RECOMMENDED
Sherwood
Streaming: TVNZ+ from September 1
With its mix of detective story, authentic setting and political history and a great cast, Sherwood was one the best British dramas of 2022. The first season was centred on two killings in a former mining town in Nottinghamshire where the anger over the strikes and pit closures of the 1980s still run deep. The second season from writer James Graham returns to the same community ten years later, where gang-related violence is on the rise and where former top cop Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has left the police to take up a civilian crime-prevention role. The murder of a young man increases the tensions between local crime families, meanwhile the prospect of a return to coal-mining in the area has battle-lines drawn between local business and a local government representative with a historic job title still used today – the Sheriff of Nottingham. As well as Morrissey, other cast returning from season one includes Lesley Manville, while new additions include Monica Dolan and Stephen Dillane.
The Body Next Door
A strange, true, and sad story
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Monday September 1
When an elderly woman in the Welsh village of Beddau died of cancer in 2015, she left something behind: a man’s body buried in the garden. The investigation to discover whose body it was spanned time and distance, all the way to 1960s New Zealand and five siblings whose parents left them at a nursery one day and then just disappeared. The woman was former cabaret performer Leigh Sabine, who had first moved into the house with her husband John in 1997. Decades before that, the couple had been living in New Zealand when they suddenly abandoned their children, who grew up in state care. In 2016, after Welsh police confirmed their belief that the body in the garden was John’s, one of those children, Jane Sabine, talked to the New Zealand Herald about the trauma of being abandoned – and then later sexually abused in state care – and her occasional interactions with her distant mother. On learning about the body, she said, she immediately knew whose it would be. There’s a good deal more to this three-part true-crime documentary produced for Sky UK – not least, the bizarre circumstances in which the body was discovered. It tells the story of a case “so convoluted, surprising and sweeping that there’s no need for any infuriatingly glacial recapping or other filler”, wrote the Guardian’s reviewer, praising the pace of the documentary and the strength of its storytelling.
Last King of the Cross
The game moves to the party scene
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Tuesday September 3
Officially, Last King of the Cross is a work of fiction, but one “inspired by” the life of former nightclub owner and – according to Australian police – “major organised-crime figure” John Ibrahim. This second season of the drama picks up with the return of the John character from Ibiza to Sydney, where the chance beckons to supply the MDMA fuelling the central city’s party scene. But he’s not going to have it all his own way, as new rivals emerge, and the cops watch every move. The recent launch of the eight-episode season emphasised the strange way that Ibrahim – who has never been convicted of a crime – has become part of the country’s media firmament, with the likes of his friend, notorious radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands, in attendance.
The Boy That Never Was
A face in the crowd
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Tuesday September 3
This Irish drama, screening here only two days after its debut on RTE in Ireland, is based on the bestselling 2014 novel by Karen Perry. Colin Morgan (Merlin) plays Harry, an expat artist in Morocco who is devastated when an earthquake destroys the family home and, apparently, kills his 3-year-old son, whose body is never found. When Harry spots a boy in a crowd back home in Ireland, he becomes convinced that it is his lost son. His wife thinks he’s crazy, but his obsession only grows. Four parts.
RECOMMENDED
Slow Horses
Things really blow up
Streaming: Apple TV+, from Wednesday September 4
The fourth season of Slow Horses is based on Spook Street, the fourth book in Mick Herron’s Slough House series and the one in which the body count really ramps up. The slow horses of Slough House are not safe: “One of my team just died!” exclaims the malodorous Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in the season four trailer, while seeming not excessively bothered by it. The trailer promises plenty of spectacle – there’s a car-bombing in the first 30 seconds – and Hugo Weaving joins the cast as the villainous Frank Harkness, a very bad CIA agent.
Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist
Hustlers in trouble
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Friday September 6
Everyone looks to be having a whale of a time in this eight-part series, based on Shaye Ogbonna’s hit true-crime podcast of the same name. It’s the remarkable side story to Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback fight in Atlanta. There was an armed robbery on the night of the fight, and it set in motion a chain of events that ultimately shaped the destiny of the city itself. Samuel L Jackson plays the notorious gangster Frank Moten, Kevin Hart is Chicken Man, the flamboyant hustler who finds himself in the frame for the heist, and Don Cheadle is the police detective who has to try to sort out what the hell is happening.
Emperor of Ocean Park
Middle-class murder mystery
Screening: SoHo, 8.30pm, from Sunday September 8
Streaming: Neon
The back story here is a notable one: in 2002, when Stephen L Carter scored a US$4.2 million advance for his debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, it was seen as a game-changer for African-American literature – and a signal that such works could be successfully marketed to the mainstream. Early responses to this screen adaptation by Sherman Payne (best-known as a writer on Shameless) have been more mixed. But Forest Whitaker’s performance as Oliver Garland, a conservative black judge whose suspicious death sends his family into a spin, has earned plenty of praise. Grantham Coleman plays the lead role as Talcott Garland, the judge’s son, whose comfortable life is upended as a conspiracy-minded journalist presses her belief that the judge was murdered.
Celebrity Treasure Island
Once more onto the beach
Screening: TVNZ 2, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, 7.30pm from September 9
Streaming: TVNZ+
Labour’s deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni is among this year’s 18 contenders vying to win $100,000 for their chosen charity. This has brought some criticism for her becoming, like past Dancing with the Stars entrants Rodney Hide and David Seymour, an MP taking time off representative duties to be a reality show contestant. TVNZ itself has escaped criticism for now having CTI as its only primetime show where a politician might be taken to task for an extended period. Sepuloni’s involvement was outed in May when she was observed hobbling around Parliament because of an injury reportedly suffered during the filming at Te Whanganui-o-Hei/Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel. No, that’s not an island. And as always, the word “celebrity” has also been applied loosely. Among the more well known in the mix are Suzanne Paul, who was on the show back in 2003, All Black great Christian Cullen, Silver Fern great Casey Kopua, actors James Rolleston and Michelle Langstone, broadcaster and Listener online columnist Duncan Garner, and one of Sepuloni’s former political colleagues, Tāmati Coffey. Among the rest, this series has its first drag queen in Spankie Jackzon, and first world boxing champion in Mea Motu. Bree Tomasel returns to host with past contestant Lance Savali. The series runs for six weeks and has three Monday-to-Wednesday episodes a week.
Total Control
The halls of power
Screening: Rialto, 8.30pm, from Tuesday, September 10
This Australian political drama wrapped this year across the Tasman with its third and final season, but it’s here from the beginning of the story, with Deborah Mailman (Offspring) starring as Alex Irving, an indigenous woman who is offered a place in the national Senate by the calculating prime minister Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths) after she acts bravely in a crisis. She discovers that good faith is an elusive political commodity. Critics differed on the quality of the storytelling, but praise for Mailman’s performance was universal. Screenhub declared her “electrifying. Tectonic. Unforgettable”.
A Very Royal Scandal
Don’t sweat it, Andy
Streaming: Prime Video from September 19
Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew in a three-part drama about his 2019 trainwreck interview about his connections to Jeffrey Epstein with BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis (Ruth Wilson). The saga has been dramatised before in the Netflix movie Scoop with Rufus Sewell and Gillian Anderson in the respective roles. It’s made by the producers of the earlier A Very English Scandal and A Very British Scandal about historic shenanigans among the aristocracy and the political classes.
The Pengiun
Beaky blinders
Streaming: Neon from September 20
With a second Joker movie out at cinemas next month, another Batman villain is getting his own solo screen outing. An unrecognisable Colin Farrell plays the Gotham City gangster as he did briefly in the 2022 film The Batman, in this HBO series. Given the tone of that film and the look of the trailer, it would appear Farrell’s depiction is more Tony Soprano than the top-hatted, monocle-wearing Penguins of previous screen incarnations like Danny DeVito’s memorable turn in Batman Returns.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the August, July, June, May, and April viewing guides