Bill Hader as Barry, a four-season dark comedy available to watch on Neon, just one of the underrated TV shows you should make time to watch.
Chilling sci-fi, sprawling crime sagas, dark dramas... In alphabetical order, here are the hidden TV gems you may have missed.
Roughly inspired by the comic film How To Be A Latin Lover, Acapulco hits that Ted Lasso/Schitt’s Creek feel-good sweet spot. It’s set at a luxury Mexican resort in the 1980s, where wide-eyed staffer Maximo chases wealth – and the girl of his dreams.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Following a murder at a high school reunion, different characters share their perspectives, in the form of genre spoofs for each episode of this inventive whodunit, from action movie to animation, musical, thriller and, in the latest series, a Wes Anderson parody. The sparky cast includes Tiffany Haddish and Jack Whitehall.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Workplace sitcoms are 10-a-penny. Few, though, have the guts to set themselves in the exuberantly unsexy world of Detroit’s crumbling motor industry. Which perhaps explains why this show was cancelled after only two seasons. That’s a shame as its fish-out-of-water premise – a Big Pharma exec takes over a skidding auto business – is sharp and the writing is consistently good.
Where to watch: Neon
Originally a Radio 4 drama set in Oslo, this crime drama about a marine homicide unit has been transported to Glasgow – although Nicola Walker’s Annika Strandhed is still Norwegian, and still a wry presence, whether dealing with corpses or her stroppy teenage daughter.
Where to watch: Neon
In the “discourse” about whether HBO’s The Last of Us was the greatest-ever video game adaptation, Arcane was unfairly ignored. Based on the League of Legends online beat ‘em up, it’s an animated steampunk thriller about two sisters – Jinx and Vi – who end up on opposite sides of a struggle for power in a richly-imagined fantasy universe.
Where to watch: Netflix
This Bill Hader-starring black comedy has grown ever murkier over its gripping four seasons. Hader plays a dissatisfied hitman who finds new purpose in an acting class (run by Henry Winkler’s eccentric coach), but who can’t escape his violent past. The direction – particularly of action set-pieces – is more thrilling and inventive than anything on the big screen.
Where to watch: Neon
You’ll have to go far and wide to find a drama as bonkers as this eye-swivelling adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s supernatural thriller. Simona Brown plays a single mum drawn into a web of forbidden love with her new boss (Tom Bateman) – and his creepily passive wife (Eve Hewson). Silly fun and worth staying with for a twist that will have you hooting aloud.
Where to watch: Netflix
Killing Eve’s Sandra Oh swaps assassins for infighting and identity politics in academia. She plays the newly appointed chair of a prestigious university English department, but when her colleague does a mock Nazi salute during a lecture, a cancel culture scandal erupts.
Where to watch: Netflix
David Gelb’s mouthwatering documentary series takes us into the kitchens of some of the world’s greatest culinary talents. It’s a veritable feast of food porn, as well as offering genuine insight into what makes the likes of Massimo Bottura, Alain Passard and Asma Khan tick.
Where to watch: Netflix
The ever-versatile Bertie Carvel makes a convincing account of P.D. James’ modest, poetry-scribbling detective in this classy new adaptation with a detailed 1970s setting.
Where to watch: AMC+
There are many TV shows about wannabe music moguls, and even a few worth your time (Atlanta, People Just Do Nothing). But this US sitcom is one of the choicest picks of the bunch. Co-created by rapper Dave Burd, it follows the travails of a fictionalised version of his stage persona, Lil Dicky, and is notable for its bevvy of star cameos, from the obvious – Usher, Doja Cat – to the more unexpected likes of Brad Pitt and Rachel McAdams. (Whatever happened to Megan Fox? Well, she ended up on Dave.)
Where to watch: Disney+
An Australian black comedy set in a Tasmanian town largely populated by lesbians, where the body of a man has washed up on a beach. A sort of parodic Antipodean take on self-serious procedurals such as True Detective, Deadloch stars Kate Box and New Zealand’s own Madeleine Sami as flinty, somewhat inept coppers trying to piece together the mystery. A second season has been green-lit and will see the action move to the jungles of Northern Queensland.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
The cosy crime boom reaches Disney, which commissioned this Agatha Christie-esque whodunnit set aboard a luxury yacht populated by horrible rich people. The Flash’s Violett Beane is Imogene Scott, an ingenue with a traumatising childhood, while Homeland’s Mandy Patinkin plays the Hercule Poirot-esque detective Rufus Cotesworth.
