What to watch: a great binge on Amazon Prime
Plus, an Oscar-nominated drama, Minari and What Maisie Knew
Dear friends,
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OUR TOP TV SHOW OF THE WEEK
Scott & Bailey
New on Amazon Prime this week.
This excellent British detective drama is from Sally Wainwright, writer and creator of Happy Valley. It premiered back in 2011 and now has five seasons to dive into for an extended binge.
Rachel Bailey and Janet Scott are two murder-unit detectives in Manchester, England. The show is as much about their cases as it is about their friendship and lives. In the first epsiode, while Rachel Bailey investigates the alleged suicide of a Turkish immigrant, she’s also investigating her ex-partner, who suspiciously broke up with her and moved away.
It’s packed with the buddy-cop genre, which admittedly has been overdone in British TV. But who knew the solution to making something feel completely fresh is as easy as having the buddies be two women.
📰 Calling it “top-notch British telly”, The Guardian said that the two leads “solve the mystery of how to make Sunday ITV detective shows fresh and exhilarating”
📺 On Amazon Prime U.S.; 🍅 rating: - not available
OUR TOP MOVIE OF THE WEEK
Notes on a Scandal
New on Amazon Prime U.S this week.
This drama-thriller from 2005 stars Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench in roles that earned each of them an Oscar nomination.
Sheba Hart (Blanchett) joins a school as a new teacher and gets tangled up in a relationship with an underage student. An older teacher at the school (Dench) finds out about the relationship and threatens to expose Hart. The result is a toxic relationship between the two of them, full of manipulation and twists.
📰 BBC: “Judi Dench is truly spellbinding as the dumpy schoolteacher hiding an iron fist in a velvet glove to wheedle her way into the confidence of a younger colleague with a terrible secret (Cate Blanchett). Around these formidable women, director Richard Eyre (Iris) and writer Patrick Marber (Closer) craft a psychological thriller of rare delicacy.”
📺 On Amazon Prime U.S.; 🍅 rating: 87%
Top picks outside of Netflix and Amazon
A24’s Minari, one of this year’s most exciting releases, is now available on rental services. Steven Yeun (Burning) is a Korean immigrant who moves his family to rural Arkansas, where he works in a chicken plant and is saving to farm their plot of land. In Korean and English, it’s an excellent story both of immigrant ambition and struggle, all based on director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood.
The 2012 drama What Maisie Knew is now on HBO Max. It stars Julianne Moore as a successful musician who is separating from her art dealer husband (Steve Coogan). The film studies how the parents handle their divorce after it has a bad effect on their little girl, Maisie.
That’s it for this week, I hope there is something in there for you.
The next edition of this weekly letter will be in your inbox Friday, March, 5th.
Until then,
Bilal