LOOK AND LISTEN
SERIES
Now is the time to commit to some serious serieswatching. Here are our three favourites to bingewatch, as they have new seasons airing in 2019. Catch up while you can.
Game of Thrones
Aunt Daenerys and Jon Snow. Enough said. Veep
We defy you to name a more unpleasant and yet beguiling TV character than US senator turned vice-president Selina Meyer. Six seasons in, and the character played by Julia Louis-dreyfus is as bizarre, calculating and funny as ever. Her team in the White House stumble from one faux pas to the next; they’re conniving and dirty and hilarious.
This is fast, smart comedy at its best. The final episodes will air in the second quarter of next year. Luther
Idris Elba is the damaged, brilliant and very human detective Luther. What’s not to like, really? Add in a sharp plot and some seriously macabre crimes (don’t watch this alone, in the dark) and it’s no wonder the first four series of this crime drama were a sensational success. Of course, the thing we really like is the masterfully complex relationship DCI Luther has with his “sidekick”
Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson). They share chemistry, complications, brilliant caper-solving, and the little matter of her being a supposed psychopath.
PODCASTS
Ideal for long car drives or a bit of lying on the couch and listening, here are the podcasts that really broke the internet this year.
Alice Isn’t Dead
If Stephen King and Thelma and Louise came together to take down a rogue monster army in the heyday of radio stories, Alice would be it. The tale of a truck driver looking for her wife has expanded over the past three years and came to a heady, emotional conclusion this year. It cemented itself as one of the most human narratives in recent days, in spite of the supernatural undertones.
Personal Best
A good one for the new year’s resolution selection process. Seen as a “selfimprovement show for people who don’t like selfimprovement”, Personal Best follows ordinary people’s often hilarious attempts to try to change in negligible ways. Though the idea of listening to someone trying to wake up earlier may sound strange, the journey almost always ends in a realisation that says something about humanity itself.
Slow Burn
We love an investigative podcast and we adored the first smashing season of this because it looked into Watergate — during the days of the Mueller investigation. Slow Burn now tackles a story that fits squarely into the prickly domain of power and censorship in American politics and the #Metoo movement: the Clinton impeachment scandal. The podcast attempts to conjure up the world as it was at the time, through the lens of current, erm, affairs, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Teacher’s Pet
If you hate an Aussie accent this one isn’t for you. That said, The Australian newspaper’s investigation into the disappearance of Lyn Dawson shook Down Under for a reason. You would imagine that if a dedicated mother of two small children vanished one week and her husband’s 16-year-old mistress, Joanne Curtis, moved into the family home, the next, that it would be enough to warrant some form of investigation. (Chris Dawson was a high school teacher; Joanne was one of his pupils, and the family babysitter.) In the wake of the podcast investigation by journalist Hedley Thomas, Dawson (now 70) was this month charged with his wife’s disappearance and murder. He is out on A$1.5m bail.
Serial
This is the podcast that launched a couple of million listenerships. After a cracker of a first season, which changed the game for the podcast medium as a whole, Serial is back with probably the most astounding narrative to date. After spending a year in Cleveland’s criminal justice system, host Sarah Koenig’s team weave a tapestry of many small incidents that come together to show just how far people are willing to go to game an already broken system, and win, no matter the human cost.