The Beach Boys
The last word, perhaps
Streaming: Disney+, Friday May 24
The level of marketing around this Beach Boys documentary – there’s a soundtrack album and the band’s first official book – suggests it won’t get too dark, but writer Mark Monroe has a record of substantial films, including 2020′s The Dissident and 2022′s Lucy and Desi. Notably, directors Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny secured what may be the last major interview with the genius Brian Wilson, whose family applied for a conservatorship earlier this year, reporting Wilson was affected by dementia and “unable to properly provide for his or her personal needs” since the death of his wife. There are also new interviews with Mike Love, Al Jardine, David Marks and Bruce Johnston and commentaries from Lindsey Buckingham, Janelle Monáe, Ryan Tedder, and Don Was. It has the feeling of finality.
Married At First Sight NZ
Instant nuptials
Screening: Three, 7pm, Sunday to Tuesday from May 26
Streaming: ThreeNow
The matrimonial reality show and “ultimate social experiment” returns for a month of Sunday-to-Tuesday episodes on Three, which canned it after ratings tanked for its 2019 third season. That final series also made headlines when one contestant was discovered to be facing domestic violence charges in the US – he and his bride were quickly edited out – and another was still legally married to someone else. But with the high-drama, alcohol-fuelled Australian version becoming an international hit, it has created demand for all MAFS content – previous NZ seasons have been picked up in the UK and Australia and the new one is due to stream on 9Now not long after its local debut. So, the show’s local broadcast numbers may not matter as much as they once did. The NZ show also features relationship expert John Aiken from the Aussie show, who returns with local sex and relationship therapist Jo Robertson. This year’s brides are Samantha (26, Auckland, content creator), Kara (33, Christchurch, car sales rep), Stephanie (31, Auckland, marketing) and Madeleine (37, Tauranga, account manager and healing intuitive). The grooms are Piripi (28, Hamilton, brewer), Nathaniel (30, Wellington, aviation officer), previous The Apprentice NZ contestant Michael (36, Auckland, auctioneer) and undoubtedly hoping to bowl a maiden over is English cricket-import-turned-primary teacher James (31, Christchurch).
Eric
Psychodrama on the streets of New York
Streaming: Netflix, from May 30
“When I pitched the idea of a New York puppeteer on a quest to find his missing son, with a 7-foot-tall blue monster in tow, it’s to Netflix’s eternal credit that they jumped on board,” screenwriter Abi Morgan told the streamer’s in-house mag Tudum recently. Morgan, best known for writing the feature films Shame, Brick Lane, Suffragette and The Iron Lady, goes somewhere new here. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Vincent, a children’s puppeteer in 1980s New York, who falls into a desperate spiral after his 9-year-old son disappears one day while walking to school, alienating friends and family with his obsession with finding his son. Morgan frames the six-part drama as “a deep dive into the 80s Big Apple, grappling with rising crime rates, internal corruption, endemic racism, a forgotten underclass and the Aids epidemic”.
Jim Henson: Idea Man
The beloved entertainer
Streaming: Disney+, from May 31
Ron Howard takes the helm for this film about the life and work of the creator of Sesame Street and The Muppets. The format – interviews with Henson’s friends, colleagues, and fans – is familiar enough, but Howard says being granted access to Henson’s archive by the family was a revelation. “There are a lot of things I hadn’t seen, these hilarious, crazy, irreverent commercials … which are what first got him noticed in the mainstream and allowed him to be this sort of experimental artist in the early years of his life,” Howard said at a TV industry forum last month. “But I also got to see that the creativity for him never stopped. It existed in his home movies. It existed in all of his drawings. It existed in his notebooks, that weren’t sketches for design, necessarily. They were just him keeping track of things. And even those were reflections of this creative energy. And it just dazzled me. I wanted to get to the bottom of what made him tick.” Happily, the archive is opened to the viewers and the film promises plenty of previously unseen material. It seems a good chance to rejoice in a talent that remains untarnished and was with us for all too short a time.
