Netflix wins on volume in this week’s new streaming TV, according to Dan Slevin.
Elisabeth Moss returns as June in season three of The Handmaid’s Tale (Lightbox). Photo by Elly Dassas. Photo: 2019 Hulu
There’s an almost paralysing amount of choice in new TV to stream and, while some of the biggest shows have come to an end, there are large, medium and small offers on every service and – still – only 24 hours in a day.
Lightbox has gone all in on season three of The Handmaid’s Tale – that’s their only new show until late in June. They dropped the first three episodes instantly and it now arrives weekly until the middle of August. As is my wont, I’ll be holding my review until we know how it ends, but in the meantime I can say that it remains highly watchable and frustrating in roughly equal measure.
Lightbox have also just announced that they are introducing closed captioning to their service with Handmaid’s which is commendable but kind of depressing that they thought they could launch without it in 2014.
Neon has the big name shows coming from HBO, FX and AMC in the States. Season two of Big Little Lies reunites the great cast of season one (Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz and Laura Dern) and adds Meryl Streep into the bargain. Episodes are dropping weekly, and they are up to episode two (of seven). They’ve also got season five of Fear the Walking Dead, a franchise that must surely be tottering around on its last legs by now, and season two of Golden Globe-nominated Pose about the ballroom culture on New York in the 80s and early 90s.
TVNZ On Demand continues to find some great content, sometimes shared with their broadcast arm but often only available on demand. There’s a reboot of Das Boot, the German WWII series about a U-Boat under pressure from the Allies who have cracked the Enigma code. Jordan Peele has made a huge impact with his recent feature films, Get Out and Us, and his reboot of the classic mystery series The Twilight Zone is a great ‘get’ for a free-to-stream provider. There are ten episodes featuring stars like Kumail Nanjani, Greg Kinnear, Rhea Seehorn (Better Call Saul) and Ginnifer Goodwin (Big Love). They’ve also got all seven seasons of The West Wing, if you want to get nostalgic for a time when politics seemed to actually work.
The cast of the new Das Boot keep an eye out for trouble. Photo: Nik Konietzny / Bavaria Fiction GmbH, 2018 - All Rights Reserved
But it’s Netflix that’s really swamped us with choice over the past three weeks. A third series of Black Mirror, a second series of Designated Survivor, a third (and final) season of Marvel’s Jessica Jones would keep a lot of people busy but the four episode limited series When They See Us from Ava DuVernay is the repository of all the prestige. Following on from DuVernay’s incendiary 2016 Netflix documentary about the American prison system, 13th, she’s turned her attention to the appalling miscarriage of justice, The Central Park Five from thirty years ago. Five young African-American men were arrested and persuaded to confess to the rape and murder of a jogger in Central Park, despite there being no supporting evidence whatsoever. A local real estate mogul called Donald Trump took out a full page ad in the New York Times calling for their execution.
Photo: Netflix
Netflix has also revived Armistead Maupin’s classic stories of the San Francisco gay community, Tales of the City, which sees Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis, Paul Gross and others reprise their roles from the original series which was made in 1993 (and which can be seen for free on TVNZ ON Demand).
Off the beaten Netflix track, I’m intrigued by a Belgian cyber-crime thriller called Unit 42 and a German comedy about a teenage crimelord, How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast).
Every month, Dan Slevin highlights some of the best and most interesting TV shows that are new to Kiwi streaming services.
