New to View
Reacher
The brainy brawny brawler returns
The first season of Reacher, the Lee Childs’ lone vigilante drifter played by Tom Cruise in two mediocre movies, was generally regarded by those who had read the books as better than the films. It was a pulpy production that wasn’t trying to do anything than be a tv show but the hulking Alan Ritchson certainly inhabited the outsize role.
The second series is based on Childs’ eleventh Reacher book Bad Luck and Trouble in which former military policeman Reacher discovers old comrades from his Special Investigations MP unit are being murdered. He is reunited with three of his former squad mates. That involves Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) a forensic accountant for whom Reacher always had a soft spot. Now they are out of uniform, that chemistry may turn to romance, unless, of course, the murder spree gets in the way.
Streaming: Prime video
Shetland
Changing the guard
The eighth series of the BBC detective drama originally inspired by the books of Ann Cleeves and set on the bleak islands of the title has had a change at the top. Effectively replacing Detective Inspector Jimmy Pérez (Douglas Henshall), who hung up his pea coat after seven seasons, is DI Ruth Calder. She’s played by Ashley Jensen, who is best known for her comedic roles alongside Ricky Gervais in the likes of Extras and After Life. Her DI Calder is Shetland-born but her police career has been with London’s Met. She is sent home to find a witness to a London gangland murder who has fled north, pursued by a couple of hitmen. Calder must also confront figures from her past and estranged family members, including a younger brother who has now the minister of their late father’s old kirk. She also faces the inevitable jurisdictional conflict with the local coppers who are now headed by Pérez’s second-in-command Alison ‘’Tosh’' McIntosh.
Streaming: Acorn TV and AMC+. Two episode premiere then weekly
The Beautiful Lie
Tolstoy in Australia
This reimagining of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as a contemporary Australian relationship drama isn’t new – it first aired across the Tasman in 2015 – but it might be worth a look. The Sydney Morning Herald’s reviewer wrote that “As a concept it might sound a little like reworking The Iliad into Getaway, but the result is as astonishing as it is compelling: a gorgeous, velvety drama that will be re-watched and discussed for years to come.” It stars Sarah Snook, who went on to appear in Succession, and was the TV debut for our own Marlon Williams.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
The write stuff
Author Rick Riordan was never very happy with the two film adaptations of his novels – in fact, a letter he wrote to the producers of the first movie taking issue with the script has become legendary – but he has taken control of this new TV series adaptation as co-creator, executive producer and co-writer. “I’m not a fan of Hollywood, I’ve never been starstruck,” he told the Guardian, but he and his wife Becky decided they “owed it to the fans to try one more time”. The new Percy Jackson is a youngster called Walker Scobell and guest stars include Lin Manuel Miranda, Jay Duplass, Megan Mullally and Toby Stephens.
Streaming: Disney+
Dr. Death: Miracle Man
Bad medicine
In a perfect world, there would be no medical malpractice to make podcasts and TV dramas about. But that’s not the world we live in, so here’s the second season of TV based on the third season of the original true-crime podcast, with a new doctor and new deaths. Edgar Ramirez (The Assassination of Gianni Versace) plays Paolo Macchiarini, the Swiss surgeon once hailed as a “miracle man” for his work with regenerative medicine. Mandy Moore (This Is us) is Benita Alexander, the investigative journalist who began to unravel Macchiarini’s falsehoods – and discover the stories of the victims he experimented on.
Streaming: TVNZ+
The Crown season 6 part 2
The final chapter
After the four episodes covering the demise of Princess Diana, the last six episodes of The Crown’s final season pick up a few months after the tragedy. The emphasis is back on she who wears the Crown, and those who are destined to later in the coming decades.
There’s Queen Elizabeth pondering what’s she done with her life and asking if the Royal Family should be asking existential questions about itself, against the lavish preparations for her 2002 Golden Jubilee and public disquiet about the institution. Elsewhere, Prince Charles (Dominic West) is ruing his own troubled relationship with Prince Philip (“we don’t do fathers and sons very well in this family”) when he’s considering his own with his boys. A downcast Prince William (Ed McVey) is finding he’s inherited some Diana-mania as he heads off to university where he, of course, meets Kate Middleton (Meg Bellamy).
