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Time
A second lag
Sean Bean earned a Bafta for his lead role as a man thrown into the prison system in the first season of veteran writer Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama and Time was named the best mini-series of 2021. There were no plans to extend the story and the writer’s job appeared to be done – until the BBC suggested that he create a second season set in a women’s prison. He brought in Helen Black as a co-writer for the three-episode series and cast Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who), Bella Ramsey (The Last of Us) and Tamara Lawrance (No Offence) as inmates from very different backgrounds and who are doing time for very different reasons.
Streaming: Neon
Fargo
Back in Coen country
The fifth and possibly final season of the acclaimed crime anthology loosely based on the 1996 Coen brothers’ movie returns to the almost present day after the 1950s’ mob story of the 2020 series. The cast includes Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple as a seemingly mild-mannered Minnesota wife and mom Dorothy Lyon, who, according to the trailer, isn’t who she says she is. Her cover has seemingly been blown after a kidnapping – one that might seem to have some parallels with the abduction that set off events in the original film. Jennifer Jason Leigh is her billionaire mother-in-law who always thought there was something amiss about her son’s spouse, and Jon Hamm is a hardline North Dakota sheriff who takes an unhealthy interest in the case.
Streaming: Neon, weekly episodes, Tuesdays.
Squid Game: The Challenge
Pop culture eats itself
Perhaps it was inevitable that Squid Game, a dystopian social commentary using competitive reality TV shows as its template, would be adapted into a competitive reality TV show. And here we are: 456 players compete to be the winner of a $4.56 million prize while the others are mercilessly eliminated. The 10-episode season was shot (if that’s not too sensitive a word) in the UK by Studio Lambert, the company behind The Traitors and multiple other franchises. Meanwhile the “real” – that is, fictional – Squid Game is being prepared for a second season to air next year.
Streaming: Netflix
The Crown
End of an era
The Crown’s sixth and final season will consist of ten episodes split in two parts. The first four are dealing with the events of 1997, the last year of Princess Diana’s life, and the aftermath of her death in August. The post-Diana episodes will also feature storylines featuring the Princes WIlliam and Harry and the former’s university days courtship of Kate Middleton. Among other notable events of the period, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother both died in 2002 which was the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee. The show reportedly concludes its 60-episode run in about 2005, which coincides with the marriage of Charles and Camilla.
Streaming: Netflix, first four episodes available now; remaining six from Dec 14
A Murder at the End of the World
Gen Z whodunnit
Emma Corrin (who played Diana in season four of The Crown) stars as Darby Hart, a young sleuth who accepts an invitation from mysterious billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen, who played Bill Clinton in Impeachment: American Crime Story) to a retreat at a remote lodge. When one of the other guests is found dead, it’s up to Darby to prove that it’s a murder and identify the killer before another life is taken. The series sets up with a two-episode premiere.
Streaming: Disney+
Orphan Black: Echoes
Send in the clones
A spin-off of the original 2013 cult hit Orphan Black, set a little further in the future. Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones) stars as Lucy, a young woman who wakes up with no memory of who she is and is told only that she has undergone “a procedure”. Is she, like Sarah in the original series, a clone? The producers have been cagey about that, but John Fawcett, the co-creator of the original show, is involved again and told Radio Times this year that, “The spin-off is a very different show. If you go with the expectation that you’re going to see Orphan Black, you’re going to probably be disappointed. It’s got its own feel, it’s got its own identity. What makes it Orphan Black, is there’s a bit of a slow burn to it.” Keeley Hawes (Stonehouse) plays a scientist who may hold the clues.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Julia
A second course
The second season of the acclaimed biographical series about Julia Child opens with a three-episode premiere that sees the unexpected TV career of Julia (Sarah Lancashire) continue to gain momentum. Paul (David Hyde Pierce) steps in and she’s off to France for a break and to finally reunite with her cookbook co-writer Simca (Isabella Rossellini). They enjoy an idyllic bike ride and shop at a farmers’ market. But things are happening back home and both Julia and Paul will have to learn to adjust to her growing celebrity and the responsibilities it brings.
Streaming: Neon
Screening: Vibe, from Thursday December 7, 9.30pm
The Lazarus Project
Against the clock
There’s a three-week time loop that is collapsing time, the universe and everything. Or something like that. In season two of the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey British sci-fi thriller, George (Paapa Essiedu) is going to have to clean up the mess he made in season one when he ended the world to save his girlfriend (don’t ask). Creator Joe Barton (Giri/Haji) says that the season is about how the cast of characters get themselves out of an impossible situation and that “Paapa gets put through the ringer a bit”. There’s plenty of action, Colin Salmon waltzes in as a possibly evil new boss and the cast includes Caroline Quentin, Tom Burke and another acting Gleeson, Brian.
