Watch TV with Paul Flynn
As we approach a year of lockdown, we’ve watched Normal People, Fleabag, I May Destroy You and Bridgerton – twice. But there is still wealth of TV out there. Grazia’s Paul Flynn explores the unsung shows worthy of your attention...
WE ARE WHO WE ARE
Luca Guadagnino’s follow-up to Call Me By Your Name is an exquisite eight-part drama which inverts all the luxurious middle-class cultural tropes surrounding Chalamet and Hammer in their academic idyll and replaces them with the sterile backcloth of a US army base in northern Italy. Elsewhere, his languorous film-making skill remains constant, deploying his exacting eye for casting, soundtrack and particularly fashion in a generation-defining coming-of-age saga. Breakout stars Jack Dylan Grazer and Jordan Kristine Seamón are a bit like a baby Bieber and Beyoncé, if they’d both shopped at Dover Street Market. Sky Box Sets
ELITE
Class, the schoolyard and teen existentialism cross swords in this masterful Spanish drama, now steaming through seasons to
virtually no British acclaim. Shame on us. Three working-class kids are stuck at a fancy school, left to negotiate their place in the world with next to no assistance. The stage is set for multiple revelations. Netflix
LOVE
A highly unusual star-crossed-lovers tale, set directly in the heart of hipster LA. Mickey is a self-acknowledged nightmare girlfriend. She loves a bad boy. She tampers with her own apocalyptic sense of self-sabotage to the point of pushing down hard on the destruct button. Then an attractive-on-the inside fellow with no self-confidence crosses her path and she starts to question the very nature of romantic turbulence. Things get lovelier, if more tearful from hereon in. Netflix SHRILL
Why wasn’t Shrill the biggest thing on TV? A mystery for our moment. Adapted from the super-readable Shrill: Notes From A Loud Woman by Lindy West, SNL alumnus Aidy Bryant plays the plus-size cub reporter whose weight is everybody else’s problem and categorically not her own. She flies through life regardless, only to be reminded that she shouldn’t be taking up quite so much space by everyone from the sympathetic barista to her own judgemental mother. At surface level, this show is empowerment itself, without ever once using or even alluding to the word ‘empowering’. Sometimes the world’s at fault, not you. BBC iplayer
BREEDERS
Martin Freeman and Daisy Haggard play the beleaguered parents of young kids in a fancy north London mews house. He has knackered, short-tempered, frustrated dad down to a fine art. She’s the breadwinner, a gender scenario we virtually never see in domestic sitcoms, despite its prevalence. Most of the dialogue is very sweary in a show that is both laugh-out-loud funny and – for anyone with toddlers – almost painfully true. Sky Box Sets
CALL MY AGENT!
The whip-smart comedy drama about a Parisian acting-talent agency recently swooped into its fourth season. The French are a lot classier about celebrity than the British. They take their stardom with a well-seasoned pinch of sea salt. In London, you’d have to set an elite talent bureau against the multiple hangovers of Max Clifford, #Metoo and Love Island mania. Kind of like Anna Paquin’s similarly underrated Flack. As it is, our Parisian cousins edge it by a nose, in a show that is as compulsive as it is slyly drawn. The secret is beginning to be shared. That Call My Agent! is a show of the decade, building its own chicly quiet head of steam. Netflix
NURSE JACKIE
You know how your boyfriend wanted to use the pandemic as (another) excuse to watch The Sopranos from the start? Fox him with this delight instead. Carmela Soprano herself, Edie Falco, traces America’s opioid problem while working as a match-fit A&E nurse at All Saints, New York. Merritt Wever as her kindly sidekick, Zoe, and Eve Best as the glamorous consultant O’hara round out a perfect leading trio. Now TV
GIRI/HAJI
A British-japanese co-production that defies categorisation, the drama centres on the brotherly relationship between a Tokyo cop and his wayward gangster brother. The gifted Kelly Macdonald enters the scene when one follows the other across the world and an elegant dance of familial trust and psychotic underworld activity falls gorgeously into place. BBC iplayer
BELOW DECK
The reality show it’s (still) OK to love, all aboard the good ship Honour! Now an astonishing 10 years old, Below Deck gathered major word-of-mouth traction during the first lockdown. What was it that appealed about watching glamorous people and their hardy staff enjoying lounging in the sun, getting wasted with one another and hopping between gossip whispered directly in your ear? Hmmm. Netflix
FEEL GOOD
What happens when a lesbian stand-up comic with multiple addictions falls for the seemingly straight girl in the audience? This twisty, frank tale is built on pathos. Author/ star Mae Martin drew the characters from her real life. By the end of season one, it feels so authentic you can practically smell their scent. Netflix