Catch Up: Top TV to watch this June
Claire Sawers gets her eyes on another bunch of telly shows that have just been launched, including an iconic pop princess, some quality rural rutting, an unlikely clerical love affair and the twisty tale of an impulsive soccer mom
Kylie Minogue has made more hits than the mafia, plus she happens to be the artist behind the first single purchased by one Claire Sawers (aged seven), so it’s no surprise that Kylie (Netflix) turns out to be three episodes of shiny, stretchy TV gold. Beginning with her megastar stint on Neighbours, followed by formative love affairs with PWL labelmate Jason Donovan and the magnetic Michael Hutchence, via her creatively powerful, chiaroscuro relationship with Nick Cave, her story is a fascinating one. Add in her breast cancer diagnosis aged 36, plus confessing that she is still searching for the love she had with Hutchence and would have loved to be a mum, and you have a ‘joy machine’ of pop, rattling along an emotional rollercoaster. For a very private artist who has regularly taken flak for her ultra-glossy, manufactured pop persona, director Michael Harte teases out real honesty. Nostalgic, blissful, goddess-tier entertainment.
Falling (Channel 4) imagines the forbidden romance between a nun and a priest. In Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’s first love story, Anna (Keeley Hawes) is a timid, yearning, perimenopausal Catholic, questioning her devotion and no longer feeling fulfilled from tending the abbey’s cabbages. While it’s maybe a leap of faith for viewers to imagine Anna blowing up her entire life and breaking her celibacy vow after just one conversation with visiting priest David (Paapa Essiedu), the six-part drama wrestles well with knotty themes of forgiveness, kindness, duty, desire and the church’s practical role in modern society. Although the main plot is about two flawed and frustrated do-gooders finding each other through shared altruism, the sub-plots add extra depth, including an incorrigible domestic abuser, a bishop who favours shaming over real compassion, and an adoptive sister guiding her brother sagely when he struggles to guide his flock. Things are simultaneously messy and incredibly beautiful in this diocese, as in life.
Speaking of messy, the late Jilly Cooper found much delight in the bed-hopping, double-crossing behaviour of Rutshire’s fictional residents, and Rivals (Disney+) returned with plenty more preposterous, fabulous, hairsprayed and nicotine-stained thrills. There’s a whiff of pure French farce in one OTT scene with people hiding in pantries, and much rutting and rubbing all over staircases, swimming pools and antique furniture. The high camp fun is as delicious as the Birds Eye Potato Waffle that Freddie (Danny Dyer) snatches in a clandestine tryst with Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson) but there are proper characters to care about too, amid all the soap opera shagging and backstabbing. Dyer and Parkinson’s adulterous dilemma is torturously magical to behold, as they complete one another in a way that their spouses cannot, and we can’t help but feel for Maud (Victoria Smurfit), struggling with feelings of missing the boat in her acting career after supporting her TV host husband played by Aidan Turner.
In Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (Apple TV), Paula is going through a difficult divorce with her controlling ex, while the very real danger exists that she will lose custody of her daughter due to her husband’s aggressive lawyer and his slippery new lover. Paula’s boss is a bully and her office buddies can’t be trusted either. Who can blame her, then, for finding comfort with a very handsome camboy who also seems to be her only real friend, keeping her afloat when she’s drowning in anxiety and a midlife identity crisis. Tatiana Maslany is relatable as the chaotic, kind-hearted soccer mom, truthful to a fault and recklessly impulsive. A forensic murder mystery gets wrapped up in this very bingeable, original, twisted comedy tale about dysfunctional adult life.
Sawers also saw…
Amandaland on BBC iPlayer: ‘Excellent follow-up for the farcical Senuous influencer and her friends’; James Dean: The Emotional Man on Now: ‘Cinephile documentary on the three-movie legend and his nuanced portrayals of masculinity’; Ponies on Now: ‘Stylish 1970s-set Russian espionage drama about two widows investigating their husbands’ deaths’.