Streaming: Neon
Coming up next week
Doctor Who 60th Anniversary 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 the 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. Arriving weekly from November 26, the three one offs – “Star Beast”, “Wild Blue Yonder” and “The Giggle” – feature other returning characters, including Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Karl Collins as Shaun Temple, Ruth Madeley as Shirley Anne Bingham, and Jemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. Among the newbies is American star Neil Patrick Harris as villain the Toymaker. The season featuring Ncuti Gatwa as the fifteenth Doctor is due next year.
Streaming: Disney+, from Nov 26
Faraway Downs
The director’s cut
Baz Luhrmann’s “six-chapter reimagining” of his 2008 film Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, recut from footage shot for the original film (which was, by Luhrmann standards, a flop). The premise of the story remains the same – Kidman is a far-from-home English aristocrat who needs the help of a rough-edged drover (Jackman) to try to save her late husband’s farm – but it features a new, less-than-happy ending that Luhrmann filmed but was told by studio bosses to replace aft er audiences in test screenings didn’t like it. The 2 3⁄4 hour film has been expanded with more dialogue to four hours. A preview screening of the first episode in Sydney last month revealed the embrace of young First Nations creatives who Luhrmann has drawn on for a new soundtrack and title graphics.
Streaming: Disney+ from November 28
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+ from November 29
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+ from November 29
From earlier this month
Patrick Gower On: The Royals
Paddy scrutinises the monarchy
It’s Gower on power: specifically, the role and relevance of constitutional monarchy to contemporary New Zealand. He travels to the UK to meet royal biographer and reality TV star Lady Colin Campbell and paparazzo Chris Harvey. Back home, he talks to Tāme Iti about the impact of colonialism and explores with constitutional lawyer Natalie Coates the implications of becoming a republic.
Streaming: ThreeNow
Queer Academy
The ABC of LGBT
Comedian James Mustapic sets out to affirm all the good things about being queer and explore the value of the LGBTTQIA+ experience in this series of five 10-minute episodes for TVNZ’s youth platform, Re:. Among other things, he discovers that non-straight people are particularly good at sexual health. And, it might be added, at winning the revived Celebrity Treasure Island, which Mustapic has just done.
Streaming: TVNZ+
Fellow Travelers
Love in turbulent times
US State Department official Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer, The Last Tycoon) and recently graduated Timothy Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton) meet and fall in love in 1950s McCarthy-era Washington – a dangerous time to be identified as a “sexual subversive”. Their story unfolds across the political dramas of the 1960s, the hedonist freedom of the 70s and the trauma of Aids in the 1980s. Created by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) based on Thomas Mallon’s novel of the same name.
Streaming: Neon/Sky Go (weekly episodes Monday after double episode premiere)
Screening: SoHo, 9.30pm, Fridays from Nov 10
Payback
Risk of liquidation
The latest delivery from the Jed Mercurio production stable has been developed with veteran British TV writer Debbie O’Malley. Lexie Noble (Morven Christie, The Bay) is a happily married Edinburgh mother of two who is about to restart her career in the accountancy firm run by her husband when she discovers – after he is attacked in the street – that her comfortable existence has been almost entirely funded by the proceeds of crime. Her attempts to get to the bottom of what has been happening bring her into contact with crime boss Cal Morris (Peter Mullan, After the Party), who is a very dangerous man to know. She’s forced into a double life, trapped between the criminal underworld and the cops.
Streaming: ThreeNow
The Vanishing Triangle
Irish cold case saga
Claire McGowan’s 2022 book took to task the culture of secrecy and victim-blaming that surrounded the disappearance of eight women in the 1990s in an eastern area of Ireland and this new series is inspired by those still-unsolved disappearances. Rather than dramatising real people, the producers have opted for fictional characters, although have said they hope the show will help to keep the stories alive in Ireland. Allen Leech (Downton Abbey) and India Mullen (Normal People) lead the cast; Mullen is a reporter working on the disappearance of her mother 20 years before and Leech plays a detective helping with her case.
Streaming: Acorn TV, AMC+
The Buccaneers
Party like it’s 1899
A period drama with a literary foundation and a modern post-Bridgerton touch. This new series has its roots in Edith Wharton’s final unfinished novel, which was published in 1938 and subsequently given an ending by Wharton scholar Marion Mainwaring in 1993. Two years later it was made into a miniseries starring Carla Gugino and Mira Sorvino. The 2023 rendering is more like a 19th-century Gossip Girl: a group of modern young American women descend on the London season determined to meet potential suitors. Cute boys and complications ensue.
Streaming: Apple TV+
Earth
The planet’s biggest dramas
This BBC documentary series focuses on the periods of dramatic – and often catastrophic – change that shaped the planet we live on. The story begins with the Late Permian-Triassic extinction event – aka “the Great Dying” – that killed as much as 90% of living species 250 million years ago, eventually making way for the dinosaurs. Presenter Chris Packham (currently being anointed by UK media as “the new Attenborough”) is thoroughly engaging and there may be quite a lot you didn’t know about the Earth’s story. The spectre of contemporary climate change hovers over it all and is addressed in the fifth and final episode, “Human”.