One episode is dedicated to the final years of Princess Margaret ending with her death in 2002 and flashbacks to the life that she and the then Princess Elizabeth shared in their younger years, including during WWII and when they famously snuck out of the palace to enjoy the VE Day celebrations in 1945.
The biggest villain of this series isn’t the occasionally errant Prince Harry but Kate Middleton’s mother Carole (Eve Best), who brings her party planning skills to bear on the romantic life of her eldest daughter, steering her towards becoming Willam’s university classmate, flatmate and future wife.
Elsewhere, the episodes follow the rise of Labour prime minister Tony Blair, whose popularity and anti-monarchist leanings seem to put him at odds with Buckingham Palace. The final series ends in 2005, in an episode in which Charles and Camilla are finally given permission to marry. That long final episode also has heavy undertones of the Queen’s death some 17 years later.
There’s even a kind of a multi-Elizabeth debating club with the three actresses who have played QEII pondering whether the contemporary one should abdicate in favour of Charles. The episode is called Sleep Dearie Sleep. An alternative title might have been “One Wedding and a Funeral (in the planning stages for when the time comes)”. Oh, and yes, Harry goes to a party dressed as a Nazi and gets into a frightful bit of bother. Silly boy.
Streaming: Season six, part two on Netflix.
The Famous Five
Lashings of adventure
It seems bit of an odd fit – Enid Blyton’s quaint English kid’s adventures, and Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish-American film-maker best known for the R18 likes of Only God Forgives and Drive. But Winding Refn is one of the creators of a new BBC series of movie-length shows based on Blyton’s 21 novels about the quintet of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and dog Timmy. Co-creator Matthew Read says they haven’t adapted specific stories but have taken inspiration from all of them. “We looked at the books as a jumping off point. We wanted to weave our own stories which were inspired by the whole canon of The Famous Five books. Whilst the series is set in the late 1930s, we wanted to create a drama series that is set in the timeless space of childhood. We wanted to draw on viewers’ memories of the long summers in their childhood rather than trying to specifically tie it down to one moment in time.” Unsurprisingly, it’s a bunch of newcomers as the four kids while among the grown-up supporting cast are Jack Gleeson (Game of Thrones) as the evil Wenworth, and James Lance (Ted Lasso) as Uncle Quentin.
Streaming: ThreeNow.
Christmas Television
For a guide to Christmas and New Year’s Eve television specials and one-offs go here.
Coming up
Vigil
Coming up for air
The first season of Vigil centred on a mystery death on a nuclear-armed Vanguard-class submarine, against the murky backdrop of modern British military operations. For season two, DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) finds herself back on land and into the world of weapons development and military relationships in the Middle East – and there’s still plenty of murk. Apparently-malfunctioning military drones have killed people at a military air base – but were these really accidents? DCI Silva’s search for the truth takes her to some dangerous places. Just to raise the stakes, she and her life and work partner DI Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie) have taken in her late fiancé's young daughter Poppy – and Kirsten is pregnant. Joining the cast as RAF officers are Romola Garai and Dougray Scott. Scott plays an air marshal who, at first, appears to be helping DCI Silva with her investigations, and Garai is the newly appointed commander of an RAF base in the fictitious Middle East country of Wudyan where Silva is sent. In the six-part drama, the story opens up what series creator Tom Edge describes as “a world of moral and political compromises, ethical disagreements and clashing institutional priorities’'. British operations in the Middle East have long raised “fascinating questions about how we define Britain’s ‘national interests’”, Edge says in the publicity. “When the prospect of British-made weapons, serviced by British personnel and fired by British-trained foreign servicemen, can end up causing civilian casualties, questions are inevitably raised as to whether Britain can honestly disavow any responsibility for these kinds of foreign military operations. “As with the first series, the meaning of ‘loyalty’ is a major theme. To whom or what do we owe our loyalty? Our loved ones, our conscience, the institution we serve, our country? How do we approach the duties that derive from these loyalties? And which legal and ethical boundaries might we have to transgress in order to fulfil them?”
