Am I Being Unreasonable? (TVNZ+)
The life of the stay-at-home parent can seem like the dream when you go to work at an office every day, but Daisy May Cooper paints a slightly different picture in the BBC comedy-thriller Am I Being Unreasonable? First her character Nic has to pry herself off the couch and away from Real Housewives because her son’s on at her about not wanting to be “late for school”. Then an imperceptibly minor run-in with one of the alpha mums gives her something to stew over all day. The cleaner’s in, so she has to finish her Real Housewives ep on her phone in the cemetery. And she can’t stop having flashbacks to the horrific train accident that killed the man she was having an affair with right before her eyes. She tells the story of that affair to a new mum at the school, Jen (Selin Hizili, Cooper’s real-life best friend and it shows), over a quiet wine, which turns into a bottle of wine which turns into vodka and the pair screaming with laughter quoting “what a sad little life Jane” at each other. What Nic doesn’t notice is the phone propped up against Jen’s knee, recording the whole story. A comedy-thriller can be a hard balance to strike, and there are times during the six-episode series you wish it would just choose one or the other – some moments in later episodes are so riotously funny that you wonder why couldn’t the whole thing be like this. But the thriller elements – why is Jen covertly filming Nic, for a start – are ultimately what makes this the kind of series you can easily watch in one go, and three hours well spent at that.
A Spy Among Friends (TVNZ+)
It’s a big year for dramatic adaptations of Ben McIntyre’s military history books – first, the stranger-than-fiction Operation Mincemeat was turned into a film starring Colin Firth, then SAS Rogue Heroes was made into a series by the folks who made Peaky Blinders. Now completing the trifecta, A Spy Among Friends tells the story of Kim Philby, an MI6 intelligence officer who in the 1960s was revealed to have been secretly working as a double agent for the KGB and spilling top secret British tea to the Soviets. Guy Pearce plays Philby, with Damian Lewis as his MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliott.
