The Diplomat
The dance continues
Streaming: Netflix, from Thursday October 31
US ambassador Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) finished the first season of The Diplomat with a big problem: the realisation that the deadly attack that destroyed a British ship was less likely to be the work of a rival foreign power than of the British prime minister. But how can she act on that knowledge when she’s in the UK and who – apart from her nearly ex-husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), who survived the explosion at the end of the first season – can she even trust? In the dance of diplomacy, the pace is picking up.
A Remarkable Place to Die
Resort to murder
Screening: TVNZ1, 8.30pm, Sunday November 3
Streaming: TVNZ+
The chances of being murdered in the actual Queenstown are very slight when compared to the rest of the country but that hasn’t stopped crime dramas setting up shop there every few years. A Remarkable Place to Die follows Top of the Lake and One Lane Bridge as a story of a cop new to the Southern Lakes beat taking charge. Chelsie Preston Crayford plays Detective Inspector Anais Mallory in the series of 90-minute murder mystery episodes, which say its makers, isn’t as cosy crime as The Brokenwood Mysteries but isn’t as dark as its aforementioned Queenstown predecessors. No stranger to the district having starred in Under the Vines, Rebecca Gibney plays Crayford’s mother, and the cast also includes Matt Whelan, Alex Tarrant, and Roimata Fox.
Dead And Buried
Didn’t you kill my brother?
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Tuesday November 5
When young Derry mum Cathy McDaid (Annabel Scholey, The Split) bumps into Michael McAllister (Colin Morgan, Merlin), the man who killed her brother 20 years earlier, she is shocked. When she discovers that he has been a free man for years, she is enraged and embarks on a scheme to reel in the killer by adopting a fake online persona, stalking him and trying to ruin his comfortable new life. The Irish Times’ reviewer found the BBC Northern Ireland four-parter absurd (“none of the characters behaves rationally”) but entertaining.
Daddy Issues
A winning comedy about losers
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Wednesday November 6
A very modern comedy about a 24-year-old party girl (Aimee Lou Wood, Sex Education) who becomes pregnant after a random hook-up in an aeroplane toilet. She has to take on her beaten-down, divorced dad (David Morrissey, in a rare comedic role) as a flatmate, for practical and emotional support he is not well-equipped to provide. Let’s not get started on the rest of the family. The show, the first sitcom from comedian, TV writer and podcaster (Do the Right Thing) Danielle Ward, won rave notices from UK critics when it debuted in August. The Daily Telegraph called it “deft, daft, and deliciously watchable” and the Guardian praised its “potent blend of wit and charm”. A second season has already been commissioned.
Inside No. 9
The last of the strange stories
Screening: Sky Arts, 9pm, Thursday November 7
Streaming: Neon
The award-winning British anthology series racked up its ninth – and final – season in 10 years without a notable change in the recipe: each stand-alone 30-minute story features creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith (The League of Gentlemen), an array of guest stars, a darkly comedic plot-with-a-twist, and a brass statue of a hare. This farewell season won the show’s fourth Bafta and was hailed by the Times as “exquisite”.
Citadel: Honey Bunny
The Indian version
Streaming: Prime Video, from Thursday November 7
The Russo brothers designed their spy thriller Citadel as the basis of a “universe” and this is the second non-English-language spin off within it, after the Italian Citadel: Diana. Written and directed by the blockbuster Indian film-making duo Raj & DK, Honey Bunny stars Varun Dhawan as Bunny, a stuntman who recruits struggling actress Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) for a gig that hurls them into a world of danger and espionage. Years later, their past catches up and they must reunite to protect the daughter they had along the way – who is a childhood version of ace spy Nadia Sinh from the original series. So, it’s effectively a prequel to Citadel. But mostly, it’s a big, glossy stunt fest with some culturally specific jokes and a lot of elaborately choreographed violence.
Bank Under Siege
A dramatic true-life story from Spain
Streaming: Netflix, from Friday November 8
Spain’s emergence into democracy in the early 1980s was perilous. In February 1981, a group of military officers staged an attempted coup, occupying the lower house of the Spanish Parliament and holding MPs hostage for 18 hours. Their bid to restore a Francoist regime was defeated with the public intervention of King Juan Carlos. This five-part limited series, produced in Spain as Operation Banco Central, is about what happened three months later – the storming and occupation of a crowded bank by armed gunmen who threatened to begin executing hostages if their demand for the release of the coup leaders was not met. Opt for the subtitled version, because the English-language dubbing is terrible.
