What to Watch

It’s an odd feeling to be writing this on a calm, sunny and warm Wednesday morning in Wellington (it’s always like this here. We just don’t tell people because we like our privacy), knowing that, by Sunday, my usual ritual of going to my local for poached eggs and coffee while I read the printed Sunday Star-Times, will probably be suspended for the foreseeable future.

So, with that in mind, maybe it’s time to talk about the very best of what’s worth bingewatching – over the next couple of weeks at least.

First up, if you haven’t started watching The Americans (Lightbox and DVD/Blu-ray, the latter of which offers lots of exclusive extras) yet, then you are in for a huge treat.

I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t respect this show as soon as they give the first series a spin.

The Americans of the title are two KGB operatives, posing as a married couple, working undercover in the United States in the 1980s.

Against a backdrop of the Iran-Contra affair, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, and everything else that happened in that globally turbulent era, the couple is also negotiating a marriage, parenthood – particularly how to deal with a daughter who is beginning to suspect the truth – and a thousand other convincing and sharply drawn situations.

The show is crisp, witty, hugely tense, and basically brilliant. And, as with a lot of benchmark TV, it gets stronger with each series, with seasons four and five perhaps the very best of the crop. I loved this show.

And I’m saving season six as my marooned-onthe-couch treat for the coming weeks.

Mention Godless (Netflix) in the same pub in which everybody has watched everything else you mention, and you’ll most often draw a blank.

And maybe that’s the appeal. This dust and blood-covered symphony of violence and preindustrial ‘‘riot grrl’’ righteousness is a betterkept secret than most.

Godless is set in the historically real New Mexico town of La Belle, around 1884. A mysterious mining disaster has wiped out most of the men, leaving some ornery and entirely asskicking, whiskey-drinking and hard-swearing widows to keep themselves safe from various outlaws and villains who have designs on the town and its riches. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) takes the lead, as the twice-widowed-by-21 Alice, regarded by many as a witch, but a deadshot with a Winchester 44.

Godless is ruthless, funny, utterly adult, and a godsend for those of us who never really got over Deadwood being cancelled just when it was getting unmissably brilliant. Stay safe and, seriously, wash your hands, even if all you’ve touched all day is the TV remote.