WHAT TO WATCH
The best thing about the GFC
The Big Short Netflix, Available from Thursday Michael Lewis books invariably end up as good movies. There was the emotional manipulation of The Blind Side and the intelligent human adaptation of the statistically-intense Moneyball, and then there was The Big Short. Set in the greedy, empty days around the time of the global financial crisis, the movie takes as its raison d’etre the way a small group of people used the disaster to make a pile. It’s a movie that unfolds cleverly, with crazy fourth wall-breaking cameos from a broad range of celebrities, and an incredibly compelling, Lewis-like re-telling of a story that otherwise desperately wants to be boring.
How to make babies
9 Months That Made You Prime, Sunday, 7.30pm First screened on the BBC as Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You, this documentary series divides the wonder and horror of pregnancy into three parts: The First 8 Weeks; Against the Odds; and The Final Push. If only it were so neat in real life. Host Michael Mosley (pictured) meets parents and babies and shares stories about the importance of our children’s experience in the womb in shaping their, and therefore our, lives. Parents everywhere will be amazed and frightened.
TV3 wants you to watch more Housewives
Family Feud All Stars: Bachelorettes vs Real Housewives TV3, Tuesday, 7.30pm Effectively a shameless extended advertisement for the two reality franchises of its title, this is a show so gratuitous, so terrible-sounding, so full of the subjects of Auckland’s most interesting current workplace conversations, that viewer repulsion and compulsion will be engaged in a rugged and roughly equal battle. You can only hope that your internal emotional conflict is matched by the internal emotional conflict of the two teams, and you can assume that it probably will be.
The best thing on food
Chef’s Table: France (Season three) Netflix, available now By the end of the second episode of the first season of the documentary series Chef’s Table, it was obvious that this show was going to change the way we think about cooking and eating and
more particularly how we represent those two things on screen. That second episode, on American philosopher-chef Dan Barber, and the following one, on Argentine philosopher-chef Francis Mallman were so astonishing that it was hard to believe each episode was not a one-off, made-for-Cannes, multi-year labour of love, but part of a series. Now in its third season,
Chef’s Table is going fully French, and we should all be excited.
Oldie / goodie
The Mindy Project Lightbox, seasons 1-4 available now Four years and nearly a hundred episodes in, The Mindy Project is fast turnaround television comedy of high quality. In this televisual golden age, great dramas and documentaries have appeared almost weekly, but sitcoms have been slower to be gilded. The
Mindy Project has been criticised for being a bit slapdash, not cohesive enough, its characters not well-rounded, that kind of stuff, but these concerns are mitigated by its sheer volume, the fact it’s funny and the fact it’s miles from the factory-pressed, road-tested sitcoms that still dominate. It’s got a non-white, non-male lead character for starters, and it gets better from there.