This time it's Colin Farrell, he's in a phone booth (it's 2003) and there's a sniper on the other end threatening to reveal his philandering secrets – or worse. A classic of the man-on-the-phone-the-whole-time genre.
Podcast of the Week: Suspect
Although we are never in danger of there being a shortage of true-crime murder podcasts, a lot of us are probably still all hanging out for the next new series that hooks us the same way something like Serial or The Teacher's Pet did back in the day. If that's you, then Suspect could be the one.
The latest series from pod giants Wondery reinvestigates a 2008 case that seems straight from the CSI writers' room – a sprawling, multi-room Halloween party in a big apartment complex, a lot of alcohol and drugs, everybody in costume. And, the next morning, one of the hosts is found dead in her apartment.
There are no witnesses and everyone's a suspect, but the police convict a man and send him to jail, where he maintains his innocence to this day, saying their use of DNA evidence got it all wrong.
The nine-episode podcast (the last of which comes out this week) re-examines the case, its original police investigation and the trial(s) that followed, unsurprisingly raising plenty of questions, particularly around DNA evidence and how it's used. Meticulously reported and expertly crafted, it's the kind of podcast that'll have you going for walks just to listen to the next episode.