RECOMMENDED
Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure
The spice must flow
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm, Wednesdays, from May 22
Streaming: TVNZ+
Joanna Lumley, still the reigning queen of the celebrity travelogue, sets out in search of the spices we use every day in our kitchens. To be fair, most of us don’t actually get out the nutmeg every day, but that’s first up as she visits Indonesia’s Banda Islands, which for many centuries were the only source of nutmeg and mace, the red spice derived from the coating of the nutmeg seed. There are various cheery interactions with the locals and a nod to the colonial brutality to seize control of the nutmeg market ‒ the Dutch East India Company killed 90% of the native people of the Bandas. Lumley, a child of the Raj, then visits India to trace the stories of ginger, black pepper, and turmeric. In the final episode she is in Madagascar, home of vanilla, where it becomes clear why real vanilla is so expensive.
The Big Cigar
Creating a smoke screen
Streaming: Apple TV+, from May 17
The stories of Los Angeles journalist Joshua Bearman continue to make their way on to the screen. His article about a CIA ruse involving Los Angeles movie producers which freed American embassy staff from Iran, led to the Oscar-winning film Argo. The Big Cigar is an adaptation of his piece for Playboy about another escape brokered by Hollywood. It’s about when Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 while on bail for murder and assault with the help of a fake movie arranged by Bert Schneider, a prominent producer with counterculture political leanings. Schneider, who had been behind The Monkees television show and Easy Rider, is played by Alessandro Nivola while André Holland plays Newton, and the first two of the six episodes are directed by actor Don Cheadle. Expect a serio-comic treatment, funky 70s décor and stoking of Newton’s personal mythology.
Bridgerton
Friends with potential benefits
Streaming: Netflix from May 16
The third season of Bridgerton focuses on the relationship between Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan) and the globetrotting Colin Bridgerton (Luke Newton). He’s back in town and offers to help school up his friend for success in the marriage market, having dashed her dreams last season when he was overheard saying he would never personally court her. But is there more than friendship developing there? Might the #Polin hashtag have life yet for Bridgerton fans?
The 8 Show
Who will win the won?
Streaming: Netflix, from May 17
Netflix will be hoping it has another Squid Game on its hands with this new Korean thriller/dark comedy. Based on webtoons Money Game and Pie Game by Bae Jin-soo, the series features eight people desperate for money – something of a theme in Korean cinema and TV – who enter into a mysterious reality show that takes place inside an eight-storey building. The longer the participants stay the more money they earn, but naturally, there are deadly consequences. Han Jae-rim, who has had hits with films The Face Reader and Emergency Declaration, writes and directs, and the cast includes Hellbound’s Park Jeong-min and Korean star Ryu Jun-yeol.
RECOMMENDED
Bodkin
Podcasters in trouble
Streaming: Netflix. from May 9
A trio of true-crime podcasters – Will Forte (Nebraska), Siobhán Cullen (The Dry) and Robyn Cara (Trying) – get more than they bargained for when they turn up in an Irish coastal town looking to make some killer content out of the mysterious disappearance of several people during the annual Samhain celebration. Officially, it’s a thriller, but the trailer is spilling over with jokes, and it looks a bit Father Ted, a bit The Wicker Man. It’s the first scripted show made for Netflix by Higher Ground, the production company owned by Barack and Michelle Obama, who are also executive producers.
Population 11
Everyone’s weird in the outback
Streaming: TVNZ+, May 9
Another week, another smalltown Australian drama – but this one is as much comedy as drama. Ben Feldman (Silicon Valley) plays Andy, a bank teller from Ohio who travels to the tiny outback town of Bidgeegud (where the local zoo consists of a crocodile) in search of his estranged father, Hugo (Darren Gilshenan, No Activity). A crop of Australian actors play the people of the town, who are basically all weirdos. Created by Phil Lloyd, who wrote Here Come the Habibs!, it leans heavily on culture-clash tropes.
