BABY REINDEER
Netflix
When Martha (Jessica Gunning) walks into the pub where aspiring comedian Donny (Richard Gadd) is a bartender, she claims to be a top lawyer – but is also skint. He takes pity on her and gives her a cup of tea on the house. Thus begins her pursuit of him online and in real life, so bad that he takes the matter to the police. But just when you think that the dynamics are clear to the point of stereotype, the story takes a series of deeply unsettling turns. Self-sabotage as an art form.
THE SYMPATHIZER
NOW
Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this seven-part series, co-created by Park Chan-wook, follows the fortunes of “the Captain” (Hoa Xuande), a spy for the communist North embedded in the South Vietnamese secret police as chief aide to the General (Toan Le) – and extracted from Saigon to Los Angeles by CIA handler Claude (Robert Downey Jr, in the first of five roles) to work with a new and pretty ramshackle group of expat counter-revolutionaries. All the while, the Captain is keeping his true masters in Saigon up to speed. In a clear echo of Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove, Downey Jr’s broadly comic turns as various characters – flinty US congressman, deranged academic, narcissistic film director – are both cartoonish and sinister.
RIPLEY
Netflix
After his triumphs on stage in Vanya and on screen in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Andrew Scott is now squarely in his imperial phase, and his interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, the psychotic conman and social interloper, is genuinely original in its nuance and shape-shifting agility. Arriving in Atrani on the Amalfi coast in 1960, he befriends socialite Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) – whose girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning) instantly and correctly suspects the motive of this smiling villain.
SHŌGUN
Disney+
“Now is not the time for good men: It’s time for a shōgun.” This terrible warning, muttered in an early episode of this 10-part adaptation of James Clavell’s bestselling 1975 doorstopper, is a reminder that there is nothing new about strongman leaders. After the death of the reigning Taikō, a council of regents governs Japan in 1600 in place of his young heir. Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) sees in the arrival of John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) on the storm-damaged Erasmus an opportunity to force a wedge between his opponents. A visually stunning portrayal of the wheels-within-wheels of a faltering regime.
THE PENGUIN
NOW
Many superhero movie spin-offs are dreary disappointments, but Lauren LeFranc’s eight-episode miniseries is a happy exception. Though as Oswald “Oz” Cobb (AKA the Penguin), Colin Farrell is unrecognisable under all the prosthetics, his performance is terrific: a portrait of pathological resentment, with unsettling traces of amiability.
