If Christmas TV Is Not Up To Scratch .............
10 Box Sets To Binge On ....
From The Missing to The Night Manager, Victoria to Vinyl, we pick the best entertainment for a sofa marathon
From left: Hugh Laurie, Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Debicki, Olivia Colman and Tom Hollander in The Night Manager
Billions
Sky Box Sets or DVD
What makes the alpha-male grandstanding between Damian Lewis’s self-made hedge-fund king Bobby Axelrod and the man on his case, Paul Giamatti’s Ivy League attorney Chuck Rhoades such a blast is the virile, aphoristic dialogue. “A good matador doesn’t try to kill a fresh bull. You wait until he’s been stuck a few times,” suggests Rhoades of the man he despises. Later Axelrod shoots back at him: “I have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and philanthropy; I employ hundreds of people directly, thousands indirectly . . . you’re a traffic cop hiding in federal robes.” Such swagger is but window-dressing to what is a nifty cat-and-mouse drama with many more shades of grey than you’d expect.
Try this if you liked The Wolf of Wall Street; the US remake of House of Cards
Sky Box Sets or DVD
What makes the alpha-male grandstanding between Damian Lewis’s self-made hedge-fund king Bobby Axelrod and the man on his case, Paul Giamatti’s Ivy League attorney Chuck Rhoades such a blast is the virile, aphoristic dialogue. “A good matador doesn’t try to kill a fresh bull. You wait until he’s been stuck a few times,” suggests Rhoades of the man he despises. Later Axelrod shoots back at him: “I have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and philanthropy; I employ hundreds of people directly, thousands indirectly . . . you’re a traffic cop hiding in federal robes.” Such swagger is but window-dressing to what is a nifty cat-and-mouse drama with many more shades of grey than you’d expect.
Try this if you liked The Wolf of Wall Street; the US remake of House of Cards
The Crown
Netflix
Knocking spots off Victoria (see below) — although you’ll need a Netflix subscription for this one — is the writer Peter Morgan’s £100 million dramatisation of the reign of the Queen. It begins with her father coughing up blood into a royal loo and continues in that intimate, close-up manner. Churchill (John Lithgow) is a scene-stealing egotist, while the marriage of Princess Elizabeth (Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith) becomes a perpetual tightrope walk between domestic life and royal duty. The series as a whole illuminates forgotten details of our history (the fourth episode on the Great Smog reminds us of how many died in London), while looking wonderfully cinematic throughout.
Try this if you liked Edward & Mrs Simpson; Peter Morgan’s film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren
Netflix
Knocking spots off Victoria (see below) — although you’ll need a Netflix subscription for this one — is the writer Peter Morgan’s £100 million dramatisation of the reign of the Queen. It begins with her father coughing up blood into a royal loo and continues in that intimate, close-up manner. Churchill (John Lithgow) is a scene-stealing egotist, while the marriage of Princess Elizabeth (Claire Foy) and Philip (Matt Smith) becomes a perpetual tightrope walk between domestic life and royal duty. The series as a whole illuminates forgotten details of our history (the fourth episode on the Great Smog reminds us of how many died in London), while looking wonderfully cinematic throughout.
Try this if you liked Edward & Mrs Simpson; Peter Morgan’s film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren
Fleabag
iPlayer or DVD
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag creation (we never learn the character’s actual name) has become an icon for today’s millennials, so if you want to find out what the fuss is about . . . this twentysomething owner of a guinea pig-themed café in London is promiscuous and damaged. She thieves, she lies, she’s very bad. Somehow, she is also a sympathetic heroine as her life unravels across a six-episode comedy — helped by her knowing glances to camera (think an X-rated Miranda). Olivia Colman and Bill Paterson add class, but it’s Waller-Bridge’s show as she veers wildly between comedy and tragedy.
Try this if you liked Girls; Peep Show
iPlayer or DVD
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag creation (we never learn the character’s actual name) has become an icon for today’s millennials, so if you want to find out what the fuss is about . . . this twentysomething owner of a guinea pig-themed café in London is promiscuous and damaged. She thieves, she lies, she’s very bad. Somehow, she is also a sympathetic heroine as her life unravels across a six-episode comedy — helped by her knowing glances to camera (think an X-rated Miranda). Olivia Colman and Bill Paterson add class, but it’s Waller-Bridge’s show as she veers wildly between comedy and tragedy.