Screening: BBC Earth, 9.20pm, Thursdays
Streaming: Sky Go
NCIS: Sydney
Cops and cobbers
First there was the Aukus agreement, which gives the Royal Australian Navy access to US-UK nuclear powered submarines. Now, there’s a TV show that gives Australia and others access to the fourth spin-off from the 20-year franchise and the first NCIS not set on American soil. Originally developed for the streaming market, NCIS Sydney debuted recently on Australia’s Network 10 with an episode set during an Aukus event. Thanks to the big hole created by the writers’ and actors’ guilds strikes it will also get a run on the CBS network in the US. An American NCIS crew is merged with an Australian Federal Police team to jointly investigate naval crime. But first, they’ll need to overcome their differences and learn to trust each other. Interestingly, there are no American actors in the main cast – Olivia Swann playing an NCIS special agent is a Brit and the rest of the cast are Aussies, including the familiar face of William McInnes as the show’s resident pathologist. Fun fact: there is actually an NCIS field office in Australia, but it’s in Perth, not Sydney.
Streaming: TVNZ+
All the Light We Cannot See
Fully occupied
Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary blockbuster All the Light We Cannot See sold some 15 million copies after it was published in 2014, so it’s inevitable there would be a screen adaptation. And, given its 500-plus pages set mostly in Occupied France and the port city of Saint-Malo during WWII contemplating war, radio waves, marine biology, Jules Verne, gemmology and a few other topics, it was also inevitable it would be quite a long one. After the screen rights bounced between would-be makers, it has become a four-hour mini-series starring Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie, among others. It’s directed, perhaps surprisingly, by Shawn Levy, who is best known for helming the Night at the Museum movies as well as films starring Ryan Reynolds. It’s written by Steven Knight, the creator of the shows Peaky Blinders and SAS Rogue Heroes. The book’s lead female character, Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl fleeing the Nazis with her father (Ruffalo), is played in the series by two blind actresses – seven-year-old Welsh girl Nell Sutton and as a teenager by American Aria Mia Loberti. It was shot in Hungary, where actual Ukrainian refugees became extras in scenes of Parisians fleeing the Nazis. The trailer suggests a full-blown, massed-strings saga and Levy thinks his touch will do the book justice: “So many period pieces are magnificently crafted, but they feel somewhat austere or emotionally remote. I wanted to make a beautiful-looking period drama that was also unabashedly human and emotional.”
Streaming: Netflix
Granite Harbour
Scot cops pursuing their quarry
This three-part crime drama is set in Aberdeen, also known as Granite City, so watch out for some impressive Victorian-era buildings made of the local rock. Perhaps that’s why Romario Simpson’s character Davis Lindo is so spectacularly well dressed – he looks great against the grey backdrop and his partner in crime, DS Tara “Bart” Bartlett (Hannah Donaldson) is pretty spiffy too. The story involves the murder of an energy company executive who wanted to go green; it seems that half of Aberdeen were against the idea. Lindo is a former military police officer who is supposed to be observing, but...
Streaming: Acorn TV, AMC+
Black Cake
Family secrets melodrama
Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films is behind this drama series based on the novel by Charmaine Wilkerson, so you know it will be epic, melodramatic and possibly tearjerking. The family drama is about two siblings who discover secrets about their mother’s past and is set in two timeframes: the 1960s, when runaway bride Covey (Mia Isaac) disappears into the surf off the coast of Jamaica and is thought either drowned or on the run for her husband’s murder.
In the present, brother and sister Byron and Benny (Ashley Thomas and Adrienne Warren) are shocked at the revelations their mother leaves behind on a flash drive.
Streaming: Disney+
Gone Fishing
Thy rod comforts me
This show has taken a long time to arrive on New Zealand screens. After six seasons in the UK, it’s practically an institution – but it’s a salve for the troubled soul nonetheless. Comedians Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse are longtime friends who were both diagnosed with heart problems. In an effort to get Mortimer out of the house after undergoing triple bypass surgery, Whitehouse invited him on a fishing trip. It proved to be a revelation. “There comes a moment when you realise that you’ve said nothing for an hour and a half. I haven’t thought about anything else. I haven’t worried about the past, or future,” Mortimer reflected. During the six episodes, the pair venture from the Norfolk lakes to the Isle of Wight, talking all the way. Reviewers have called it: “lovely: warm and funny and human and healthy”, “soothing” and “poignant”.
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm, Saturdays
Streaming: TVNZ+
Anonymous
Fighting Rotterdam’s dirty rotters
A Dutch crime thriller with a superhero flavour (it was originally conceived by its writer-director Diederik van Rooijen as a “Batman of the Netherlands”). Schoolteacher Jurre and his wife Saar, a public prosecutor, are in a failing marriage, drifting apart from each other and their two teenage children. Separately, and unbeknown to each other, they embark on secret vigilante missions to try to hold back the tide of organised crime sweeping the country – getting in each other’s way in the process. The result is a deepening entanglement in the criminal underworld – and perhaps the salvation of their marriage.
Streaming: TVNZ+
This guide is updated weekly with new previews and reviews. See what was good in October that you might have missed here.
