Watch, listen and be inspired by Calum Henderson's definitive list of what's hot right now and from the vault.
The Girl Before (Neon, from today)
As the property agent rightly points out, 1 Folgate St is "not your typical London one-bed." So brutally architectural it would leave Kevin from Grand Designs lost for words, so militantly minimal it would make even Marie Kondo a bit uncomfortable, you better believe the city's hipsters are lining up for a chance to live there.
It's not just the polished concrete and lack of handrail on the stairs that make the house at the centre of four-part psychological thriller The Girl Before an unusual rental. The rules imposed by the landlord, who also happens to be the architect, extend beyond the usual no pets, no parties to a list of "about 200" prohibited activities. On the other hand, the rent is surprisingly cheap because the house is run by a state-of-the-art computer system that monitors and collects data from the tenants around the clock.
No alarm bells and no red flags for trendy young couple Simon and Emma (Ben Hardy and Jessica Plummer), to whom the landlord offers the lease despite having coffee spilled all over his architectural drawings by the klutzy Emma. They move in, fit all their stuff into the one allotted cupboard, then throw a big party in an apparent attempt to see how many of the house rules they can break in one go.
Meanwhile, in another timeline, another prospective tenant – who it must be said bears quite a resemblance to Emma – is jumping through all the same hoops. Jane (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is the perfect tenant – single, tidy, would never let a child touch the house's single decorative tree – so much so that the landlord asks her out on a date.
This and the many other revelations that follow walk a thin line between the intriguing and the unbelievable. If you keep your brain in a low enough gear, that line can feel like a very enjoyable sweet spot.
Bel-Air (TVNZ OnDemand, from Monday)
We all know the story: a young West Philadelphia man has his life flip-turned upside-down after he gets in one little fight and his mum gets scared and says "you're moving in with your aunty and uncle in Bel-Air". Back in 2019, film-maker Morgan Cooper made a trailer which took the facts from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air's expository sitcom theme song and reimagined them as an intense modern-day drama. He uploaded it to YouTube, where Will Smith saw it, loved it and decided to get in touch. Now here we are with a full series answer to the question: what if The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but Euphoria?
Inventing Anna (Netflix)
Anna Delvey is a wealthy German heiress who once walked among New York City's richest and most famous socialites at their biggest and most extravagant parties. Anna Sorokin is a German con artist famous for her successful and highly entertaining run defrauding banks, hotels and wealthy acquaintances between the years of 2013 and 2017 as her alter ego Anna Delvey. The saga was inevitably going to be made into a TV series one day and here it is, created by none other than Shonda Rhimes ,based on Jessica Pressler's definitive New York magazine feature that lifted the lid on Sorokin's spectacular grift.
Pam & Tommy (Disney+)
You never really think to ask for the stories behind famous sex tapes, and you certainly don't expect the TV dramatisations of those stories to be any good, but here we are. English period drama specialist Lily James is a surprisingly effective casting choice as 90s babe Pamela Anderson, whose sex tape with rock sleaze Tommy Lee (superhero movie specialist Sebastian Stan) is stolen from his house by a scorned renovator played by Seth Rogen. The first few episodes, directed by I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie, are probably the most talked-about TV of the year so far, for reasons that should become clear once you start watching.
Movie of the Week: Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Netflix, from Wednesday)
Peter Jackson and The Beatles no longer hold the monopoly on epic seven-hour music documentaries – the first part of the new documentary trilogy about hip-hop artist/producer/fashion mogul/preacher/presidential candidate unknowable enigma Kanye West arrives on Netflix this week. His origin story picks up all the way back in 1998, with an extraordinarily eager young Kanye hustling to get his foot in the door of the music industry while being filmed by his extremely foresightful friends and early collaborators Coodie and Chike. By the sound of things their cameras have been rolling ever since, and the result is likely to be the music documentary event of the year.
From the Vault: NYPD Blue (1993) (Disney+)
The kids have gone to bed, what should we watch? For seemingly every parent or caregiver in the 1990s, the answer was usually either LA Law or NYPD Blue. (Both, it turns out, created by the same guy.) If you want to approximate or relive the experience of being a grown-up in the 90s, all 12 seasons (261 episodes) of the gritty police procedural are on Disney+, and the early ones in particular, with the dream crime-solving team featuring Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits, still hold up pretty well.
Podcast of the Week: The Trojan Horse Affair
It's almost five years since the hugely popular podcast S-Town was released, and plenty of questions still remain. Did they ever find the buried treasure? And whatever happened to host Brian Reed? The answer to the admittedly less exciting second question has arrived in the form of new eight-part saga The Trojan Horse Affair.
For a good chunk of the last five years, Reed has been trying to solve a deceptively knotty mystery set in the Birmingham school system alongside British journalist Hamza Syed, who came to him with the idea back in 2017, when he was still in journalism school.
It all starts with an anonymous letter leaked to the press in 2014, which purportedly outlined how Islamic extremists were planning to take over the UK via its schools. Although the letter was quite clearly fake, its impact and the ripples of Islamophobia it sent through the UK are still being felt today. So, simple question with an anything-but-simple answer: who wrote it?
The Trojan Horse Affair follows the reporting odd-couple as they pull at the thread only to find it becoming more and more tangled. It might take a while to get its hooks in, but eventually you'll be taking long, episode-length walks so you can listen without distraction.