Try this if you liked Girls; Peep Show
Halt and Catch Fire
Amazon Prime or DVD
You probably won’t have heard of this one — unhyped, with a terrible title, buried away on Amazon, yet adored by those who have found it. AMC’s series can broadly be described as Mad Men for the 1980s, set in the emerging personal computer business instead of in 1960s advertising. The key figure is an ambiguous, smooth-talking Steve Jobs-wannabe named Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), who in 1983 teams up with a tech nerd/family man (Scoot McNairy) and a punkish young beauty (Mackenzie Davis) to build a new computer to rival IBM. Three series in and, as they enter the internet age, the rivalries, office politics and company sabotages are hopelessly addictive.
Try this if you liked Mad Men; Steve Jobs (the 2015 Michael Fassbender film)
Amazon Prime or DVD
You probably won’t have heard of this one — unhyped, with a terrible title, buried away on Amazon, yet adored by those who have found it. AMC’s series can broadly be described as Mad Men for the 1980s, set in the emerging personal computer business instead of in 1960s advertising. The key figure is an ambiguous, smooth-talking Steve Jobs-wannabe named Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), who in 1983 teams up with a tech nerd/family man (Scoot McNairy) and a punkish young beauty (Mackenzie Davis) to build a new computer to rival IBM. Three series in and, as they enter the internet age, the rivalries, office politics and company sabotages are hopelessly addictive.
Try this if you liked Mad Men; Steve Jobs (the 2015 Michael Fassbender film)
The Missing
BBC Store or DVD
The recent second series of the BBC’s mystery drama started with twists and continued with more twists. A young woman has stumbled barefoot into a town in Germany claiming to be Alice Webster, who vanished 11 years earlier, poleaxing her army parents (Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey). Is she who she seems? Soon the action is hopping between three time frames in European and Middle Eastern locations as the limping French detective Julien Baptiste untangles a case involving sexual abuse and cover-ups. Confused? You might be. Intrigued? By the gripping last episode, undoubtedly so.
Try this if you liked The Bridge; the first series of The Missing
BBC Store or DVD
The recent second series of the BBC’s mystery drama started with twists and continued with more twists. A young woman has stumbled barefoot into a town in Germany claiming to be Alice Webster, who vanished 11 years earlier, poleaxing her army parents (Keeley Hawes and David Morrissey). Is she who she seems? Soon the action is hopping between three time frames in European and Middle Eastern locations as the limping French detective Julien Baptiste untangles a case involving sexual abuse and cover-ups. Confused? You might be. Intrigued? By the gripping last episode, undoubtedly so.
Try this if you liked The Bridge; the first series of The Missing
The Night Manager
BBC Store or DVD
The big talking point series back in February was the luxuriant six-part Le Carré that pitched Hugh Laurie as “the worst man in the world”, an Old Etonian arms dealer named Richard Roper. You wallow in the sun-soaked Mediterranean locations — not least Roper’s clifftop lair in Majorca — but it’s the intimate and deadly dance of death played between Roper and the undercover spy in his confidence, Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine, that really grips. Another reason to watch is Roper’s bitchy, vicious sidekick Corky, played by Tom Hollander. The best Bond adventure that never was.
Try this if you liked Homeland; The Constant Gardener
BBC Store or DVD
The big talking point series back in February was the luxuriant six-part Le Carré that pitched Hugh Laurie as “the worst man in the world”, an Old Etonian arms dealer named Richard Roper. You wallow in the sun-soaked Mediterranean locations — not least Roper’s clifftop lair in Majorca — but it’s the intimate and deadly dance of death played between Roper and the undercover spy in his confidence, Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine, that really grips. Another reason to watch is Roper’s bitchy, vicious sidekick Corky, played by Tom Hollander. The best Bond adventure that never was.
