Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip
In the steps of a Victorian heroine
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.35pm, Saturdays from November 30
Streaming: TVNZ+
In 1854, Isabella Bird, the frail daughter of a Victorian silk trader and slavery abolitionist, was advised to take an ocean voyage for the good of her health. It was to be the start of a lifetime of exploration and writing about what she saw. In this three-part show, comedian Ruby Wax, former Spice Girl Melanie Brown and actor Emily Atack follow in the steps of Bird’s most famous journey – the 1300km trek on horseback through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, recorded in her fourth book, A Lady’s Life in The Rocky Mountains. Wax, who describes Bird as her heroine, says she “climbed 15,000ft-mountains and wrangled cattle throughout the state. She had no fear and yet most people have never heard about her. Hopefully, now they will.” Brown sums up the show as “hectic, informational and a lot of fun”.
Black Widow
Catching a monstrous woman
Screening: Sky Open, 8.30pm, Sundays from December 1
Streaming: Neon from December 22
British woman Dena Thompson used Lonely Hearts columns to reel in lovers and husbands, then proceeded to manipulate, defraud, and even kill them. It took police a decade of investigation to bring charges for the murder of her second husband and frauds committed against her other two. Thompson was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2007 – the judge at the Old Bailey described her as “utterly ruthless and without pity” – and released under strict conditions in 2022. This three-part Channel 4 documentary looks at how police pieced together the events and hears from some of the men she preyed upon.
DNZ: Ram Raid Mums
Mothers to the rescue
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.30pm, Monday December 2
Streaming: TVNZ+
This week’s episode of Documentary NZ New Zealand investigates a whānau-driven programme in South Auckland to overcome systemic failures and keep kids on the right side of the law. It follows three resilient mothers as they search for a lifeline for them and their families.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew
Kids in space
Streaming: Disney+, from December 3
Star Wars meets The Goonies – or perhaps The Goonies in the Star Wars universe, given that this spin-off seems mercifully not inclined to suffocate itself in matters of lore and canon (if you must know, it’s set in the same New Republic time frame as The Mandalorian). Four children make a discovery that sends them far away from their home planet, and in the struggle to get back, they meet a mysterious character called Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law, taking a break from villain roles) and various other allies and enemies. Creators Christopher Ford and Jon Watts have both served time in the Marvel Universe, notably on Spider-Man movies, but Watts said in a recent interview his lodestar was the 1980s kids’ films of Goonies creator Amblin Entertainment, whose work “always stands out to me because there was a feeling that they took the kids seriously. They didn’t feel like kids’ movies when you watched them as a kid, and even now looking back, they feel like grown-up films that just happened to star kids.”
Get Millie Black
Jamaican true detective
Screening: Sky HBO, 8.30pm from Tuesday December 3
Streaming: Neon
The most recent novels of Jamaican writer and Booker Prize winner Marlon James – Black Leopard, Red Wolf and its sequel Moon Witch, Spider King – have been described as being like an African Game of Thrones. But the author’s first foray into television isn’t a fantasy epic but a contemporary detective series. Set in Kingston, the James-scripted Get Millie Black stars Tamara Lawrance as the titular character, a former Scotland Yard detective who returns to her birth country and joins the local force. She is soon on a missing-persons case that involves a young girl who has disappeared and a wealthy suspect, who her former UK employers, in the form of visiting Scotland Yard Inspector Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie) may also have an interest in. The trailer suggests this has the Caribbean gothic vibe of some of James’ early novels, and looks moody, gritty, and humid.
Sue Perkins In Alaska
Wild in the country
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm, Wednesdays from December 4
Streaming: TVNZ+
Perkins is on the road again, this time in Alaska. (It’s actually the second time she has toured the vast state for TV, after a 2012 trek with adventurer Charley Boorman.) In this three-parter, Perkins and her crew forge deeper and deeper into the Alaskan wilderness. Along the way they meet an old woman in a hidden Russian village, conservationists rescuing animals that have been abandoned by their mothers or hit by cars, hunters, and doomsday preppers. “The programme is, at times intensely, about Perkins as much as it is about Alaska,” wrote the Daily Telegraph’s reviewer.
