From Nicolas Cage channelling himself in The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent to Bad Education, the best on demand TV to watch this week
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The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent
We love a movie star happy to send themselves up, and Nicolas Cage is more than willing to oblige. He plays ‘Nick Cage’, a fading star who reluctantly accepts a well-paid gig to attend the birthday party of a wealthy superfan, Javi (Pedro Pascal).
We love a movie star happy to send themselves up, and Nicolas Cage (above) is more than willing to oblige as he plays ‘Nick Cage’, a fading star
Nick and Javi actually get along like a house on fire but, unfortunately, Javi is the head of a criminal empire and the CIA wants Nick to spy on him.
This is part Hollywood satire (with a lot of industry in-jokes), part buddy movie and all good. Sky Store, from Monday
Film collection
Among the latest batch of films to arrive on Britbox is A Single Man, a period drama starring Colin Firth as a gay college professor and Julianne Moore as his old friend, plus a collection of movies celebrating classic British cinema.
Among the latest batch of films to arrive on Britbox is A Single Man, a period drama starring Colin Firth as a gay college professor and Julianne Moore (both above) as his old friend
They include 1963’s Billy Liar, starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie; Ken Loach’s 1967 kitchen-sink drama Poor Cow, with Carol White and Terence Stamp; and The L-Shaped Room (1962), in which a pregnant single woman moves into a boarding house where she meets a group of fellow misfits.
Starring Leslie Caron and Tom Bell. Britbox, from Thursday
Hustle
Adam Sandler plays Stanley Sugarman, an ageing basketball talent scout who’s grown weary. But when he stumbles across Bo Cruz on a Spanish street court, he thinks he might just have found the one.
Getting Bo to the States and into the Philadelphia 76ers, however, turns out to be far from straightforward.
With echoes of Ben Affleck’s Finding The Way Back, Clint Eastwood’s Trouble With The Curve and, inevitably, Rocky/Creed, this is classic, against-all-odds sports-film territory, with Sandler playing it straight and a raft of real-life NBA talent.
Netflix, from Wednesday
Bad Education
Jack Whitehall is bringing back the BBC3 sitcom in which he played ‘the worst teacher ever to grace the British education system’ for a new series.
Jack Whitehall and the students of Abbey Grove School (above) are set to return for a new series of Bad Education
Catch up with the first three series, in which newly graduated history teacher Alfie Wickers attempts to impress his crush Rosie Gulliver (Sarah Solemani) while trying to act cool in front of the Abbey Grove School students. Britbox, available now
The Syndicate
The late Kay Mellor leaves behind a fine legacy of TV work, including her popular drama series The Syndicate, starring many a famous face from Timothy Spall and Alison Steadman to Gavin & Stacey’s Joanna Page and Mellor’s daughter, Gaynor Faye.
First shown on BBC1 in 2012, each of the four stand-alone series focuses on a different group of people whose lives are turned upside down after they jointly win the lottery. Britbox, available now
Love Me
Super Australian six-part drama that focuses on the trials and tribulations faced by members of a family at different stages in their lives. Hugo Weaving stars alongside ex-Home And Away and Neighbours star Bob Morley.
Bojana Novakovic (above) stars alongside Hugo Weaving and Bob Morley in the super Australian six-part drama
Look out too for Shalom Brune-Franklin and Bojana Novakovic. Acorn TV, from Monday
Hacks
The first series of the Emmy-award-winning comedy drama was all about the tension between legendary old-school Vegas comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and the supposedly hip young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) hired to revitalise her material.
Would the two become friends despite the gulf between their respective world views? It looked as though they might, and now, at the start of the second series, they’re on the road together as Deborah goes on tour for the first time in years.
But will the pair’s relationship survive the coming to light of an email that a drunken Ava had sent slagging off Deb? Amazon, from Friday
Baby Fever
When fertility doctor Nana (Josephine Park) realises she has a limited amount of time left to conceive, in a drunken state she inseminates herself and becomes pregnant.
When fertility doctor Nana (Josephine Park, above right, with Olivia Joof Lewerissa) realises she has a limited amount of time left to conceive, in a drunken state she inseminates herself
She then has to explain her condition and win back ‘the one that got away’. Things get complicated in this six-part Danish romcom. Netflix, from Wednesday
For All Mankind
A news montage at the start of the third series of this superb sci-fi-meets-politics drama reminds us we’re in an alternative timeline.
Margaret Thatcher was killed when the IRA bombed Brighton’s Grand Hotel. The Beatles reunion tour kicked off with a concert in Chicago. The Americans have set a date of 1996 to go to Mars. The Soviets are aiming to beat them to it.
Either Dani (Krys Marshall) or Ed (Joel Kinnaman) will command the US mission but space remains, in the words of one astronaut, ‘an unrelenting bitch’ as we see in the first episode which should set space tourism back by another few decades.
Apple TV+, from Friday
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