Streaming: TVNZ+ from Boxing Day
Money Heist: Berlin
Berlin’s back pages
A prequel to Netflix’s Spanish produced hit Money Heist, focused on the story of Andrés de Fonollosa – or Berlin, as he became known to his criminal colleagues – many years before his last great job. Pedro Alonso returns to play the dashing thief, and as revealed in the trailer, he’s joined by at least two other characters from the original series, Raquel Murillo (Itziar Ituño) and Alicia Sierra (Najwa Nimri) as he puts together a team to steal $44 million worth of gems from a vault in Paris. Series creator Álex Pina says the new show is “a trip through the golden age of the character, when he robbed around Europe crazy in love”, and promises plenty of humour.
Streaming: Netflix, from November 29
From earlier in the month
Sanditon
Austen all areas
Holiday binge-watches await, Austen fans: TVNZ+ is streaming not only the three seasons of this recent adaptation of Austen’s unfinished manuscript, but the 2009 adaptation of Emma, starring Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller, and 1995′s Pride and Prejudice, the series written by Andrew Davies that kicked off the whole sexing-up Austen thing. True to form, Davies gave Theo James a naked beach scene in the first season of Sanditon. Austen left behind 11 chapters of Sanditon before her death in 1817 and Davies opined that she would have approved of the unhappy ending for her heroine Charlotte (Rose Williams) in season one. However, there are two more to come, with hunky Mr Colbourne a likely suitor.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Scrublands
Outback noir
The TV adaptation of Chris Hammer’s debut 2018 crime novel Scrublands is the latest outback noir bestseller to get the screen treatment. Like Jane Harper’s 2016 The Dry, which became a film in 2020, it’s set in a drought-afflicted expanse of rural Victoria. Made for the Australian streaming service Stan, the series is certainly cinematic. The location helps: the real site of the story’s fictional country seat of Riversend is Maldon, a well-preserved gold-rush town.
The story starts with a mass shooting at a local church and picks up a year later when a big city newspaper journalist (Luke Arnold) gets sent by his editor to write a colour piece on Riversend’s recovery from its trauma. The series stars Kiwi actor Jay Ryan as Father Byron Swift, a priest at the church caught up in events.
Streaming: ThreeNow
Doctor Who 60th Anniversary and Christmas Specials
Tardis in Disneyland
They’ve grabbed the Beatles and now streamer Disney+ has gone into business with another 1960s-born British pop culture institution, Doctor Who, with the BBC giving exclusive rights to new instalments to the American entertainment giant outside the UK. Which means no more free access to old shows on TVNZ+. The new arrangement begins with three 60th anniversary specials which sees the return of David Tennant, who previously played the tenth incarnation, as well as former co-star Catherine Tate. The three one offs – “Star Beast” (Nov 26), “Wild Blue Yonder” (Dec 3) and “The Giggle” (Dec 10) are followed by the Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” (Dec 26) – in which Ncuti Gatwa, takes over as the fifteenth Doctor with Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) becoming the new Doctor’s companion.
Slow Horses
John le Carré meets The Office, again
The third season of the acclaimed off-kilter British spy series is based on writer Mick Herron’s third Slow Horses instalment Real Tigers. The plot involves the kidnapping of Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), the mother hen of the misfits at MI5′s Slough House run by Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb. The squad are pressed into action while finding themselves up against the upper echelons of MI5 and Whitehall. The original story and the trailer suggest this might be the most action-based and gun-happy Slow Horses series so far.
Streaming: Apple TV+
The Artful Dodger
Dickens in the colonies
A spin-off of Oliver Twist, in which Thomas Brodie-Sangster is Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger of Dickens’ novel (Brodie-Sangster also played the spiritually-related Malcolm McLaren in Pistol). Jack has reinvented himself far from Victorian London in the growing Australian colony of Port Victory, where the nimble hands that once picked pockets now perform medical surgery. But there’s an unwelcome blast from the past with the arrival of Fagin (David Thewlis). Australian actor Maia Mitchell (Good Trouble) plays Lady Belle Fox, who is a professional threat (she’s an actual surgeon) and a love interest, despite looking alarmingly like she might be Brodie-Sangster’s sister. There are capers aplenty and it looks fun.
Streaming: Disney+
See what Listener writers thought were the best shows of the year here.
This guide is updated weekly with new previews and reviews. See what was good in November that you might have missed here.
