The Guide #190: From Dope Thief to Families Like Ours, here’s what to watch on every streamer
In this week’s newsletter: Beyond big-hitters like Adolescence and The White Lotus, there are countless cracking shows that have gone under the radar. Here are our favourites on Apple TV+, My5, ITVX and more
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It’s time for another instalment of A Show for Every Streamer, where we recommend a TV series to watch on each of the approximately 3,082 streaming services currently vying for your limited recreational time. (You can read our previous attempts here and here). As ever, we’ve focused on series that haven’t been discussed endlessly – so no Adolescence or The White Lotus. Instead, you’ll find Danish flooding sagas, football-based gastronomy and Martin Clunes attempting a Welsh accent …
Apple TV+ | Dope Thief
The “Apple paradox”, where incredibly talented people combine to make shows that no one seems to watch, is alive and well here. Despite having Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura as leads and a pilot episode directed by Ridley Scott, this crime comedy-drama about two childhood friends who pose as drug agents to rob dealers seems to have had next to no cut-through. A shame, as it builds to a tense, dark and funny climax.
BBC iPlayer | Families Like Ours
The title screams daytime soap, but this is actually something far more intriguing: a climate-change drama from Festen director Thomas Vinterberg. Families Like Ours imagines a Denmark where citizens have to evacuate the country due to flooding. It’s a terrifying prospect that Vinterberg handles with Dogme 95 levels of naturalism, finding small personal stories amid the creeping apocalypse.
Channel 4 | GBH
We’ve flagged a new C4 release in Take Five (see below) so instead here’s a word for its cavernous archive, which contains many of its most groundbreaking dramas over the decades: A Very British Coup, Queer as Folk, This is England and GBH, an ever-timely 1991 drama from Alan Bleasdale about city council corruption, featuring a ferocious performance from Robert Lindsay.
Disney+ | Suspect: The Killing of Jean Charles de Menezes
The politically charged new series of Andor is Disney’s water-cooler show of the moment, but that has received props elsewhere. So instead let’s spotlight this four-part drama about the notorious 2005 police shooting from socially conscious TV king Jeff Pope. It’s a meticulously researched and utterly damning piece of procedural drama, with a cast that includes Russell Tovey, Conleth Hill and Emily Mortimer.
Discovery+ | Adam Richman Eats Football
We could flag any number of grubby true-crime dramas here: Discovery churns them out at such a rate that you wonder if they may soon run out of murders to almost solve. But let’s sidestep the slaughter and instead flag this cheerful series, which sees Man v Food star Richman piggyback on the “footy scran” trend and try matchday delicacies across the UK, from pie and mash at West Ham to haggis and whiskey pizza at Celtic.
ITVX | Out There
“Martin Clunes plays a vigilante farmer taking aim at county lines drug runners” sounds like the sort of pitch you might get from a malfunctioning TV commissioning chatbot. But no, this revenge thriller is real and, more remarkably, Clunes – Mr Cosy Early-Evening Drama himself – is rather good in an uncharacteristic role, even if his west Walian accent is a bit off.
My5 | The Good Wife
As you might expect from a platform with a strand titled Lawless Britain, Channel 5’s free streaming service largely trades in the trashy and prurient. But there are gems to be found if you look hard enough, such as all 156 episodes of the excellent Julianna Margulies led legal drama, which is also available to stream on Paramount+ too.
Netflix | Turning Point: The Vietnam War
It was only a matter of time that, having conquered the rest of TV, Netflix would come for Ken Burns’s turf. This five-part documentary from Brian Knappenberger (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz) relitigates Vietnam, making use of talking heads on both sides of the conflict and sifting through hours of US presidents’ Oval Office meetings and phone calls, to argue that the war paved the way for a more cynical, distrustful America.
NOW | The Righteous Gemstones
Pour one out for Danny McBride’s comedy about a family of loathsome televangelists, which has just finished the fourth and final season of an impressively consistent run. In its latest outing, the show grows loopier and more ambitious, including a stand-alone episode set in the American civil war, and Bradley Cooper guest starring. As ever, it’s Walton Goggins – man of the hour due to The White Lotus – who steals the show.
Paramount+ | Mobland
A Guy Ritchie crime drama starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren? Frankly, we didn’t know Paramount+ had that level of clout, but here we are. Written and created by Ronan Bennett (with assistance from Jez Butterworth) this London gangster series, which sees Hardy’s fixer tasked with keeping the lid on a potentially devastating mob war, does very little that’s radical but manages the familiar with an engaging slickness.
PlutoTV | 21 Jump Street
Cheerful and cheaper than cheap, this streamer seems to be mostly made up of half-remembered crime dramas from the 80s and 90s. Given that it’s free, we probably shouldn’t complain about a service that includes Prisoner Cell Block H, The Dick Van Dyke Show and the original TV version of 21 Jump Street, featuring a pre-everything Johnny Depp. It’s got a surprisingly tolerable film library too.
Prime Video | Bosch: Legacy
While Amazon ploughs cash into costly clunkers like its Citadel universe of shows or its notorious golden handcuffs deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its Bosch franchise trundles efficiently on. A fast-paced modern detective procedural, it’s marked out by Titus Welliver’s gruff anguished turn as its titular LAPD gumshoe. A spin-off from the original Bosch series, Legacy has just dropped its final season on Prime, and it sees Harry Bosch juggling a missing family investigation and a probe into his own conduct.
U | Silence is Golden
Another Prime series we could have flagged is Last One Laughing UK, its hugely successful comedy gameshow where stand-ups staying together in a Big Brother-style house try to not laugh in each other’s company. But as you’ve almost certainly seen that, how about a similarly premised show on UKTV’s streaming service to keep you diverted while you wait for series two? In Silence is Golden, it’s the studio audience who have to avoid tittering in the presence of comics. Do so, and they’ll collectively win a cool £250,000.
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