This quality drama will help ease the isolation
The Nest BBC1, Sunday The Mandalorian Disney+ Ozark Netflix
Dan and Emily have the perfect life. He’s a successful Glaswegian selfmade businessman, she teaches music, and they live in the most stunning house you’ve ever seen, perched on the side of a loch and with picture windows that frame the astonishing beauty of the landscape.
In fact, they have everything they need except for the one thing they want most – a child. Dan’s sister has agreed to be a surrogate but she miscarries, and the couple are down to their last frozen embryo. Enter Kaya, a troubled teenager who has spent most of her life in care. When Emily gets lost in an unfamiliar area at night, she accidentally knocks Kaya down and the two form a bond of sorts.
Kaya proposes a deal. She will carry the couple’s child for £50,000, even though commercial surrogacy is illegal in the UK and only expenses can be paid. And, after years of having to be grateful to someone else for her care, she tells Emily she wants someone else to be grateful to her.
Emily is won over, but Dan proves a tougher nut to crack. Eventually, when threatened with losing his marriage, he relents, and at the end of the first episode of BBC’s new drama The Nest we see the couple present as the embryo is implanted in Kaya.
Unfortunately, Dan has missed a call from an associate who has checked Kaya out and who reveals that she is not what she seems – and a neighbour of the young woman, who threatened Dan with exposure, is floating dead in the Clyde.
Clearly, Dan had has as many secrets to hide as Kaya does, and the gripping opener made me want to stick around for all five episodes. As Dan, Line Of Duty’s Martin Compston is a ball of pent-up energy and it seems fairly certain he’ll explode as the series progresses. The real acting honours, though, go to Mirren Mack as Kaya. She conveys ambiguity effortlessly, to the point where even though we’re already questioning her motives, they indeed might be pure. Dan, maybe not so much. All in all, it’s the sort of quality TV the BBC does peerlessly, and Sunday nights in isolation just got a whole lot better.
This week saw the launch of Disney+, the new streaming service featuring content from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and the Star Wars franchise (you can get a free trial for a week before committing to it, but remember to cancel if you don’t want to continue). Its first big original offering is The Mandalorian, a Star Wars offshoot set in the years between the end of Return Of The Jedi and The Force Awakens.
The title character is a masked bounty hunter, roaming the planets to round up renegades. One commission sees him sent to Nevarro to apprehend a 50-year-old target. It turns out that this creature is a member of Yoda’s species, and at 50 still is little more than an infant. When the Mandalorian’s spaceship is cannibalised by Jawas (remember them on Tatooine?), he is left to look after The Child (the internet dubbed it Baby Yoda), and the two form a father-son bond; the Mandalorian, we learn, himself was a foundling.
It’s a decent conceit – how does a bounty hunter single dad cope, and will this turn out better than other father/son relationships in the Star Wars series? After all, most major characters in the movies either killed their dads or were killed by their sons. It’s not a great track record.
Created by Jon Favreau, who directed two of the Iron Man movies, as well as the recent remakes of The Jungle Book and The Lion
King, The Mandalorian already has placed itself firmly in a credible universe. Only three episodes are available so far, with a new one to come every week from now on, though that may change given the current crisis.
It’s an interesting move by Disney, and it surely will build subscriber retention – and at the very least, it means you don’t have to sit goggle-eyed binge-watching it all in one go.
Not so with Ozark, the third series (sorry, I speak British English and don’t do the ‘season’ thing), all ten episodes of which dropped on Friday. The first series was a cracker, but it lost its way in the second, so it’s good to see everything back on track. Accountant Marty Byrde fell foul of a Mexican drug cartel for which he was laundering money, and his life is spared on condition he move with his family to remote Missouri to run a cluster of resorts and a floating casino through which dirty money can be rinsed at will.
Needless to say, even in the backwoods, there are criminals too, and soon everyone wants a slice of the action, not least Ruth Langmore (the brilliant Julia Garner), whose moral compass is permanently set to Hell. In the first episode, the Missouri Belle casino is up and running but Marty (the superbly laconic Jason Bateman) already is deeply suspicious it has been infiltrated by gamblers trying to cheat him and FBI agents trying to catch him out.
Meanwhile, his wife Wendy (Laura Linney acting up an absolute storm), a former political analyst who has taken rather enthusiastically to the criminal life, wants to expand the operation, while Marty just wants to keep himself and his family alive.
With the cartel pushing him to launder ever more, against his best instincts, Marty is in quite a bind on both the home and business fronts, and with those ten episodes to work through, we won’t be short of something to watch this week.
A warning, though. Ozark is quite staggeringly sweary and violent, so if either of those things is not your bag, then I highly recommend Disney+ for you. You won’t find much of either there!