New to view
The Veil
Special agent Moss
Streaming: Disney+ from April 30
Elisabeth Moss assumes an English accent and starts cracking heads in this six-part spy thriller by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. She plays Imogen Salter, a veteran undercover MI6 agent sent to fetch a mysterious woman called Adilah (Lebanese actress Yumna Marwan) who holds a secret Salter needs to get out of her before thousands of lives are lost. It turns out that she also needs to get a couple of other spy agencies out of her hair. Moss told the Press Association recently that, between the accent and fight and stunt training, it was the most challenging preparation she’d ever done for a role and that “It definitely felt like, if possible, I’ve found something even more challenging than The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Boat Story
Finding cocaine at the beach
Streaming: TVNZ+, from April 26
The set-up is familiar from fiction and real life. Paterson Joseph (Timeless) plays Samuel, a criminal solicitor, and Daisy Haggard (Episodes) is Janet, a factory worker. They’re strangers until they find a fortune in cocaine in a washed-up vessel on the Yorkshire coast and their destinies become entwined. Then the vengeful owner of the shipment comes aft er them. The Guardian’s reviewer deemed it “a glorious concoction” worthy of Tarantino or the Coen brothers – it’s violent – some other critics thought it was overstuffed and disjointed.
Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story
Definitely more than halfway there
Streaming: Disney+, from April 26
A four-part docuseries telling the 40-year story of Bon Jovi, with a particular focus on frontman Jon Bon Jovi. Bon Jovi himself recently told Deadline it would be the warts-and- all version: “One thing we agreed upon on day one was this was not going to be a VH1 puff piece.” Fellow Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen is among the interviewees.
RECOMMENDED
Feud: Capote vs. The Swans
Getting it in the neck
Screening: SoHo, April 22, 9.30pm
Streaming: Neon, now.
It’s been a long time between Feuds. The first season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series was in 2017 and focused on the rivalry between Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who were magnificently played by Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon. Murphy had planned his second season to be about Charles and Diana but scrapped that for this juicy tale of Truman Capote and the 1960s-70s New York high society women he called swans. Among those in the show’s flock are Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Demi Moore, Calista Flockhart, Chloë Sevigny, and Molly Ringwald. The eight episodes directed by Gus Van Sant follow the downfall of Capote (Tom Hollander), after he used them as thinly disguised characters in “La Côte Basque 1965″, a dirt-dishing standalone chapter to a never-finished novel, which was published in Esquire magazine in 1975.
My Life is Murder
Back in the Lawless city of Auckland
Screening: TVNZ 1, Sundays from April 21, 8.30pm
Streaming: TVNZ+
According to the advance publicity, in this fourth season of the private eye light drama, Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless) places more trust in her occasionally annoying sidekick Madison (Ebony Vagulans), meaning Madison gets to go out and do more investigating solo. Meanwhile, Alexa finds out more about how her husband died and investigates dirty deeds in the posh worlds of hairdressing, ballet, and professional tennis. Guest stars include Bill Bailey (as a courier driver), Erik Thomson (as a celebrity hairdresser), Aussie star Rodger Corser and by the looks of it, possibly every Kiwi actor who hasn’t appeared previously. Among those putting in guest appearances are Siobhan Marshall, Miranda Harcourt, Chelsie Preston Crayford, and Tandi Wright, Meanwhile, Martin Henderson returns as Alexa’s brother Will, as Rawiri Jobe as Detective Inspector Harry Henare and Joe Naufahu as Alexa’s local café owner Reuben Wolf.
The Jinx: Part Two
Streaming: Neon, from April 23
The Emmy-winning first season of The Jinx concluded in spectacular fashion: oddball real estate millionaire Robert Durst was arrested and charged with murder just hours before the screening of the finale in which he was caught on mic confessing to killing his wife, her friend, and his neighbour. The Jinx: Part Two picks up the story from there, revealing new material gathered over the subsequent eight years since 2015′s extraordinary revelations. The six-parter features new witnesses and phone calls Durst made from prison. Durst had multiple health issues and had contracted Covid in prison before his death in 2022.
RECOMMENDED
The Dry
Better than ever
Streaming: TVNZ+ from Tuesday April 23
The second season of Nancy Harris’s lauded Irish comedy-drama picks up seven months aft er the first, with Shiv (Roisin Gallagher) sober, celibate, and working as a receptionist at the local art college. But any of those things could change, especially with the arrival of Alex (Sam Keeley), the hot new barista. Other new faces include Michael McElhatton (Game of Thrones, The Long Shadow) and Seán Doyle (Normal People) as new love interests for Bernie and Caroline. Reviews to date have been as one in declaring it’s even better than season one.
RECOMMENDED
Friends Like Her
Rocking the Kaikōura cradle
Screening: Three, Mondays from April 15, 8.30pm
Streaming: ThreeNow from April 15
After 2020′s The Sounds, this is writer Sarah-Kate Lynch’s second southern coastal potboiler. It’s also moved down the road a bit from the salmon farms of Marlborough to the whalewatching and other tourist enterprises of Kaikōura. The first episode starts with the 2016 earthquake in the area and the other five episodes are set against its aftermath. But the story is essentially about the widening dangerous faultline between two friends and sisters-in-law played by Morgana O’Reilly and Australian actress Tess Haubrich and what happens after a surrogacy arrangement between the pair, who exist in much different tax brackets, doesn’t go to the agreed plan. And how something unspoken in the pair’s past might be a lever for either side to pull. As well as O’Reilly, the series has Jarod Rawiri and Vinnie Bennett as the brothers who are the two women’s husbands, Elizabeth Hawthorne as the men’s mother, and yes, among its biggest stars is Kaikōura itself, and its unique alps-to-ocean backdrop.
