With so many entertainment options, it's easy to miss brilliant streaming shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on, or skip.
Daybreak
Netflix
Post-apocalyptic Los Angeles has become a playground for teenage survivors in this smart, imaginative and surprisingly funny horror-comedy – which comes packed with pop-culture references that might be just a little bit old for the target audience.
Colin Ford, Austin Crute and Cody Kearsley star in Netflix’s Daybreak.
Initially, it's all fun and games for teenage loser Josh (Colin Ford) as he roars around the ruins in a convertible Ferrari, collecting sports memorabilia and the very best junk food and toilet paper. How is he able to do this? Well, you see some kind of bio-bomb killed almost all the adults in the city. Those that survived stagger around zombie-like, eating any living flesh they can find while constantly repeating their last dull thought ("I should cancel my Facebook account. It's too divisive"). As long as Josh avoids them, along with all the scary mutant animals that have popped up, he should be fine.
Oh, there's also the small matter of how various high-school cliques – jocks, nerds, Kardashian clones – have carved up the Glendale real estate like gang turf. You really don't want to fall afoul of the jocks, who rule their patch with cars and costumes straight out of one of the more outre Mad Max movies. That said, the golf team's armoured golf cart isn't all that intimidating. Of course, there's a lot more to the story.
Pop culture nod to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Matthew Broderick, right, stars in Daybreak, with Sophie Simnett.
Much of it happens in the past, where the high school echoes to Ferris Bueller's Day Off – even leaving aside the fact that it's Matthew Broderick playing the odd but well-intentioned Principal Burr, whose droning PA announcements put students to sleep. It's in that past that Josh met his teacher, Ms Crumble (Smash's Krysta Rodriguez), fell in love with the angelic Sam (Sophie Simnett), and babysat 10-year-old aspiring gangster Angelica (Alyvia Alyn Lind).
Series creators Aron Eli Coleite (Star Trek: Discovery, Heroes) and Brad Peyton (Rampage), adapting the cult graphic novels by Brian Ralph, keep things fast-moving, unpredictable and darkly funny. Ford deftly deftly a fine line, playing Josh as a fourth-wall-busting protagonist who fancies himself the hero of his own story, while also keeping the character drab enough to act as a foil for the likes of Burr, Mrs Crumble and Angelica. Lind gives Angelica a precocious ferocity as the self-styled slime queen of Glendale, while Rodriguez invests Ms Crumble with a unhinged theatricality that recalls Edi Patterson in The Righteous Gemstones. Great fun.
Cold Feet
Acorn TV
The much-loved comedy drama of Cold Feet is back again, for an eighth season, and by the time the ninth wraps up next year, this revival will have been running almost as long as the original did between 1999 and 2003. The babies from the original are at university now, but some things never change, and within moments of this season opening on Adam (James Nesbitt) posing in front of the mirror before a certain wedding, the series settles back into its familiar rhythms of love, laughs, humiliation and division.
Back again: James Nesbitt as Adam Williams in Cold Feet.
Adam still fancies himself a bit of Casanova – rather more than anyone else does – and David (Robert Bathurst) is still chafing in his reduced circumstances at the insurance call centre and at his financial reliance on the women in his life. Darker news looms for poor old Jenny and Pete (Fay Ripley and John Thomson). A paean to friendship that's as warm and comfy as a pair of old bedsocks. Acorn TV has all eight seasons, along with countless other British drama, comedy and mystery series.
Free Meek
Amazon Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video’s documentary series Free Meek explores rapper Meek Mill’s decade-long ordeal in the US justice system.
Pennsylvania rapper Meek Mill suffered a decade-long ordeal on probation at the hands of a seemingly obsessed judge who kept sending him back to jail and prison for non-criminal probation violations – and who wouldn't let him out even when a superior court finally overturned his original conviction. This compelling documentary series tells that story in affecting detail and shows how the "Free Meek" protest campaign has grown into a broader movement working to reform America's probation and cash-bail systems.
Not Today, Bianca
Stan*
Familiar face: Bianca Del Rio is the star of two-part series Not Today, Bianca, on Stan.
As Stan continues to drop new episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race UK, don't forget to revisit Bianca del Rio – a breakout star of the original American series – in this all-too-short two-part series. Louisiana's favourite drag queen is in Los Angeles on a doomed quest to make it big with the aid of an agent (3rd Rock from the Sun's Kristen Johnston) who has an interesting line in unhelpful analogies for the state of Bianca's career. Del Rio shines in sharp-tongued, self-absorbed exasperation. Watch out for Tori Spelling and Charo.
You're Not a Monster
You’re Not a Monster is IMDB’s first scripted original series.Credit:IMDb
IMDb
IMDb's first original scripted series is a distinctly modest venture. It's an animated series of 10 bite-sized episodes following sad-sack psychiatrist Max (Eric Stonestreet), who has trouble dealing with people and so only treats monsters from the movies. His office closet is haunted by an old psychiatrist vampire (Kelsey Grammer), and his front desk is staffed by a succubus (Aparna Nancherla) who wants to give up the sex stuff and settle down with Max. The premise promises but the jokes tend towards the thin and laboured.
Gracepoint
Amazon Prime Video
Broadchurch 2.0: David Tennant and Anna Gunn in Gracepoint.
This American remake of Broadchurch also starred David Tennant – this time with Anna Gunn as his suffering subordinate in homicide investigation. The inspired casting continued with Michael Peña as the father of a boy found murdered on a Californian beach, and with suspects including an old salt played by Nick Nolte and a hostile caravan dweller played by Jacki Weaver. Weaver is mesmerising, not least when her character eventually unloads her account of the night the boy died – along with her own shocking back story.
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