Looking for something to keep you entertained this Easter? Callum Henderson shares his top picks of what to watch and listen to for the week ahead.
Pick of the Week: Operation Varsity Blues (Netflix)
Everything has a price – including admission to top US colleges. The "back door" to an Ivy League school comes via a donation with a price tag in the tens of millions, independent college counsellor Rick Singer told wealthy parents. His "side door" was a bargain by comparison – usually somewhere more in the region of a million.
Singer was the mastermind behind the US college admissions bribery scandal that made headlines in 2019. It was big news mainly because of the large number of high-powered CEOs and funny minor celebrities (Becky from Full House; a woman whose family invented Hot Pockets) who were implicated and sentenced to jail. But the real story behind it all was the intricate web of corruption and fraud Rick Singer successfully oversaw for years.
That's the story told by Operation Varsity Blues, the new Netflix documentary from the makers of the Fyre Festival documentary. It's built around reconstructions of real phone conversations between Singer and his clients, taken from wiretap transcripts released by the US government. Singer is played by Matthew Modine (the villainous doctor in Stranger Things), who takes the art of the dramatic reconstruction to artistic heights seldom seen before.
Singer's job as a college counsellor was meant to involve coaching high school students through the application process – helping them draft their letters of application and prepare for their SATs. Instead, he helped an estimated 730 students a year get into their dream colleges through the side door of the schools' athletics programmes – by photoshopping them into high-school water polo teams and bribing various coaches.
Like the Fyre Festival documentary, watching Singer's web of deceit come crashing down and some of his wealthy clients go to jail offers unrivalled schadenfreude. By the end, though, you mostly just feel sorry for the kids, unknowing pawns in their parents' vanity games.
The Watch (TVNZ OnDemand)
Terry Pratchett heads beware: The Watch may be based on characters and places from the fantasy author's beloved Discworld series, but this very loose adaptation hasn't gone down well with everyone. Set in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, the police department of Discworld's biggest city, it's basically a CSI-style police procedural that looks like Mad Max got a healthy injection of Pratchett's trademark weirdness and whimsy. It's an odd mix, and a polarising one – for every one-star review from a disgruntled Discworlder there seems to be a five-star review from someone who appreciates it for what it is.
This is a Robbery (Netflix, from Wednesday)
The 1990 theft of 13 artworks from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is one of the most documentary-friendly art heists in history. It's already made for a great 10-part podcast series (Last Seen) and now it's got the inevitable four-part Netflix true-crime documentary treatment to go with it. Carried out by two men posing as police officers responding to a disturbance call out, the crime remains unsolved and the artworks remain missing. But even if this documentary doesn't manage to solve it, the podcast showed there's still a huge international art world conspiracy to get sucked into.
Kung Fu (TVNZ OnDemand, from Thursday)
The original 1970s Kung Fu series, apocryphally based on an idea stolen from Bruce Lee by Warner Bros, starred David Carradine as a Shaolin monk travelling through the American Old West. This modern adaptation is about Chinese-American woman Nicky Shen (Olivia Liang) who uses Shaolin values to fight crime in her hometown of San Francisco while searching for the assassin who killed her mentor. If you were into the Bruce Lee-inspired historical drama Warrior before they stopped making it, this might fill the martial arts hole in your heart.
Movie of the Week: Bill & Ted Face the Music (Neon, from Monday)
Of all the unlikely predictions you could have made at the start of 2020, "there will be a new Bill & Ted movie, and it will actually be pretty good" would have to be right up there. But 2020 was nothing if not a year of surprises, and Bill & Ted Face the Music is worth a watch now it's on Neon if you want to see with your own eyes. Set 30 years after the last one, it finds an ageing Bill and Ted, who still haven't written that song that was going to unite humanity, but with the help of their daughters they get back on the time travel wagon and give it one more shot.
From the Vault: Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) (Disney Plus)
On the topic of rebooting iconic 1990s comedy duos ... when are they going to bring Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino back together for another Romy and Michele movie? Seems criminal they didn't try and make a whole franchise out of it at the time, but maybe that's for the best – the original stands as one of the great and perpetually under-rated comedies of the 90s.
Podcast of the Week: Sentimental Garbage
There are the books you say you like and the books you talk about – then there are the books you read, but never talk about. Sentimental Garbage is a podcast about the latter. In each episode, journalist and author Caroline O'Donoghue is joined by a guest to chat about a favourite book from the genre broadly, pejoratively labelled "chick-lit". We're talking Jojo Moyes, we're talking Jackie Collins, we're talking Bridget Jones's Diary.
And, for the last few weeks, O'Donoghue and her equally funny and popular writer friend Dolly Alderton have been talking Sex and the City. Yes, that's a TV show, not a book, but they see it as one of the "great American novels" and who's going to argue with that?
Each episode of the miniseries offers a hilarious (and extremely long) overview of each of the show's six seasons. O'Donoghue and Alderton are SaTC superfans from way back, and as they declare in their manifesto, "this is not going to be a place where we roll our eyes about things that people have already rolled their eyes about before". It's a full-hearted, laugh-a-minute discussion between friends which is enjoyable even if you haven't watched the show in question – and probably a thousand times better if you have.