Churchill At War
A colourful new history
Streaming: Netflix, from December 4
November 30 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who, according to occasional UK polls, remains the most admired figure to have held the position. His leadership of Britain, and effectively the British Empire, during World War II makes his top position a safe bet for generations to come. Plus, he still gets plenty of reputation-enhancing screen time, whether he’s being played by Gary Oldman lathered in latex in the movie The Darkest Hour or regular documentaries like the new Churchill at War, a four-part series that re-examines what Churchill did in WWII and what made him the right man for the job. The series, which is by Hollywood producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, makes extensive use of colourised footage and recordings of Churchill’s voice, as well as dramatic re-creations. There are also historian talking heads, including the author of the 2014 Churchill biography The Churchill Factor, Boris Johnson.
Black Doves
Spy, actually
Streaming: Netflix, from December 5
In this six episode espionage series set in London during Christmas, Keira Knightley plays Helen Webb, a wife to a Whitehall politician, who, despite being a devoted homemaker and mother of twins, has been passing on her husband’s secrets to the shadowy organisation she works for, the Black Doves. Her cover starts to unravel when her secret lover is murdered, and her handler (Sarah Lancashire) calls in an old assassin friend played by Ben Whishaw to protect her. The trailer suggests it’s a spy thriller that might brush Slow Horses territory. It’s created by screenwriter Joe Barton, whose past shows Giri/Haji and The Lazarus Project, have shown an imaginative approach to genre, and there is already a second season in the works.
Somebody Somewhere
You’re in Kansas now
Screening: Sky HBO, 8pm, Thursdays from December 5
Streaming: Neon
The third and final season of the remarkable comedy drama that Rolling Stone called a “rare love letter to America”. Sam (Bridget Everett) is no longer settling back into Manhattan, Kansas – she lives there, she’s met her people, and she is changing along with the place itself. Variety hailed the concluding season as “beautiful” and “a stunningly honest depiction of friendship, grace and courage”. Notably, Everett herself has three writing credits in these final seven episodes, including the season premiere, alongside creator Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen.
The Sticky
A syrupy story
Streaming: Prime Video, from December 5
What became known as the “Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist” involved the 2012 theft of 3000 tonnes of the stuff in nearly a thousand barrels from a warehouse in Quebec. At the time, it was worth more than CAD$18 million (NZ$21.8 million). The main perpetrators got jail time as well as hefty fines. This six-episode comedy drama was inspired by the robbery but cooks up its own story and takes a Coen brothers-like approach to the caper and its characters. The plot involves a maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry (Margo Martindale), who is fed up with her industry’s restrictive bureaucracy, so partners with a low-level Boston mobster (Chris Diamantopoulos) and a mild-mannered French-Canadian security guard (Guillaume Cyr) to steal the syrup in bulk. That brings the attention of not just the Canadian authorities, but a hitwoman played by Jamie Lee Curtis.
Fake
Love and deception
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Sunday December 8
The pairing of Asher Keddie and David Wenham may seem like a match made in a sort of nostalgic Australian television heaven – Sea Change’s Diver Dan and Offspring’s Nina Proudman, together at last – but as the name suggests, Fake is not that sort of show. And as Keddie told the Listener, the series represents a change of pace and tone for the Australian star. She plays Birdie, a woman who starts dating Wenham’s “Joe”, a supposedly wealthy former architect-turned-sheep farmer, who may not be all he seems. The eight-part series is an adaptation of Fake: A Startling True Story of Love in a World of Liars, Cheats, Narcissists, Fantasists and Phonies, a personal account by Sydney journalist Stephanie Wood of a 15-month relationship, one which left her wondering why she hadn’t followed her initial instincts about the guy. When it screened across the Tasman earlier this year, it was widely hailed as one of the best local TV dramas in some time.
DNZ: Predict My Future
Can we grow better?
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.30pm, Monday December 9
Streaming: TVNZ+
It’s more than 50 years since the Dunedin Study began following the lives of more than 1000 New Zealanders born in 1972 and 1973. In that time, it has delivered hundreds of insights into how we grow and age and the factors that influence the way our lives unfold. In this episode of the Documentary NZ season, Auckland-based film-maker Ankita Singh (whose last turn on screen was the excellent one-off action comedy Give Me Babies, for TVNZ’s Motherhood anthology series) looks at the social and individual implications of some of those insights. The film covers the new technologies and interventions emerging from this historic research programme and asks how we can age healthily and why we don’t do it equally.
