Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
Deceit (Neon)
If you've listened to the truly stranger-than-fiction podcast Bed of Lies, there's probably nothing about the way the British police went about their business in the 1980s and 90s that can shock you anymore. But the intense new crime drama Deceit certainly gives it a good go.
The four-part series is based on the real-life murder of Rachel Nickell, who was stabbed to death in broad daylight on Wimbledon Common in 1992, and the undercover "honey trap" launched by police in an attempt to implicate their main suspect.
The cop given this unenviable assignment is Sadie Byrne (Niamh Algar), an undercover operations expert whom we first see going deep undercover at a 90s rave in order to help bust some grotty drug den. She's tough, she's fearless and she's resigned to seeing all the credit for her dangerous work go to her male counterparts.
With tabloid interest in the Nickell case threatening to get out of hand, and convinced the killer will strike again, the cops have to pull something big out of the hat. They've already featured the case on Crimewatch and, based on the response they got from that, they have a strong suspect in a bloke called Colin Stagg – they just don't have the evidence to do anything about it. Byrne's job is to go undercover in every sense of the word in order to find out if he's the sexual deviant their criminal profilers think he is.
A brilliant criminology professor (Eddie Marsan) helps her get into character as "Lizzie James", and she starts out writing letters to lure Stagg into revealing his deepest, most violent fantasies. These are the standout scenes of the first episode and help elevate this above the police procedural and into something where the stakes feel much higher. By the time the relationship moves to chatting on the phone it's already intense, and that's not even the start of it.
The Panthers (TVNZ 1, 9:30pm tonight)
If you're still not a 100 percent sure what it was that Jacinda Ardern was apologising for the other weekend, The Panthers should answer your questions and then some. Starting in Auckland in 1974, the series charts the formation of the Polynesian Panthers amid a racially divisive climate under the Muldoon Government and the dawn raids by police, which targeted Pacific communities. It's a historical drama with purpose, telling the story of a period in our history that's not nearly as widely known as it should be. The biggest local series of the year starts tonight.
Debris (TVNZ OnDemand)
It may not be how we always imagined making contact with aliens would go, but having debris from one of their spaceships start to fall out of the sky is still pretty exciting. People in this new sci-fi series definitely seem pretty keen to get their hands on an extraterrestrial souvenir, but when weird stuff starts happening to them, the CIA and MI6 form a transatlantic task force to track down all the bits. They're far from the only ones on the hunt, though – the race is very much on to find these spaceship pieces and solve their mystery before they fall into the wrong hands.
War & Peace (Neon, from Thursday)
Let's be honest with ourselves: we are never ever going to read War & Peace, are we. Could definitely still watch it though. Originally released in the UK in 2016, this BBC adaptation gets the job done in six episodes and is widely regarded as being among the top tier of costume dramas. It was written by Andrew Davies, who's the master of the classic novel to TV adaptation, having done the classic 1995 Pride and Prejudice, the 2008 Pride & Prejudice and more recently Les Miserables and Sanditon. There's never been a better way of consuming Tolstoy's absolute doorstop of a novel.
Movie of the Week: Beckett (Netflix)
John David Washington (BlacKkKlansman, Tenet, son of Denzel) is Beckett, an American guy who becomes a magnet for trouble on his holiday in Greece. Like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive all those years ago, he becomes the subject of a manhunt after an accident and has to try to make it to the US embassy in Athens before the net closes and without becoming entangled in a whole big web of conspiracy. Sounds quite intense, as does the film's original title "Born to be Murdered".
From the Vault: The Kitchen Job (2008) (Tubi)
Bad news: there's yet another streaming platform to consider. Good news: this one doesn't cost anything. Tubi is the daytime television of streaming platforms, full of absolute rubbish but sprinkled with enough fun oddities and hidden gems to make it worth signing up for a look. Among the surprising selection: both seasons of the NZ reality classic The Kitchen Job – the one where John Palino (pre mayoral candidacy) went around fixing up struggling restaurants.
Podcast of the Week: The Battersea Poltergeist
One day in 1956, 15-year-old South London girl Shirley Hitchings found an old key on her pillow. Nobody in her family knew whose it was, where it came from or how it got there. Not long after that, the strange banging noises started.
Classic poltergeist behaviour. The haunting of the Hitchings home at 63 Wycliffe Rd is one of the UK's most well-known ghost stories, the subject of years of tabloid speculation in the years that followed. But nobody ever did quite get to the bottom of it.
That's what host Danny Robbins sets out to do in the BBC podcast The Battersea Poltergeist. He approaches the haunting as a cold case, the way a true-crime podcast host would, drawing from boxes of evidence collected by determined ghost hunter Harold Chibbett, a former World War II pilot, who dedicated his life to solving the paranormal mystery.
While Robbins connects the dots in the present day, re-enactments take us back to the time of the haunting, bringing the family – all of whom except Shirley have since died (of non-ghost related causes) – to life, with Toby Jones putting in a hell of a performance as Chibbett. It's all a lot of spooky fun, and manages to be an entertaining listen for believers and sceptics alike.