Where to watch: Disney+
Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner play aspiring comedians and caustic best friends in this deliberately abrasive cringe comedy. It’s like a cattier version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with a similarly impressive guest star roster and close-to-the-bone, pop culture-savvy gags.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
Aptly named, this bone-dry Irish comedy – impeccably scripted by playwright Nancy Harris, and produced by Normal People’s Element Pictures – sees recovering alcoholic Shiv return home to her dysfunctional family. Ciarán Hinds plays her philandering father.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
The Crown meets All Quiet On The Western Front in this German-language dramatisation of the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Elisabeth – or “Sisi” – falls in love with her sister’s intended, Emperor Franz Joseph and finds herself sucked into courtly intrigue in Vienna. Her timing could be better: the Empire has never been more unstable and now Russia and England each want Franz to join their side in the Crimean War.
Where to watch: Netflix
Deliciously blending laughs with a real streak of horror nastiness, the three seasons of Evil star Mike Colter as a trainee Catholic priest who teams up with Katja Herbert’s psychologist to investigate supernatural phenomena. It’s The Exorcist put through the National Lampoon wringer.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
Israeli television has been responsible for a number of imported gems, and this spy thriller is one of the finest. Its three seasons follow an Israeli Defence Forces operative hunting a ruthless Palestinian assassin. Based on the writers’ own time in the military, it’s as murky and disorientating as a sudden sandstorm.
Where to watch: Netflix
In the early years of World War II, five acclaimed American directors answered the call of duty and headed to the front to record what they saw and transmute it into propaganda films. In this three-part series, five contemporary directors discuss the legacy and impact of their mythmaking. Steven Spielberg takes William Wyler, Francis Ford Coppola profiles John Huston, Guillermo del Toro discusses Frank Capra, while Paul Greengrass and Lawrence Kasdan explore John Ford and George Stevens respectively.
Where to watch: Netflix
There was a galactic backlash against David S. Goyer – writer of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy – and his adaptation of the cult Isaac Asimov novels on the not-treasonable grounds of his Foundation having almost nothing to do with the source material. Never mind. On its own merits, Foundation is a grippingly OTT portrait of a utopian society in decline – worth watching for the feverish Lee Pace as an emperor who cannot die but sometimes wishes he could.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
“Alternative history” is usually codeword for “what if the Nazis won the war and Big Ben was redesigned to resemble Hitler’s face?” This Apple series from Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore is more subtle: it gives us a reimagined Cold War space race where the Soviets landed on the moon first, and is as gripping as TV gets.
Where to watch: Apple TV +
Fans of Twin Peaks, Lost or the Alan Wake video games will relish the atmospheric horror of From, a chiller set in a remote American Midwest town where the locals – who are trapped there, seemingly for good – lock their doors each night as shadowy figures emerge and try to rip them to shreds. Lost’s Harold Perrineau is the local sheriff, while Catalina Sandino Moreno is a new resident of “The Township” who is trying to keep her family safe.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
Inspired by the acclaimed Slow Burn podcast, this political thriller tells the story of Watergate from the perspective of those surrounding Richard Nixon. It centres on Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s Attorney-General, played by Julia Roberts, who was the first person to expose the affair.
Where to watch: Prime Video
This Tina Fey-produced sitcom about a girl group reuniting in middle age has a ridiculously great cast (Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, Paula Pell and Renée Elise Goldsberry), a head-spinning joke rate, and a clutch of slyly satirical, but genuinely catchy, original songs.
Where to watch: Netflix
A gleeful braiding of Deadwood with Lysistrata, this Western from Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank has a 10-gallon hatful of acting talent, with Jack O’Connell leading as a murderous outlaw seeking revenge in a frontier town populated almost entirely by women – courtesy of a mining accident which has wiped out the menfolk. Jeff Daniels, Michelle Dockery and Thomas Brodie-Sangster also star.
Where to watch: Netflix
If you like horror but would rather not be scared stiff, del Toro’s hokey anthology series is the perfect guilty pleasure. H.P. Lovecraft is among the inspirations for an enjoyably ripe show in which each gruesome tale is introduced by del Toro – taking his cue from Alfred Hitchcock in Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Where to watch: Netflix
Today, brand origin stories are all-the-rage and breaking box office records (take a curtsy, Barbie). But when this series premiered on AMC in 2014, it went criminally underwatched, despite critical acclaim. An insider’s view of the personal computer revolution of the late 80s and 90s, it’s whip-sharp and ripe with period detail. Think Mad Men, with PCs big enough to roast a turkey inside.
