Pig out on Black Mirror and Japanese intrigue
Black Mirror, Season 3
Available from Friday, 12 episodes Charlie Brooker was once best known for his acerbic reviews in The Guardian and his witty takedowns of sundry telly dross in Screenwipe on Channel 4. That his name has since been incorporated into the title of the latter series is testament, in part, to the massive success of Black Mirror, which Brooker created. When it first appeared three years ago the show — a series of stand-alone vignettes — was instantly hailed as a sci-fi classic and cleaned up at the Emmys. It also featured a storyline that involved the sitting British prime minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig live on television (no prizes for guessing where he got that idea). Brooker is now back with the third season and this time he’s skewering the hypocrisy of social media. Each episode is a dark parable, which looks at the effect modern technology might have on humanity. In the first one, Bryce Dallas Howard plays the main character, Lacie, who is ‘lost’. She has been hypnotised by social media into thinking her value is equivalent to the approval she gets online. While Lacie works on being the most people-pleasing and highly-rateable version of herself that’s possible, we see a glimpse of her about to lose her temper at a hideous two-star review. Totally understandable.
Midnight Diner — Tokyo Stories
Available from Friday, three seasons Like Black Mirror, Midnight Diner — Tokyo Stories takes several vignettes which are woven into an overall theme. The starting point is a small restaurant in the back alleys of the Japanese capital’s bustling downtown. Open from the odd hours of midnight to 7am, the Midnight Diner is a haven for the city’s weary souls, attracting disparate characters from transvestites to mobsters, furtive businessmen and boisterous ladies who lunch. Directed by award-winning auteur Matsuoka Joji, the film is neatly divided into three portions, each revolving around a Japanese dish: a tomato ketchup-based pasta served on top of a lightly fried egg roll; yam rice; and Japanesestyle curry. These dishes each tell the story of a gold-digging divorcee, a wandering homeless girl — beautifully portrayed by Tabe Mikako — and a man who lost his wife in the Fukuoka earthquake. Like Japanese food itself it’s easy to digest, but contains substantive depth.
Master of None
Available now, 10 episodes At first glance, Master of None seems quite predictable. Parks and Rec stalwart Aziz Ansari plays Dev, a single guy in New York City whose sporadic acting gigs leave him a lot of time to hang out with his friends in cool bars and coffee shops. So far, so similar to Friends and a zillion others of the genre. But Ansari and co-creator Alan Yang have crafted something much darker and smarter than anything that took place on the Central Perk couch. Much like Ansari in his recent book Modern Romance, they focus on love in the age of apps and, much like Ansari in his stand-up, they take a light-hearted look at issues of race and gender. The second episode, which looks at the prejudice dealt with by immigrant families and the difficulty the younger ones have in relating to the older family members, has echoes of The Kumars at Number 42 and even Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Definitely worth a look.
Hannibal
Available now, 13 episodes It’s inevitable that every new iteration of Thomas Harris’s source material will stand unflattering comparison with Silence of the Lambs, one of only two films to win Oscars in every major category. This series suffers from that burden and was cancelled after a few seasons on NBC in the States, but in its short life it did earn critical acclaim. Will Graham does justice to his role as a male version of the Jodie Foster character and Mads Mikkelson is brilliantly icy and creepy as Lecter, with the twist being that this time Lecter pushes the FBI operative’s fragile sanity until it seems like he — the investigator — might become a killer himself. We won’t spoil what happens but, as Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers once wrote of Silence, this series manages the brilliant trick of being mercilessly scary and mercifully humane.