Try this if you liked Homeland; The Constant Gardener
Stranger Things
Netflix
The Goonies, Stand by Me, It, Firestarter . . . if any of these touchstone films of 1980s Americana strike a chord, why haven’t you already watched the watercooler series of 2016? With Winona Ryder playing the fraught small-town mother of a missing boy, a shadowy monster in the woods, a telekinetic girl on the run from an evil scientist, and a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons-playing brats on BMXs getting on the case, it’s a nostalgia fest that somehow combines beautifully into a tense, slightly scary thriller. To be watched with pizza and a fizzy drink, just as you would have in 1983.
Try this if you liked E.T.; Black Mirror
Netflix
The Goonies, Stand by Me, It, Firestarter . . . if any of these touchstone films of 1980s Americana strike a chord, why haven’t you already watched the watercooler series of 2016? With Winona Ryder playing the fraught small-town mother of a missing boy, a shadowy monster in the woods, a telekinetic girl on the run from an evil scientist, and a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons-playing brats on BMXs getting on the case, it’s a nostalgia fest that somehow combines beautifully into a tense, slightly scary thriller. To be watched with pizza and a fizzy drink, just as you would have in 1983.
Try this if you liked E.T.; Black Mirror
Trapped
Amazon Prime & DVD
Oh gawd, yet more glum Scandi-noir, you may rightly think — but this Icelandic serial, shown on BBC Four earlier in the year, was a cut above every other thriller that starts with a mutilated corpse. That’s largely thanks to the burly presence of Olafur Darri Olafsson, all 6ft 5in of him, as the local police chief trying to solve the case after a blizzard confines the murder suspects to his small harbour town. Wrap up warm for many chilly pleasures — not least the avalanche in episode four.
Try this if you liked The Killing; Broadchurch
Amazon Prime & DVD
Oh gawd, yet more glum Scandi-noir, you may rightly think — but this Icelandic serial, shown on BBC Four earlier in the year, was a cut above every other thriller that starts with a mutilated corpse. That’s largely thanks to the burly presence of Olafur Darri Olafsson, all 6ft 5in of him, as the local police chief trying to solve the case after a blizzard confines the murder suspects to his small harbour town. Wrap up warm for many chilly pleasures — not least the avalanche in episode four.
Try this if you liked The Killing; Broadchurch
Victoria
DVD
Those who didn’t see the eight-part first series of the royal biopic, and perhaps are missing Downton Abbey this Christmas, have the answer on DVD. Daisy Goodwin’s entertaining dramatisation of the first four years of Victoria’s reign is distinguished by a luminous performance from Jenna Coleman in the title role and Rufus Sewell as her dishy first prime minister, Lord Melbourne.
Try this if you liked Downton Abbey
DVD
Those who didn’t see the eight-part first series of the royal biopic, and perhaps are missing Downton Abbey this Christmas, have the answer on DVD. Daisy Goodwin’s entertaining dramatisation of the first four years of Victoria’s reign is distinguished by a luminous performance from Jenna Coleman in the title role and Rufus Sewell as her dishy first prime minister, Lord Melbourne.
Try this if you liked Downton Abbey
Vinyl
Sky Box Sets or DVD
For those wanting a classic-rock kind of Christmas, there’s only one gig in town: this rollicking serial co-created by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger about a record label in 1973 New York. It is so in love with its era, it even re-creates a Led Zeppelin concert in the first episode. Cocaine, raucous clubs and yellow-tinted aviator shades are everywhere as Bobby Cannavale’s music executive has a meltdown. With Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and David Bowie popping up, it’s often as if Scorsese is doing Stars in Their Eyes. A guilty pleasure for anyone who has the Stones or the New York Dolls in their LP collection.
Try this if you liked Boogie Nights; Almost Famous
Sky Box Sets or DVD
For those wanting a classic-rock kind of Christmas, there’s only one gig in town: this rollicking serial co-created by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger about a record label in 1973 New York. It is so in love with its era, it even re-creates a Led Zeppelin concert in the first episode. Cocaine, raucous clubs and yellow-tinted aviator shades are everywhere as Bobby Cannavale’s music executive has a meltdown. With Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and David Bowie popping up, it’s often as if Scorsese is doing Stars in Their Eyes. A guilty pleasure for anyone who has the Stones or the New York Dolls in their LP collection.
Try this if you liked Boogie Nights; Almost Famous
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