Catch Up: Top TV to watch this September
Claire Sawers goes square-eyed watching all the latest TV shows you won’t want to miss, encountering serial killers, sassy Aussies, painful prejudice and toxic dumping along the way
Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 novel The Shards (his first after a 13-year hiatus) gets a dark and glossy adaptation for the small screen. The book was excellent, an LGBT coming-of-age tale rolled into a nightmarish blur of metafiction and memoir, looking back on the author’s imaginary final year at high school in Los Angeles. Ellis has co-created The Shards (Disney) with the prolific Ryan Murphy (Pose, American Horror Story, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace), so a luscious wardrobe and on-point soundtrack comes with the territory (think classic 80s bangers and new Troye Sivan tracks). The serial killer plotline brings grotesque details of animal mutilation and torture to rub up against the cossetted lives of rich kids and nepo babies, with the striking Kaia Gerber (daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford) cast beautifully as the stunning Susan Reynolds, one of the most popular girls in school. Sinister and titillating telly.
Another book gets adapted for TV, this time Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel, My Brilliant Career. Franklin was a feminist writer from Australia (real name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin) and after her book was knocked back by several Australian publishers, it eventually got picked up by Edinburgh’s Blackwoods, who also published Silas Marner by another woman using a male pseudonym, George Martin. My Brilliant Career (Netflix) follows teenager Sybylla Melvyn, a headstrong free spirit who is dead against marriage, but attracts various suitors when she is sent to live on a farm with her strict grandmother (Anna Chancellor). Set in rural New South Wales, the period drama has Philippa Northeast as the ebullient heroine, giving a sassy, modern voice to Sybylla, as well as a modern soundtrack featuring Australian female artists. It’s a playful, fun take on the story of one young woman’s attempts to reject the patriarchy and embrace a life of creativity and emancipation.
Taking an altogether more serious tone, Little Bird (Now) is a very beautiful if harrowing look at what was known as ‘the Sixties Scoop’ in Canada, where indigenous children were violently removed from their birth families and placed with white, affluent ones instead. Social services are portrayed as the heartless, do-gooder authority figures, casually causing generations of trauma to a community; decades later they would be harshly condemned for their illegal actions and millions of dollars were paid out in lawsuits. Darla Contois is magnetic as the 20-year-old Esther Blumenthal, doggedly trying to find her siblings before she can move forward with her plans to marry into a rich Jewish family. The opening episode is a painful watch, with an idyllic homelife torn apart by violence and prejudice; a colonial disaster plan that ruined lives. Hannah Moscovitch’s script brings dignity to this shameful tale of state-sanctioned abduction.
When the actor Michael Sheen got wind of a buried story about land contaminated by chemicals in South Wales (the original UK one this time), he set himself a mission to uncover the truth. The documentary series Buried (BBC iPlayer) begins with Sheen interviewing a dying man, the environmental campaigner Douglas Gowan, about the scandal. Gowan first blew the whistle over the pollution in the 1970s and was targeted by a smear campaign, led by US agrichemical company Monsanto. Sheen feels extra obligation to seek justice when Gowan dies shortly after their two days of filming together. Another astonishingly unfair story, this time about a biotech giant showing brazen disregard for human and animal life, Sheen does an excellent investigation into the toxic dumping which is believed to have led to cancers. In turn, the TV series has now led to fresh calls for a public inquiry into the scandal, led by Friends Of The Earth Cymru.
Sawers also saw…
Tea With Judi Dench Featuring Ian McKellen on Sky Arts: ‘A delightful chat between two much-loved luvvies, now nonagenarians’; Hamza: African Birds Of Prey on BBC iPlayer: ‘The enthusiastic wildlife presenter heads to Kenya with spectacular results’; Forever Home on Channel 5: ‘Dougie Henshall and Denise Welch star in Graham Norton’s kitchen-sink thriller adaptation’.