Murder is Easy
An African Poirot
Screening: Sky BBC First, from Tuesday December 10, 8.30pm
Streaming: Neon from December 18
A two-part BBC adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s lesser-known murder mysteries which shifts the story first published in 1939 forward a little to 1954. And it’s been modernised in another way – taking on the task of uncovering an apparent serial killer on the loose in the sleepy English village of Wychwood under Ashe, is Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson), a newly arrived Nigerian immigrant on his way to a job to Whitehall. His plans are derailed when he meets Miss Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton) on a train as she heads to Scotland Yard with her suspicions about a series of deaths in her village which have been all dismissed as accidental. The cast also includes Morfydd Clark (The Rings of Power) and former Shetland stars Douglas Henshall and Mark Bonnar.
Secret Level
It’s all in the games
Streaming: Prime Video, from December 10
The path from the stories, characters and themes born in video games to other forms of screen storytelling has been a fraught one – there have been many more bad movies based on video games than good ones. This animated anthology series, created by Tim Miller (Love, Death & Robots) seems to underline the growing maturity of the form. It consists of 15 stories, each set in the world of a marque game, Unreal Tournament, Armored Core and PAC-MAN among them (there is also an episode based on multiple games and characters created by PlayStation Studios). The list of star voice talent is prodigious, and includes Arnold Schwarzenegger and Keanu Reeves, Kevin Hart and our own space warrior Temuera Morrison, among others.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
A literary epic finally reaches the screen
Streaming: Netflix, from Wednesday December 11
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967, but García Márquez did not receive the Nobel Prize for Literature until 1982 – whereupon his most famous book, now translated into more than 40 languages, became a global cultural sensation all over again. In 2024, his work, and the magical realism at its heart, seems as if it could have been created for the modern screen. Netflix acquired the rights to the novel in 2019; the author, who died in 2014, had refused to license it during his lifetime, in the belief that such a sprawling story could not adequately be told in a single film. This production stretches to 15 episodes. The story of cousins José and Úrsula, who disobey their parents to marry, flee and establish the mythical town of Macondo, has been shot largely in García Márquez’s native Colombia, in Spanish, with Colombian actors, in keeping with his family’s wishes.
No Good Deed
Dark secrets of the open home
Streaming: Netflix, from Thursday December 12
Let it be stated here and now: the comic pairing of Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano is, on paper at least, genius. The pair play Lydia and Paul, a pair of empty-nesters who set about listing their 1920s-style Spanish villa in Los Angeles with the aim of selling and moving on to a new life. There’s a rush of interest from other families and – while Lydia and Paul watch potential buyers at their open homes on security cameras – things get strange and dark (a creepy-looking Denis Leary stands out in the trailer). Showrunner Liz Feldman (Dead to Me) said in a media release that the story came out of her own experience of anxiety trying to find a new home during the pandemic. She thanked Netflix “for being such a supportive, creative home and for continuing to allow me to turn my crippling anxiety into entertainment”.
Elton John: Never Too Late
The last tour and a colourful life
Streaming: Disney+, from Friday December 13
This latest Disney+ rockumentary has already had a limited theatrical run, which has earned largely positive reviews. A few critics, however, have pointed to the film’s reliance on audio recordings the star made for a print biography and expressed the view that producer and co-director David Furnish, Elton’s husband and manager, could have found more magic in his unparalleled access to its subject. The story itself has been told before – notably in the hit 2019 biopic Rocketman – but there was only one Elton John farewell tour, and it’s richly captured here, right up to the final show in North America at Dodger Stadium. Fans won’t want to miss it.
Later in the month
Rose Matafeo: On and On and On
The UK-based Kiwi comedian’s new stand-up special comes to Neon on December 21.
Squid Game
The second series of the South Korean horror-thriller which became a huge international hit with its 2021 debut arrives on Netflix on Boxing Day.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the November, October and September viewing guides.
