WORTH WATCHING
The Tourist TVNZ OnDemand
Of the handful of indistinguishable-looking new British drama series that popped up on TVNZ OnDemand over the summer, The Tourist is probably the one you want to go with. The British-Australian-German co-production stars Fifty Shades’ Jamie Dornan as a British man who wakes up in an Australian hospital after we see him being run off an outback road by a truck — something he doesn’t remember because he has full-on Memento-style amnesia. Written by Harry and Jack Williams (The Missing, Liar), it’s a fast-paced, tense-in-afun-way, twisty thriller as The Man pieces together the puzzle to find out what got him in this predicament.
Lodgers for Codgers TVNZ OnDemand
Much of the time, it seems that British telly makers start with the title and work their way backwards until they’ve got a show. In Lodgers for Codgers that means taking Gen Z youths priced out of the rental market and using a shonky speed dating set-up to pair them up with old-age pensioners with plenty of room to spare in the houses they bought for 20 quid back when they were that age. It’s not quite
Old People’s Home for 4 Year Olds, but there are still some heartstring-tugging moments mixed in with the cringe-worthy intergenerational exchanges.
Archive 81 Netflix
In the podcast version of Archive 81, which came out in 2016, a young archivist is hired by a secretive agency to sort through a bunch of old cassette tapes and gets drawn into the dark mysteries they contain. Unlike a lot of other fiction podcasts, this is an easy one to adapt into a TV series — just swap out cassettes for videotapes (and the archivist for a museum conservator tasked with repairing them) and things get even spookier. The tapes in question were recorded in 1994, by a PhD student researching an unusual New York apartment building — research the conservator (Mamoudou Athie) feels compelled against his better judgment to continue all these years later.