FROM THE VAULT
Rebecka Martinsson Lightbox
It’s been a second since we had a good, relentlessly bleak Scandinavian noir to get stuck into, hasn’t it? They’re still making them, and in the case of Lightbox’s new series Rebecka Martinsson, they’re still bloody good. The titular character is a successful lawyer who returns to her hometown, well north of the Arctic Circle, following the death of her childhood friend. She can’t leave until she gets to the bottom of the mysterious death, and — you know the drill — her digging reveals a whole bunch of skeletons from the past, forcing her to confront the reasons she left town in the first place.
Jeopardy Netflix
For those times you just can’t decide what you want to watch and end up choosing the least demanding thing possible, Netflix now has 45 episodes of the immortally popular Jeopardy! in its library. Even if you’ve never seen an episode before, it’ll probably still seem familiar on popculture references alone — it’s the one where contestants answer in the form of a question, with second-to-none host patter from Alex Trebek, who has been in the job since 1984. Some quiz-show connoisseurs say it’s even better than The Chase.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK The Dream
Honestly, the Airplane Game — the briefly popular 1980s chain letter/pyramid scheme discussed in the first episode of The Dream — does sound pretty good. You invest $1500 and take your seat at the back of the theoretical plane. As you invite more people on board with their $1500, you move further up the plane, and as they do the same, you work your way up to the captain’s seat, where you claim your $12,000 return on investment.
Too good to be true? In almost everybody’s case, yes, but that never seems to dampen our enthusiasm for similar modern schemes, or "multi-level marketing" as it is otherwise known.
Hosted by long-time This American Life reporter Jane Marie, The Dream is the story of multi-level marketing, the kind of story you never realised you wanted to know. Marie starts with the experiences of her own family, seduced by the promise of things like the Airplane Game, before the series draws a line right through to Donald Trump, the US government and the 1 per cent. It’s fascinating stuff, part business section, part lifestyle section, told in a way that almost makes it feel more like true crime.