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Out this week
THE TWELVE: THE CAPE ROCK KILLER
The jury is in
Streaming: TVNZ+ from October 1
Sam Neill’s venerable defence barrister Brett Colby returns for a third murder case in the Aussie crime series and he’s got quite a bit of Kiwi help in the cast. The ensemble involves Danielle Cormack as the prosecutor, Sarah Peirse as the wife of the accused, Marlon Williams as Colby’s son, as well as Neill’s Sleeping Dogs cast-mate Sir Ian Mune and rising star Hanah Tayeb. This series is set in Western Australia, where Colby keeps himself busy on his vineyard – which for Neill must be a stretch – between cases. The trial involves a man accused of killing a woman, who threatened to expose him as the murderer in a notorious local case dating back to 1968. To read more go here
New Norton naughtiness
Screening: TVNZ 2, 7.30pm, Fridays from October 3
Streaming: TVNZ+
TVNZ has snaffled Norton’s show from its long-time (since 2012) home on Three. Episodes screen a week after they air in the UK and the line-up for the season opener includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Emily Blunt talking about working together on the UFC film The Smashing Machine, Matthew McConaughey promoting new thriller The Lost Bus, and Aimee Lou Wood speaking about her new BBC series Film Club which is coming to ThreeNow this month. The second episode on October 10 has one Taylor Swift. But first an excerpt about how McConaughey went cold turkey on rom-coms ...
Getting in the groove
Screening: Sky Arts, 9pm, Friday October 3
A better-than-average survey of what funk music is, the social and political context it emerged from in 1960s America and its enduring influence on popular culture. James Brown, Parliament, Labelle, Sly Stone and Fela Kuti all get a look in, and interviewees include Fred Wesley, David Byrne, Questlove, Carlos Alomar, Nona Hendryx, an array of historians and writers and George Clinton, the “Prime Minister of Funk” himself. It’s a funky education.
From mother’s boy to serial killer
Streaming: Netflix, full series from Friday October 3
The news has been so bad lately that maybe going back to an old-fashioned sicko serial killer can be a reminder of simpler times. The third instalment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Monster anthology tells the story of rural Wisconsin killer, grave-robber and body-part fetishist Ed Gein. It’s a story that has previously inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs and the series doesn’t shy away from that – Alfred Hitchcock’s making of Psycho is actually part of the narrative. Gein is played by Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), who described the series to Netflix’s Tudum magazine as “the really human, tender, unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of who Ed was and what he did”.
Class struggles
Streaming: Disney+, from Friday October 3
Brian Jordan Alvarez returns for a second season as Evan Marquez, an English teacher who must navigate “the political minefield known as the American high school”. Marquez and his colleagues grapple with climate change, Covid, military recruitment and student phone use and his righteousness causes friction in his relationship with his ex-boyfriend Malcolm, who goes to a different school. All 10 episodes ready to stream.
Voyages and villainy
Screening: Sky Real History, 7.30pm, Saturdays from October 4
The former Top Gear head and veteran of his many boy’s own shows brings his avuncular and slight goofy presence to the stories of three of history’s most famous maritime explorers: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain James Cook. It arrives on screens a couple of months after May brought a live version to NZ stages. The series examines the innovations that enabled their voyages but also looks at how the great men became monsters. Late in his life, Cook became a tyrant who ordered increasingly extreme punishments of both his crewmen and the native people he encountered. And Columbus? Total psycho.
Coming soon
Coal case
Streaming: Acorn TV, from Monday October 6. Full series
It’s taken three years for season two to arrive after the well-received first series that introduced the titular Scottish detective from Val McDermid’s crime novels. Pirie is played by Lauren Lyle (Outlander), who is soon to be seen in Sky TV UK-NZ drama The Ridge. This three-episode season follows McDermid’s A Darker Domain, another unsolved murder from decades past, with the story flashing back to the Fife coalfields involvement in miners’ strikes of the mid-1980s, and to the unsolved disappearance of oil heiress Catriona Grant and her young son. Forty years later, a body has been discovered, and Detective Inspector Pirie is assigned to the case. The familiar figure of James Cosmo plays Sir Broderick Grant, father and grandfather of the victims and, as well as heading back in time, the story stretches from Scotland to Malta – where Pirie’s trademark bumbag just makes her look like another tourist.