The Sympathizer
The dark comedy of deception
Screening: SoHo, 8.30pm, from Monday April 15
Streaming: Neon
Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name – this miniseries focusing on the book’s element of black comedy – The Sympathizer follows the story of “The Captain” (Australian actor Hoa Xuande), a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army. He is recruited by the CIA – in the form of Robert Downey Jr – and migrates to Los Angeles aft er the fall of Saigon but soon finds his loyalties tested. It’s helmed in the early episodes by South Korean director Park Chanwook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave), who also co-produces with Canadian film-maker Don McKellar. Downey Jr whoops it up in several different roles, and among other recognisable faces is Sandra Oh. Writer Nguyen is headed to the Auckland Writers Festival next month, by which time we should know if, after the reaction to this, it’s likely his 2021 sequel, The Committed, is destined for the same treatment.
RECOMMENDED
Fallout
Life in the Wreck Age
Streaming: Prime Video, from April 11
What’s likely to be the year’s biggest videogame adaptation is, like last year’s The Last of Us, also likely to appeal to much more than just gamers. It’s been created by former Kaipara dairy farmer Jonathan Nolan, the onetime screenwriter to his directing brother Christopher, and the maker of the series Westworld, It’s set in a quirky and lawless post-apocalyptic America that was nuked when the Cold War turned hot and where some characters and their progeny have survived in bunkers since, their mid-20th century values intact. The game was a B-movie mash-up, is even more so though on what by the looks of it was a very big budget.
Franklin
When Founding Father was away on business
Streaming: Apple TV+ from April 12
Michael Douglas stars as American icon Benjamin Franklin in this eight-part series focusing on the 70-year-old Franklin’s gamble in embarking on an eight-year secret mission to France to solicit the help of the French throne in the struggle for independence from the British. The subsequent Franco-American alliance did indeed turn the Revolutionary War decisively in favour of the democratic rebels, but Franklin faced many challenges in getting there. Based on Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff’s book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. It also stars Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) as Temple Franklin and Thibault de Montalembert (Call My Agent!) as Comte de Vergennes, with a cluster of heavyweights behind the camera.
The Act
True-life drama about a bad, bad mother
Streaming: TVNZ+ from April 11
To the outside world, Dee Dee Blanchard was a saintly single mother caring for her daughter, Gypsy Rose, who suffered from several severe chronic conditions. But when a post consisting of the strange line, “That bitch is dead,” appeared on Dee Dee’s Facebook page, friends and neighbours were puzzled and alarmed. It soon became clear that what people thought was the story of a loving mother and her sick daughter was something else altogether. Patricia Arquette plays Dee Dee in this dramatization of the real-life case, and Joey King is her daughter. Note that Gypsy’s Revenge, a documentary film about the same case, is currently streaming on ThreeNow.
Tokyo Vice
The vice is twice as nice
Streaming: TVNZ+ from April 17
The second season of Tokyo Vice takes its journalist protagonist Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) deeper into the city’s criminal underworld – and levels up markedly on the first. The AV Club’s reviewer called this season “a more exacting outing, one willing to let characters find new twists on old rules, rejigger their thinking and approach the world from a new perspective.” Variety hailed it as, “A show that’s only getting richer as it goes.”
RECOMMENDED
Ripley
The life of an unreliable hero
Streaming: Netflix from April 4
English star Andrew Scott (Fleabag, Sherlock) brings his unsettling countenance to the lead role in this eight-part series based on the first of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, The Talented Mr Ripley. It’s been adapted a few times before, including the Oscar-nominated 1999 film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Here, Scott’s Ripley is a grifter getting by in early-60s New York, whose life changes when a wealthy man hires him to fetch his son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn) from Europe. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, The Irishman) directs and Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) shoots in black and white for a look that’s a mix of 60s Fellini – one episode is titled “La Dolce Vita” – and film noir. Fans of the book and the world it inhabits should be well pleased with a series which includes an uncredited appearance by an actor who also once played Tom Ripley in a previous screen incarnation.
Loot
Life after money
Streaming: Apple TV+, from April 4
Season two of this comedy about the life of the super wealthy Molly Wells (Maya Rudolph) picks up a year after the events of Loot’s widely praised first season. Having has settled her divorce from her cheating tech-bro husband and sworn off men altogether for a while, she’s focused on her role as the head of the Wells Foundation, the philanthropic organisation she was surprised to find she owned. She’s also dealing with the end of the previous season in which she announced a plan to give away her entire fortune to charity and the awkward morning after.
RECOMMENDED
Sugar
Dark times in Tinseltown
Streaming: Apple TV+, from April 5
A stylish, contemporary noir series in which Colin Farrell plays private investigator John Sugar, who is asked to dig into the disappearance of Olivia Siegel, the beloved granddaughter of a legendary Hollywood producer. Sugar is a movie obsessive, and the show occasionally includes splices in clips from his favourites – he’s a big Bogart fan by the looks of it – as cinephile asides. In echoes of Chinatown, Sugar’s investigation reveals some seamy Siegel family secrets – and he has his own demons to battle. The eight-part series is a rare television foray for both Farrell and its Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (The Two Popes, The Constant Gardener). Its cast includes James Cromwell (Succession) and Amy Ryan (The Wire, The Office).
RECOMMENDED
Testify
Streaming: TVNZ+ (both episodes), April 8
Two-part series that brings into conflict the family at the head of a big Auckland evangelical church and a group of young queer people whose lives revolved around Auckland’s Karangahape Rd. It’s the second show in a month – after Spinal Destination – from writer director Paul Whetu Jones. To read more go here.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the March and Easter Viewing Guide.
