Pick of the Week: The Drowning (Neon)
There's nothing quite like a British TV drama that looks like it's going to be all serious but then ends up absolutely bonkers instead. Remember when Doctor Foster first came out and we all thought it was going to be a serious medical drama? Well, good news: The Drowning is another one of these shows.
The four-part thriller begins with a woman called Jodie slamming on the brakes after she spots a teenage boy – the real-life son of the singer from Placebo – on his way to school. He's got a mop of curly hair, a denim jacket and he's carrying a battered guitar case. She's... a talent scout who thinks she's just discovered the next Harry Styles? Not quite.
Jodie parks the car and gets on the boy's bus. Just goes and stands right next to him, staring at him. "You're going to think I'm mad," she accurately predicts when she goes to visit her ex-husband at his work afterwards. "I've just seen him – our son."
The boy on the bus looked like her son, was the right age to be her son, and even had a facial scar on his face where their son had a facial scar. The only complicating factor in all this is that their son drowned nine years ago.
The boy's body, she reminds his father, was never found when they drained the pond where he's supposed to have died. Look, if you're a stickler for realism in TV drama, this might be the point where you switch off. Or maybe it'll be the next scene, where she walks into the boy's school, applies for a job as a music teacher (with no prior teaching experience!) and starts work tutoring him the next day.
The plot is almost glorious in its disregard for logic, with the other three episodes featuring more twists and turns and giant leaps than a rhythmic gymnastics routine. If you're looking for a quick fix now you've finished Behind Her Eyes, this could be just the thing.
The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers (Disney Plus)
Of all the ways to reboot a beloved film franchise, picking things up in the modern-day seems to be the way to go. It worked for Karate Kid spinoff Cobra Kai, anyway, and now a similar formula has been applied to new Disney Plus series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers. The once plucky underdog kids' ice hockey team is now a regional powerhouse that turns away the types of misfits who made the team great in the 90s. So one of them forms his own team, a spiritual Mighty Ducks 2.0, and even gets the team's old coach (Emilio Estevez) back on board to show them the. But what chance will his outdated 90s tactics stand against modern sports science?
The Gloaming (TVNZ On Demand)
If The Drowning is about a boy who drowned, what could The Gloaming be about? A boy who listened to too much mid-2000s Radiohead? Sadly not.
It's an Australian crime drama which on the surface of it sounds like a lot of other crime dramas – a troubled detective investigating a murder uncovers links to a cold case in the past. But this one stands out because it has Rena Owen and Martin Henderson in it, because it's set in the extremely misty and gothic Tasmania and because these murders involve ghosts.
Waffles + Mochi (Netflix)
The implosion of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen due to an institutional racism and pay inequity scandal last year has left a lot of us searching for a comforting new cooking series to watch. We probably didn't anticipate this series would involve puppets, but this is the hand we've been dealt. Waffles and Mochi are those puppets, and they're travelling the world to learn about new foods and cultures with the help of Michelle Obama and a lot of celebrity guests. The series is from the same makers of Chef's Table, Salt Fat Acid Heat and Ugly Delicious, so while it's meant to be for kids, grown-ups will probably like it even more.
Movie of the Week: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Neon, from Monday)
Spotlight may be the great journalism movie of modern times, but A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood might be the most accurate – a cynical magazine writer (Matthew Rhys) is assigned a profile of beloved children's TV icon Fred "Mister" Rogers (Tom Hanks) and decides to use it as an opportunity to expose him as a fraud and a phoney. Where it becomes harder to believe is when Mr Rogers changes the guy's mind and encourages him to confront his personal problems, but that's exactly the heartwarming true story the movie is based on.
From the Vault: In Beaver Valley (1950) (Disney Plus)
Far away from Frozen, all the various Marvel series and The Simpsons, there's a special corner of Disney Plus full of old nature documentaries. Like, really old – In Beaver Valley was filmed in 1950. Narrated by the great Winston Hibler, it's a lovely slow-paced pre-Attenborough doco about life in and around a beaver dam, also featuring otters, birds and more.
Podcast of the Week: Thrilling Tales of Modern Capitalism
Just as we were all once tiny babies, pretty much every giant global brand was once a humble small business. Weird thought, right? And for every big company that's had their origin story made into a big movie (Facebook, McDonald's) there's thousands whose stories are virtually unknown.
That's where Slate podcast Thrilling Tales of Capitalism comes in. Each episode is a brief (20-30 minute), entertaining story about how a different global megabrand started out being run out of a garage by a plucky entrepreneur with $25 and a dream. Or, as in the Crocs episode, the story of how a failing business was brought back from the brink through some minor business miracle (in the case of the Crocs revival, it's all high fashion's fault).
A lot of these episodes could easily be full series – the story of how original Domino's Pizza owner Tom Monaghan and his brother borrowed $900 to buy a small Michigan pizzeria and ended up owning the Detroit Tigers is a particularly good yarn. But the brevity is part of what makes Thrilling Tales of Modern Capitalism such a good listen, a million-dollar podcast idea in its own right.