RECOMMENDED
Let It Be
Getting back to where it once belonged
Streaming: Disney+, May 8
Following Sir Peter Jackson’s Get Back, the three-part docuseries he based on the footage and audio captured for the 1970 movie Let It Be, he has now applied the same technology to restore the original film and it includes footage that wasn’t used in Get Back. Apparently, says the publicity, there was fan clamour for the movie to be made available again aft er Get Back. So, with the support of Let It Be’s original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Apple Corps, the owners of all things Beatle, asked Jackson to restore the film from the original 16mm negative and remaster the sound using the same technology developed for the series. Says Jackson: “I’ve always thought that Let It Be is needed to complete the Get Back story … I now think of it all as one epic story, finally completed aft er five decades. The two projects support and enhance each other: Let It Be is the climax of Get Back and Get Back provides a vital missing context for Let It Be.” And in case you found the near eight hours of Get Back an extraordinarily long and winding road, Let It Be clocks in at 80-plus minutes.
Hollywood Con Queen
Movie biz catfish
Streaming: Apple TV+, from May 8
Journalist Scott Johnson’s book Hollywood Con Queen: The Hunt for an Evil Genius tracked how LA movie folk were being taken in by a fraudster posing as prominent women producers and sending them to Indonesia for location scouting, where they were told to pay cash to the locals helping them with the promise of reimbursement later. His discovery of who was behind the scam made for a stranger-than-fiction story on the page, one ripe for a three-episode true-crime makeover by Chris Smith, whose past ventures into weirdness have included Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and Tiger King.
Dark Matter
Man gets lost in multiverse
Streaming: Apple TV+, May 8
Some reviewers felt Blake Crouch’s 2016 sci-fi novel Dark Matter took a few too many plot liberties off the back of quantum mechanics, but all seemed to agree it was nothing if not pacy. Crouch has credits as creator, executive producer, showrunner and writer on this nine-part TV adaptation, so we can safely assume it’ll rattle along. The protagonist, Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), is a physics professor who’s walking along, minding his own business when he’s suddenly abducted into an alternate version of his life. The road back – if it’s even possible – lies through a labyrinth of possible lives. Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga and Jimmi Simpson also appear. That Pearl Jam has just released an album called Dark Matter is just a coincidence.
RECOMMENDED
Doctor Who
A very new doctor
Streaming: Disney+ from May 11
Doctor Who’s Disney era begins in earnest after last year’s trilogy of specials established Ncuti Gatwa as the new doctor and former Coronation Street star Millie Gibson as his travelling companion. The specials also showed how much Disney-level production could lift the look of the show. Russell T Davies, who returned as show runner as part of the BBC’s co-production deal with Disney, acknowledged in a recent interview that the bigger budgets expanded the range of stories the show could tell. If Disney somehow collapsed and the show returned to a BBC budget, he said, “We’d all rally round and make it and suddenly the stories would become claustrophobic ghost stories.” Davies also controversially suggested the deal would mean the show could outlast the BBC itself: “You’ve got to look in the long term at the end of the BBC, which is undoubtedly on its way in some shape or form.” The season – officially, it’s “season one,” which may upset some fans – premieres with the first two episodes, then six more to follow weekly.
Big Mood
Gal pals get real
Streaming: ThreeNow from May 11
Maggie (Nicola Coughlan, Derry Girls) and Eddie (Lydia West, It’s a Sin) have been besties for a decade. But they’re now in their early 30s and things are getting real. Eddie’s business is struggling, her ex-boyfriend is unhelpfully back in the picture, and she increasingly has to navigate the consequences of Maggie’s bipolar disorder. Yes, it’s another dark comedy about women and their mental health, but this one looks very zesty and has won generally good reviews. The writer, Camilla Whitehill, also works with Coughlan on their popular comedy podcast, Whistle Through the Shamrocks. Coughlan is also on screen this week with season three of Bridgerton.
RECOMMENDED
Hacks
The double act returns
Streaming: TVNZ+ from May 3
By the end of the second season of Hacks – the acclaimed dramedy about veteran Las Vegas stand-up diva Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and young writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) – it seemed like there was a resolution. Deborah had got her career back with a hit comedy special and Ava was off to find her own fortune. But it turns out that was never intended to be the end. Fate brings them back together and it’s on again. Guest stars for the season include Helen Hunt, Christina Hendricks and Christopher Lloyd.
