Loving Leo’s favourite rom com
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 3 7 episodes, available now
The title of this series is ironic and knowing; our heroine, Rebecca, does have mental health difficulties and is something of a nightmare ex, but Rachel Bloom humanises her brilliantly over the three seasons of what is really a mental health musical.
Rebecca is a lawyer who still hankers after a childhood crush, and moves across the country to be with him. The move brings its own problems and during the beginning of the first season and this one, she does a great many things that might lead you to wonder if she’s undiagnosed with something.
Eventually, after a suicide attempt, she is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and experiences the relief of finally understanding her actions, along with the fear that she is mentally broken.
The incredible heaviness of this subject matter is leavened by tremendous musical numbers and an incredible soundtrack that seems to make the whole thing ripe for a Broadway adaptation.
The Return Available Tuesday
As far back as Roseanne in the 1980s, Judd Apatow was one of the biggest forces in American TV comedy — he was one of the writers on that iconic show. Over the decades he developed something of a Midas touch, achieving success with movies like Pineapple Express, Superbad, Girls and Trainwreck. Some of the stars he shepherded naturally have words of encouragement for him as he ventures back to his stand-up roots.
“Is it too late? Could you not do it?” Mike Birbiglia asks. “Don’t do it,” Amy Schumer advises, before Apatow reveals she wants him to “bomb and suffer”. In fact the results won’t have her quaking in her boots, but Apatow does mine a good seam of dad-and-husband humour with a dash of observation of encounters with other celebrities.
His daughters have teenage sulks in rarefied settings, for instance, or a photo of him and his wife with Obama is used to set up another joke. Apatow is back performing twice a week in clubs, he says, so perhaps we may see a sequel.
Manhunt: Unabomber 8 episodes, available Tuesday
This is an anthology series exploring various high-profile manhunts conducted by the FBI. The first season, subtitled Unabomber, tells the story of the Bureau’s hunt for Ted Kaczynski, who terrified the United States with a letter bombing campaign in the 1980s and early 1990s.
It follows FBI agent Jim “Fitz” Fitzgerald (brilliantly played by Sam Worthington) and explores how he deployed a radical approach to intelligence gathering to take down the socalled Unabomber. The series is equal parts true-crime drama, psychological thriller and the moving personal stories of two men on different sides of the law who had eerily similar disconnections from the society around them. Paul Bettany portrays Kaczynski as evil and cunning, as well as fallible and sympathetic. He’s a first-born son who is beaten down by a society that can’t keep up with his genius, or understand his mental illness. Every rejection hurts, a lifetime of pain that culminates in one of the most terrifying crime sprees in US history.
Love Actually (2003) Available Thursday
The Twitterati recently noted strong similarities between the newly engaged Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and the couple in Love Actually: Sam mourning the loss of his mother, a red-headed Brit falling for an American, and a certain physical similarity between Sam and Joanna and Meghan and Harry. Even without royal coincidences Leo Varadkar’s favourite romcom is obviously the perfect movie for this time of year and an important reminder of a more cosily romantic vision of Britain than might ever exist after Brexit. The cast, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Bill Nighy all seem brilliant at distilling Richard Curtis’s sentimentality into something more deadpan and the mix works. The various stories in the film are but loosely connected — the well-chosen pop soundtrack links each scene — and all these years later, it seems to stand up wonderfully.