Screening: Sky Arts October 7, 8.30pm
Streaming: Neon, October 28
Former Auckland Art Gallery curator and Frances Hodgkins expert Mary Kisler guest stars in tonight’s episode about whether a painting bought for about NZ$80 in a Hertfordshire council sell-off of its unwanted art collection might be by the expatriate NZ painter. This is the third episode of the new 2025 season which Sky Arts fast tracked so we could see the Hodgkins episode. To read more go here
River queen
Screening: Wednesdays, 8.30pm TVNZ 1, from October 8
Streaming: TVNZ+
Dame Joanna Lumley’s late-life career as a travelogue host seems unstoppable. Here, over three episodes, she follows the Danube from its source in the Black Forest to its delta at the Black Sea, taking in Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania – with a detour to the Ukraine border. She also catches up with Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, visits the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and participates in a ceremony with a coven of witches in Romania. “They are white witches, they’re good witches,” she explained recently. “And they are so glamorous and so fantastic.”
FILM CLUB
The garage of dreams
Streaming: ThreeNow, from October 8, episodes weekly
Aimee Lou Wood (The White Lotus, Daddy Issues) and Ralph Davis (House of the Dragon) co-write and star in a romantic comedy they reportedly worked on together for a decade. Wood plays Evie, a woman who hasn’t left the house in six months but pours her heart into a weekly film club in her mother’s garage, where she can escape – and spend time with her special friend Noa (Nabhaan Rizwan, who played Dionysus in Kaos). But Noa announces he’s moving away for work, and everything begins to change. Full six-episode season.
Stars aim to deceive
Screening: Thursdays 7.30pm Three, from October 9
Streaming: ThreeNow
Unusually for a celebrity reality show, this version of The Traitors is quite full of actual British celebrities who presumably didn’t just sign on because they were desperate. Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, Alan Carr, singers Charlotte Church and Paloma Faith, rugby player Joe Marler and Olympian Tom Daley are among the contestants. Claudia Winkleman orchestrates it all in her usual campy, imperious fashion. Screening here only hours after it airs in the UK.
Posh to the front
Streaming: Netflix, full season from October 9
Victoria Beckham attracted a lot of the attention in Netflix’s docuseries about her footballing husband, but here she’s front and centre. The three-part series, produced by Nicola Howson, who made Beckham, tells the story of her formative years, but the focus is on her work towards the big New York Fashion Week show she hopes will establish her beyond doubt as a serious fashion designer. Interviews include Tom Ford, Roland Mouret, Anna Wintour, Eva Longoria and, of course, the husband. “Nothing is sugarcoated,” she told Bloomberg earlier this year. “There are tears.”
They want you, they want you as a new recruit
Streaming: Netflix, full season from October 9
Legendary TV producer Norman Lear got this one last show under way before he died aged 101 in December 2023 – although its completion was stymied by the screen writers’ strike. Miles Heizer (13 Reasons Why) plays Cameron Cope, a closeted teen who signs up for a US Marines boot camp in the 1990s in the hope it might make him not gay. Alongside him is his straight best friend Ray (Liam Oh, The Thing About Harry). The eight-part comedy-drama is based on The Pink Marine, the memoir of Greg Cope White.
Small-town sheriff vs prisoners on the loose
Streaming: Apple TV+, from October 10, first two episodes then weekly
Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) plays Frank Remnick, the veteran US marshal tasked with keeping a quiet Alaskan town safe. That job suddenly looks a lot harder when a prison transport plane crashes nearby and inmates – including one mystery prisoner who might be in on the whole thing – escape. Then his wife (New Zealander Simone Kessell) gets kidnapped. “The show is Con Air meets The Fugitive,” creator Jon Bokenkamp told Esquire. “It’s grounded in 90s action thrillers.”
Later in the month
How he composed himself
Screening: Sky Arts, 8.20pm, from Monday October 13
Following its earlier studies on he lives of Leonardo Da Vinci and Shakespeare, the BBC has delivered another three-part docudrama this time recounting the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But this one comes heavy on the celebrity talking heads, mostly British actors like Stephen Fry (who gets to read some of Mozart’s rude poems), Richard E Grant, Sheila Hancock, Adjoa Andoh, and comedian Chris Addison who are there as Mozart lovers and get to act as a Greek chorus on events in the composer’s life. Among the experts and musicians are prominent conductors Ed Gardner and Jane Glover and sopranos Lucy Crowe and Golda Shultz. The series is narrated by Juliet Stevenson, who, of course played some nice duets with Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly Deeply.