RECOMMENDED
Tiki Taane in Session with CSO
A very special concert
Streaming: TVNZ+ from May 1
When Tiki Taane staged his sold-out concert with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra in May 2021, to help welcome back Christchurch Town Hall from years of earthquake restoration, he had 22 cameras rolling. When the resulting concert film and documentary premiered last year at the New Zealand International Film Festival, he proudly told one interviewer, “I was the director, producer, musician, composer, sometimes editor, audio mixer plus project manager. And I funded the whole thing.” It’s a remarkable, often emotional project, with musical guests including his kids Charlie and Karcia and just in time for New Zealand Music Month.
RECOMMENDED
Troy Kingi’s Desert Hikoi
Walking in the sands
Streaming: TVNZ+ from May 1
A short series following the charismatic Māori musician and actor Troy Kingi on a journey into the desert of the Joshua Tree National Park, California, in search of wisdom and creative inspiration. But he’s not just there to walk and think: the national park is also home to the legendary Rancho De La Luna Studio, where studio boss Dave Catching, a former member of Queens of the Stone Age, helps him make an old-fashioned rock record due out later in year. The two apparently got on so well that Kingi will feature along with various music legends on the studio’s 30th anniversary album.
RECOMMENDED
Shardlake
Monastic murder mystery
Streaming: Disney+ from May 2
The dangers of life during the reign of Henry VIII period are given full expression in this series based on CJ Sansom’s series Tudor period mystery novels. His protagonist, Matthew Shardlake, is a lawyer who is sent to investigate all manner of rum doings and in this series, based on the first book Dissolution, Thomas Cromwell (played by Sean Bean) sends him to find out who killed one of his commissioners at a remote Sussex monastery. Of course, this is during the dissolution of the monasteries and Shardlake’s investigation is highly politically charged. Joining Shardlake (Arthur Hughes) is Cromwell’s man Jack Barak (Anthony Boyle, who played John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt), who is sort of a Watson to Shardlake’s Holmes. Sansom, whose books have sold nearly four million copies, died last month.
RECOMMENDED
A Man In Full
Lighting another bonfire
Streaming: Netflix from May 2
TV titan David E Kelley (Big Little Lies) is the creator and showrunner of this adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, which was a sort of companion to his 1987 Bonfire of the Vanities, though the series is set in contemporary times. Jeff Daniels plays Atlanta real estate mogul Charlie Croker, who faces sudden bankruptcy after a cascade of events takes down his business empire. He fights to keep what he has while others try to cash in on his fall from grace. Diane Lane (House of Cards) plays his first wife Martha, who has her own battle to maintain her social standing without her husband.
High Country
Australian country darkness
Streaming: ThreeNow from May 3
An eight-part Australian mystery series set in a fictional country town. Leah Purcell (Wentworth) stars as detective Andie Whitford, a city cop who has been relocated to the Victorian hamlet of Brokenridge and is soon tasked with investigating a series of disappearances. Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones) is Sam Dryson, the well-weathered cop she’s supposed to be replacing and New Zealander Sarah Wiseman is Helen Hartley, Whitford’s life partner. The Guardian’s reviewer acknowledged it as “a grab bag of genre elements”, but praised its pacy, punchy style.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Love in the time of death
Streaming: Neon from Monday, May 6
Screening: SoHo, Wednesdays from May 8, 9.30pm
The inevitable television series of the bestselling novel makes its New Zealand author Heather Morris a character in one of its timelines – she’s played by Melanie Lynskey in scenes depicting the three years in the early 2000s she spent recording the life story of Melbourne-resident Auschwitz survivor Lale Sokolov, who is portrayed by Harvey Keitel. For more about the show, see our preview.
North Shore
Oz-UK thriller with a diplomatic twist
Screening: TVNZ 1, Sundays 9.30pm, from May 5
Streaming: TVNZ+
John Bradley (Game of Thrones) plays Max Drummond, a charming British police officer who struggles with his Australian counterpart, DS Meg Driscoll (Kirsty Sturgess) aft er they’re ordered to work together when the UK trade minister’s daughter is found dead in Sydney Harbour under suspicious circumstances. Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey) plays the minister who still has a trade deal to sign, even as secrets begin to surface about the people close to her daughter. Written in six parts by Mike Bullen, the now Australian-based creator of Cold Feet.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the April and March viewing guides