Yellowstone
There’s a new boss at the ranch
Screening: Sky 5, 9.30pm, from Monday November 11
Streaming: Neon
In the modern fashion, this is not season six of Yellowstone, but part two of season five – even if it is nearly two years since part one concluded. The big thing that’s happened in the interim is the departure of Kevin Costner as the patriarch John Dutton, meaning another of the saga’s characters must take over the running of the ranch (series creator Taylor Sheridan has said his original story arc was always written with Dutton gone by the end). Cole Hauser recently confirmed that his character, Rip Wheeler, is the new boss. Rumours in the screen industry press that Yellowstone will not end as planned with season five seem less solid.
In Cold Water: The Shelter Bay Mystery
Kiwi on trial in Canadian true-crime case
Screening: Sky Open, from Monday November 18 to Wednesday November 20, 8.30pm
Streaming: Prime Video from Tuesday November 12
The convoluted Canadian case which saw former Napier city councillor Peter Beckett go on trial for murder twice after the 2010 death of his wife while on they were on a fishing vacation in the Rocky Mountains gets a true-crime series which is debuting in NZ on Sky Open just as it starts streaming around the world on Prime Video. The three episodes recount the case and the investigation of the drowning of teacher Laura Letts-Beckett which led to her Kiwi husband’s conviction, and which was quashed on appeal. Beckett appears in the series alongside interviews with Letts-Beckett’s friends and family, lawyers, forensic experts and police.
Blackshore
Irish detective show
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Wednesday November 13
A new series from writer Kate O’Riordan (Smother, The Bay). Lisa Dwan (Top Boy) stars as Detective Inspector Fia Lucey, who returns to her isolated rural hometown under a cloud around her actions on the job in Dublin and finds herself on the case of a missing local woman. She has to find her way back into the community and – as ever – come to grips with her own dark past there. The Irish Times called it “silly and watchable”.
Bad Sisters
Moving on from the murder
Streaming: Apple TV+, from Wednesday November 13
Sharon Horgan’s black comedy about a group of sisters committing and covering up the murder of an abusive husband was originally written as a limited series – it was based on the single season of the Belgian series Clan – but she told Variety recently she was happy to step up and continue the story after the show became a hit. In this second season, the Garvey sisters appear to be moving on from the many bad choices they made in season one – but a surprise discovery brings a clever new cop onto the scene and their troubles begin again. It’s not just the murder, it’s the menopause.
Say Nothing
Nothing but Troubles
Streaming: Disney+, from Thursday November 14
Patrick Radden Keefe’s tense, compelling Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland may be the best book written about the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Indeed, the New York Times placed it the top 20 of its 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. So, there is a lot to live up to for this limited series – and since the release of the trailer, some concern that director Michael Lennox (Derry Girls) has turned the book into an action caper centred on Dolours and Marian Price, the real-life sisters prepared to kill for a free Ireland. The series reportedly unfolds, like the book, from the IRA’s shocking abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a single mother suspected of being a British Army informant.
Cross
The detective psychologist
Streaming: Prime Video, from Thursday November 14
Alex Cross, a Washington DC homicide detective and forensic psychologist depicted in the novel series (all 20 of them) by James Patterson, has been played on the big screen by both Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry. Now Aldis Hodge (Black Adam) takes the lead in this TV adaptation by Ben Watkins (Burn Notice). Cross, a father still grieving the death of his wife, must stop a sadistic serial killer who has left a trail of bodies around the city. To do that, he needs to get inside the killer’s head while keeping his own.
The Day of the Jackal
The icon gets an update
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Friday November 15
Is there a better-known spy thriller than Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, based on a real plot to assassinate French president Charles De Gaulle? A more iconic movie in the genre than the film version that followed two years later? This TV adaptation by Ronan Bennett (Top Boy) steps into some big shoes. Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) plays the title role and recently told Entertainment Weekly that he had grown up loving the original film and was drawn to the project by the chance to “reimagine” its plot for contemporary audiences. It is, he says, “a completely different piece” that has “been reconceived and contemporised with a new target”.
Dune Prophecy
The spice girls
Screening: HBO, from 8.30pm, Monday November 18
Streaming: Neon
The sci-fi year kicked off with director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, his acclaimed movie adaptation wrapping up Frank Herbert’s epic novel. Now, before the director’s Part Three film which adapts the sequel book Dune: Messiah, comes a six-part series from HBO set in the same universe. Dune Prophecy doesn’t have Villeneuve’s direct involvement (he’s an executive producer), and it’s set thousands of years before the films. But – judging by the trailer – the look and interplanetary political intrigue and feudal rivalries go way back. The series is loosely based on the non-Herbert novel Sisterhood of Dune and follows Valya and Tula Harkonnen (Emily Watson and Olivia Williams) as they fight for their all-female nun-like sect of superhuman “truthsayers”, the Bene Gesserit. Both are ancestors of the House Harkonnen, which betrays Paul Atreides and his father in the Dune movies.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the October, September, August, July, and June viewing guides.