A new quirky crime-solver
Screening: Vibe, Tuesdays 8.30pm, from October 14
Streaming: Neon, later in the year
As he did in Doctor Who and Sherlock, Mark Gattis both writes and appears on screen – in this case, as Gabriel Book, the proprietor of a 1940s antiquarian bookshop in London, who helps police solve baffling murder mysteries. He has a great relationship with his wife (Polly Walker, Bridgerton), who knows he’s actually gay. Radio Times heaped praise on the show as “a breath of fresh air” with “more than a bit of Poirot about it all”. Viewers seemed to agree – it exceeded all ratings expectations and had a second season confirmed before its initial six episodes (in which three mysteries are solved) had finished airing.
LYNLEY
New adaptation of the detective novels
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Wednesday October 15, episodes weekly
An odd-couple detective show based on the novel series by Elizabeth George. Detective Inspector Tommy Lynley (Leo Suter, Vikings) is a cop, but also a toff, which sometimes makes for an awkward relationship with his colleagues. He’s paired with Sergeant Barbara Havers, a working-class maverick with a chip on her shoulder, and, against the odds, they become a formidable team. This four-partner for the streaming channel BritBox isn’t the first adaptation of the books (the BBC aired The Inspector Lynley Mysteries 20-odd years ago), but it seems to have a struck a sweet spot with murder-mystery fans and reviews, especially from American critics, have been strong.
Still rich and silly
Streaming: Apple TV+, from Wednesday October 15, first two episodes then weekly
It’s season three and Molly Wells (Maya Rudolph) is still trying to distribute her $87 billion divorce settlement to people who actually need the money – and still being daft as a brush. (In the current news environment, presenting extremely rich people who aren’t absolute monsters seems an agreeable form of escapism.) Season two ended with a very awkward moment with potential love-interest Arthur (Nat Faxon) and Molly instructing her assistant Nicholas to “get me out of here” on her private jet. The trailer suggests that the relationship with Arthur has gone better than the plane flight. Guest stars include Stephanie Styles, Kesha, Zane Phillips, Henry Winkler, X Mayo, and Paula Pell. Two-episode season premiere, then new episodes weekly.
True-crime podcast remade for TV
Streaming: Disney+, from Wednesday October 15, episodes weekly
In what could be seen as a striking example of nominative determinism, South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh was convicted in 2023 of killing his wife Maggie and their 22-year-old son Paul. This eight-episode drama is based on the global hit podcast series The Murdaugh Murders, which began reporting the bizarre details of the case shortly after the killings took place in 2021. (The fact that some of those details reached the public is now the basis of both felony misconduct charges against a court clerk and a motion for a retrial by Murdaugh.) Jason Clarke (also currently the lead in The Last Frontier) plays Alex Murdaugh, Patricia Arquette is his wife Maggie and podcast creator Mandy Matney is played by Brittany Snow.
THE IRIS AFFAIR
Thriller king aims to entertain
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Thursday October 16. New episodes weekly.
Wellington-based English screenwriter Neil Cross (Luther) is the creator and writer of this Sky TV UK thriller. Niamh Algar (Mary & George) plays quirky but gifted puzzle-solver Iris Nixon, who is invited to Italy by entrepreneur Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander, The White Lotus) and accepts an offer to join a team of scientists working on a powerful new technology. When she realises that the tech is extremely dangerous, she steals the activation code, goes on the run, and creates a new identity for herself. But the billionaire has put a bounty on her head and it’s not that simple. “All I wanted to do was to make a show I wanted to watch,” Cross said recently. “Iris is an unapologetically exciting, witty, chase-driven adventure show and features a lead character the like of which I don’t think we’ve ever met before on TV.”
West Wing, here we come
Streaming: Netflix, from Thursday October 16, full season
The third season of the political thriller entered on Keri Russell’s Kate Wyler, the US ambassador to the UK kicks off right where 2024’s second left off. Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) is now President after the season two finale where President Rayburn Michael McKean died in office, possibly at the shock of hearing what his deputy had done in the conspiracy behind the attack on a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf which had killed dozens of British sailors. Joining the cast this season is Janney’s former West Wing colleague Bradley Whitford playing her husband. Also new to the halls of power is Aidan Turner (Poldark) as a mystery man who Wyler has a personal eye on.
For pointers to other recent new shows, go to the September Viewing Guide.