Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
Landscapers (Neon, from Monday)
Personality traits considered charming in children can be deeply unappealing in adults. Living in a fantasy world inspired by old movies to such an extent that you murder one or both of your parents is a good, if rare, example. When the girls in Heavenly Creatures do it? Whimsical, delightful (to a point). Middle-aged couple Susan and Christopher Edwards in Landscapers? Bleak, depressing.
The four-part miniseries based on their story begins with the couple – portrayed as brilliantly as you'd expect by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis – living in a French apartment that has blown right past shabby chic and is now just shabby. A typical day: Christopher attends an interview for a job he has no chance of getting on account of his sub-par French, while Susan browses the local vintage stores spending money they don't have on old Western movie posters.
Then, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, Christopher makes a startling confession during a phone call to his stepmum in England. She tells the police what he told her: "He buried his wife's parents in a garden near Nottingham 15 years ago." And he tells Susan the rest: "I told her in strict confidence … I'm disgusted actually." The police, without enough evidence for an arrest warrant, start an email correspondence with Christopher to try to convince the couple to hand themselves in.
Written by Ed Sinclair (husband of Olivia Colman) and directed by Will Sharpe (with whom she previously worked on the surreal comedy masterpiece Flowers), Landscapers is far from the grim police procedural plod the Edwards' story could and probably would have been in any other hands. Instead, it leans into the strangeness and pathos of the crime and the criminals (who to this day maintain their innocence) like Michael Jackson in the Smooth Criminal video, and ends up all the better for it.
Severance (Apple TV+)
A simple surgical procedure (needle in the brain) that permanently separates your work and non-work memories, meaning you can't remember anything that happened at work once you get home and vice versa? Could be keen. It's a prereq if you want to work at the extremely weird and mysterious Lumon Industries, but … why? That's the big mystery to be unravelled by Adam Scott's character after his best work friend shows up in his non-work life to tell him nothing is as it seems at the office. A star-studded (Walken, Arquette, Turturro; directed by Ben Stiller), head-scratching thriller.
Abbott Elementary (Disney+)
Calling it the second coming of The Office is probably setting Abbott Elementary up to fail under the weight of unreasonably high expectations. But it's also not inaccurate to describe it as being as if The Office was set in a low-decile underfunded Pittsburgh elementary school. Created by and starring A Black Lady Sketch Show's Quinta Brunson, the mockumentary sitcom has been met with almost unanimous praise and approval from both critics and audience since it began airing on ABC in the US in December, so it's probably worth pausing your fifth rewatch of The Office to find out what the fuss is about.
The Void (7pm tonight, TVNZ 2)
If your favourite Squid Game challenge was the one where they had to jump across the panes of glass and risk falling to their death you are going to love Britain's latest idiotic game show, The Void. From the masterminds behind The Cube, the show features a variety of physical and mental challenges set high above a massive pool of water aka The Void, which contestants can and do fall into if they don't keep their wits about them. Sure it's not a cold, hard concrete floor like on Squid Game, but it's probably as close as you're going to get.
Movie of the Week: I Want You Back (Amazon Prime Video)
You don't watch a romantic comedy to find out how it ends. In I Want You Back, the ending is clear from the moment Peter and Emma (Charlie Day and Jenny Slate) meet in the stairwell of their office building where they've both gone to cry over being dumped by their respective partners. What's more important is how it gets there – and with an above-average script, an above-average cast and some actual chemistry between the two lovable loser leads, the journey in I Want You Back is one worth taking on your next rom-com night.
From the Vault: Charmed (1998) (TVNZ OnDemand)
What if the "golden age of television" had nothing to do with The Sopranos and everything to do with being able to spend an entire weekday happily watching nothing but free-to-air TV? TVNZ 2 showing classic millennial witch drama Charmed from the beginning in the 11:30am weekday time slot feels like a huge and very welcome throwback to this era – episodes are also being added OnDemand if you want to start at the very beginning too.
Podcast of the Week: The Big Hit Show
If there's one thing podcasts do better than any other medium it's helping us reassess things we didn't even realise we needed to reassess. You're Wrong About is the gold-standard example, the popular series setting the record straight on everything from Koko the gorilla to Tom Cruise's Oprah couch jump, but there are plenty of other podcasts covering the same areas equally well.
One new example is The Big Hit Show, a Spotify-exclusive series in which writer Alex Pappademas explores how and why certain things get really, really huge, and the unexpected fallout that can result from mega-popularity. The first set of episodes takes a deep dive into the 2000s Twilight phenomenon (the next is about Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly to give an idea of the range here), probing the series' popularity from a variety of different angles and talking to those responsible (and the guy who wrote the very first Twilight movie script, which involved Bella shooting vampires and riding a jetski).
Whether you were a hardcore Team Edward Twi-hard or your knee jerk reaction was to hate Twilight and its fans, The Big Hit Show's look back on the whole phenomenon is a fascinating listen.
