Comedy queen Ryan’s big year
How To Get Away With Murder: Season 4 Available today
Amid all the chaos, drama and murder, this series somehow interweaves thought-provoking messages about trauma, violence and morality. The show’s central theory is that anyone is capable of the worst crime of all, that it isn’t just bad people who kill. As Annalise’s monologue at the beginning of the series reiterates, there are many ways that psychopathy manifests in a person. There’s no one sure way to determine whether someone is a killer or not. That ambiguity can be a strength and a weakness for How To Get Away With Murder. If anyone could murder, then what exactly are the stakes? But also, if anyone could murder, tension persists. Anyone could snap. That hazy focus seems to leak into some of the plotting of season four, which sometimes veers all over the place, but at times this series feels so real that you feel like you might possibly be acquiring an American law degree. It was enough of a hit Stateside that season five is being shown there now.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 4 New episodes Tuesday
This series is so insane it’s good. Where else, after all, could you watch a middle-aged lawyer in a prison jumpsuit and an oversized thong realise her internalised racism and class privilege half way through an overeager “Chicago” parody? The brainchild of Rebecca Bloom, who also stars as its lovestruck, musical theatre-loving lead, it centres around the journey of New York lawyer turned-suburban-California-inmate, Rebecca Bunch. In season one, after a chance reunion with a childhood sweetheart, Rebecca quits her job to move to uneventful West Covina, California. Of course, as the show demonstrated from the beginning, Rebecca’s obsession with the opposite gender is more than some ingenue cliche. She’s been using her relationships as a band-aid for the fact that she’s unhappy with her career, family and friendships. But, after finally hitting rock bottom at the end of the previous season, in season four she’s determined to come to terms with who she really is.
The Fix, 10 episodes Available Tuesday
It’s been a big year for Katherine Ryan. The Canadian-Irish comedian (she proudly displayed her passport recently in response to a troll telling her to butt out of the debate around the abortion referendum) already hosts the compulsively awful Your Face Or Mine with Jimmy Carr for Comedy Central in the UK and has appeared with him on the broadcaster’s recent Roast Battle. She’s been commissioned for not one, but two, Netflix specials, and she’s writing a six-part dark comedy called The Duchess. For this series she reunites with Carr, for a sort of variety show in which the name of the game is solving our planet’s problems through the medium of comedy. In each of the 10 episodes the teams, comprising guest comics and experts, will take one massive issue facing the world and attempt to address it using quips, clips and stunts. It was made by Embassy Row, which also produces Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, among many others, and combinations of that company’s midas touch, with Ryan and Carr (whose own Netflix special was filmed in Dublin) make this well worth a look.
The Holiday (2006) Available now
The fairytale cottage that inspired this film went on sale in England this week, just at the same moment that cinemas, including The Stella, in Rathmines, began reshowing it. You, perhaps, couldn’t call it a Christmas classic, so much as one of those Christmas moments when you open your present expecting something cool and it turns out to be scented candles or socks, again. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet play American women fleeing the fallout of broken relationships, but hopping across the pond inevitably leads both of them to unexpected romance. Diaz and Jude Law make a fairly engaging couple, while Winslet and Jack Black remain an awkward pairing throughout. But the film’s truly funny moments are as thinly scattered as the English snow.