Where to watch: AMC+
Attempting to describe this gloriously peculiar show is to fall into a trap sprung by the filmmaker himself. Essentially, it involves comedian John Wilson totting a camera around New York asking bystanders how to solve life’s most difficult questions. Such as – how to cook the perfect risotto? And, is mankind doomed? It sounds effortfully oddball; and it is. But it’s also wonderfully alert, funny and often quite moving. And it makes you want to book a ticket to the Big Apple immediately to meet its apparently inexhaustible cast of kooks.
Where to watch: Available on Air New Zealand’s inflight entertainment
Has The Boys left you hankering for more foul-mouthed, super-powered violence? Then sink your teeth into this – lovingly crafted and very much adults-only animation about a boy who discovers his father, the superhero Omni-Man, is not perhaps as squeaky-clean as he seems.
Where to watch: Prime Video
We’ve already had Meryl Streep’s version of 1960s TV chef Julia Child on the big screen, but Happy Valley star Sarah Lancashire’s take is just as delicious – and includes some Mad Men-esque social commentary. David Hyde Pierce, Bebe Neuwirth and Judith Light are scrumptious support.
Where to watch: Neon
Picture House set in turn-of-the-century New York, with added racial tension. Steven Soderbergh directed the first season of this scalp-sharp medical drama, set in the titular Knickerbocker Hospital, chronicling its brilliant but opium-addicted leader of the surgery staff (Clive Owen) and a pioneering black doctor (André Holland). Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins is reportedly working on a third season.
Where to watch: Neon
Enjoyably absurd time-travel caper in which a Los Angeles family is sucked through a time portal at the La Brea Tar Pits in the middle of the city and whisked back to the prehistoric days of woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed cats. They must learn to keep the beasties at bay and to construct a new society that does not immediately collapse into a Lord of the Flies hellscape.
Where to watch: Neon
In this propulsive sci-fi thriller from Joe Barton (Giri/Haji), Paapa Essiedu’s George discovers he’s part of an elite group who can reverse time to prevent an extinction event – but this will also erase anything else that happened, adding a wrenching emotive element.
Where to watch: Neon
Created by The Haunting of Hill House’s Mike Flanagan, this slow-burn horror centres around an isolated American fishing community which becomes enraptured by a new Catholic priest who can seemingly perform miracles. As always, the payoff is less engaging than the premise – but it’s still a chillingly fascinating, moving exploration of faith.
Where to watch: Netflix
“Middle-age man has crisis” has been a core element of some of the best prestige television, from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But however outdated that premise may seem nowadays, you have to credit Justin Theroux’s adaptation of 1981 bestseller The Mosquito Coast (by his uncle Paul Theroux) for diving in head first. It’s a richly over-cooked portrait of midlife meltdown with Theroux cultivating layers of angsty stubble in order to portray an eccentric inventor who flees the US Government and takes his increasingly reluctant family to Central America.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
This brilliantly detailed workplace sitcom is fuelled by the power struggle between egomaniacal video game creator Ian (Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney) and talented engineer Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao). F. Murray Abraham is scene-stealing as a soused sci-fi novelist.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
There are shiversome strains of True Detective in this supernatural crime-horror, based on Stephen King’s novel. It follows Ben Mendelsohn’s detective who wrestles with his rationality when investigating the murder of a child, apparently by an upstanding, perfectly decent family man (Jason Bateman).
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Anime has become one of the biggest genres in streaming – but for newcomers, it can be hard to know where to start. One good jumping-off point is Netflix’s spin-off of Guillermo del Toro’s giant robots v monsters romp Pacific Rim. In fact, The Black owes as much to Frank Herbert’s Dune as to Godzilla, with its tale of crazed cults in the Australian desert and of a whey-faced kid with strange powers and a shocking destiny.
Where to watch: Netflix
What if Stranger Things was a weighty rumination on friendship, the ageing process and midlife melancholia – with giant robots? That’s the deal with Paper Girls, movingly adapted from the Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel about four young girls who, while on their newspaper round, find themselves blinking forward from 1988 to 2022.
Where to watch: Prime Video
The set-up honks like Stinking Bishop left too long in the sun, but the execution of this horror-drama is chillingly entertaining. Steve Carell stars as a therapist held hostage by a serial killer who asks for help in curbing his homicidal urges. It’s an excellent excuse to see Domhnall Gleeson shrug off his romcom baggage as the icy killer.
Where to watch: Disney+
In this origin story of the great TV defence lawyer, set in a sinful 1930s LA, Perry Mason is a broke, boozy PI haunted by his wartime experiences. It’s visually sumptuous Old Hollywood noir, complete with hard-boiled dialogue, dodgy cops, and even dodgier evangelists.
Where to watch: Neon
As pitch-black as the Mississippi night, this neo-noir follows a Vietnam vet who returns to Memphis and becomes a mob enforcer and hitman. Soused in Deep South atmosphere, it’s a finger lickin’ serving of delicious amorality.
Where to watch: Neon
The smartphone horror has had a bit of a moment recently with filmmakers utilising the format to satirise our always-on era. The genius of this excellent show, though, lies in its ability to sustain that tension over the course of an entire series as it sees a cluster of gossiping, jockeying teens succumb to a curse seemingly spread via their online interactions. As always with these set-ups, it’s the real-life horror of a life lived mostly online which terrifies more than the supernatural mumbo-jumbo.
Where to watch: Netflix
Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo supply a sweetly offbeat, Tarantino-riffing comedy about a group of Native American teenagers – and hapless petty criminals – who long to escape their Oklahoma community for California.
Where to watch: Disney+
The always excellent Elisabeth Moss is Kirby, who barely survived a brutal assault and is now hunting her attacker (a thoroughly creepy Jamie Bell). But this serial killer thriller has a supernatural twist: Kirby’s reality keeps changing, and the intricate plot involves time travel.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Fresh from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, the queen of dystopian escapism, Rebecca Ferguson, heads the cast of an evocative sci-fi tale adapted from the cult Wool novels by Hugh Howey. It’s the far future, and engineer Julie (Ferguson) is part of a community living in a vast subterranean mega-complex. The residents are warned not to venture outside, where death is guaranteed. But when Julie investigates a colleague’s mysterious demise, the wool is pulled from her eyes. Season one available now; season two coming November 15.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Try to shake Borat from your mind as Sacha Baron Cohen plays an Israeli spy sent to infiltrate the Syrian Government. It’s based on the astonishing true story of Eli Cohen (no relation).
Where to watch: Netflix
Not the mediocre Colin Firth-starring drama, but the original documentary – a classic of the true crime genre. Michael Peterson is accused of murdering his wife, and this bizarre case features surprises like an eerie cold case, a bisexuality reveal, and, yes, the infamous owl theory.
Where to watch: Netflix
Rashida Jones is full of charm in a wonky dramedy about a recently bereaved American living in Japan who inherits an adorable robot from her late husband. But hang on – her husband designed fridges. So what was he doing making robots? And could this mystery around cutesy android Sunny go some way towards explaining the death of both Suzie’s husband and their son?
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Based on the retro-future sci-fi of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, Tales From The Loop is melancholic, slow TV, set in the fictional town of Mercer, Ohio – where advanced experiential physics has quietly remade the contours of reality. Rebecca Hall and Jonathan Pryce head the cast – though the real star is Philip Glass’ hypnotic score.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Cosmic horror is difficult to pull off, but this two-season anthology gets it terrifyingly right. Series one is adapted from Dan Simmons’ grisly take on the lost Franklin expedition in which two geological survey ships went missing searching for the North West Passage deep in Canada’s Arctic Circle. Ciarán Hinds, Jared Harris and Tobias Menzies play the ship commanders trying to retain their sanity as everything falls apart. Series two switches the action to the United States during World War II and the internment of Japanese-American citizens – introducing a hair-raising Japanese ghost, The Bakemono.
Where to watch: TVNZ+
For Bourne fans, Operation Treadstone will have a chilling resonance. It was the CIA black ops programme which created super-assassins through behavioural modification – and from which Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne did his damnedest to escape. This prequel series traces the programme’s origins and explores the back stories of some of its other alumni.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Rafe Spall and Esther Smith play a couple who find they can’t conceive and so begin the process of adopting a child in this winning comedy-drama. A fantastic ensemble features Imelda Staunton, Ophelia Lovibond, Oliver Chris, Darren Boyd, Phil Davis and Cush Jumbo.
Where to watch: Apple TV+
Based on a book-length exploration by Jon Krakauer, this superlative series stars Andrew Garfield as a detective who finds his faith shaken whilst investigating a brutal killing in a Mormon community. Though it has shades of True Detective in its small-town claustrophobia, it’s a rich and prickling watch all of its own.
Where to watch: Disney+
Parks and Recreation’s Greg Daniels wrote this high-concept sci-fi comedy, which follows a computer programmer who finds his consciousness uploaded into a VR afterlife when he dies – complete with in-app purchases. Like a cheerier, shinier Black Mirror.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Hero is about to go down for murder – but is he really guilty? This adaptation of barrister Imran Mahmood’s novel by Vigil creator Tom Edge cleverly dramatises the racial prejudice and social challenges that Hero faces, while keeping us guessing about his ultimate culpability.
Where to watch: Netflix
Film distributor A24 used this to promote Celine Song's 'Materialists'.
