Pick of the week
Stranger Things
As this much-loved sci-fi thriller reaches its endgame, it seems to have narrowed its scope. The town of Hawkins – which was already under quarantine and military rule after the events of season four – now feels more isolated than ever as traces of Vecna spill out. Meanwhile, with Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven on the run, the odds are stacked against our young (well, young-ish) heroes. Still, as this final episode provides an incredibly exciting start to 2026 for devotees, the Duffer brothers are bound to have something up their sleeves. While it’s clearly time for Stranger Things to wrap up, the concluding season has been constructed with maximalist flair … so we can expect a fan-serving ending.
Netflix, from New Year’s Day
***
Y Crwydryn (The Wanderer)
With its distinct culture and language, and strong tradition of art and expression rooted in isolated working-class communities, Wales is the ideal location for a road movie. And this poetic documentary is exactly that: country singer Wil Tân travels the small towns and villages of his country and finds the music he loves is very much alive in the pubs and halls he visits. It’s a meditation on ageing, too: Tân realises that the subject matter of many country songs becomes easier to inhabit as feelings of mortality bite, and the need to express the previously inexpressible becomes more urgent. A languid, melancholy treat.
BBC iPlayer, out now
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Members Only: Palm Beach
Another deeply guilty pleasure from Netflix’s reality stable. This series comes from the heart of Trumpland and follows the garish, status-driven chaos of life among the Mean Girls elite of the luxury Florida beach resort. Essentially, it’s a power struggle as the “Old money and big-ass houses” establishment (represented by the likes of Hilary Musser) is challenged by hungry upstarts such as Ro-mina Ustayev. “We are the penthouses,” claims one member of the group. “And Ro-mina is in the basement.” But she isn’t planning to stay downstairs for long …
Netflix, from Monday 29 December
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Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story
This true-crime documentary unravels the horrific story of influencers Jodi Hildebrandt and Ruby Franke. From 2015, Franke ran the YouTube channel 8 Passengers which was hugely successful but raised eyebrows with its severe parenting advice. It turned out that viewers didn’t know the half of it: when Franke’s 12-year-old son ran away to a neighbour’s house, covered in lacerations and suffering from malnourishment, it sparked a chain of events that culminated in the arrest and conviction of Franke and her business partner Hildebrandt for child abuse.
Netflix, from Tuesday 30 December
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Ricky Gervais: Mortality
The career trajectory of Ricky Gervais continues to baffle: how did the creator of a show as innovative and original as The Office end up hawking vodka on the tube via jokes about suicide? He still has a monumentally successful standup career too, of course, as evidenced by this latest special in which Gervais ponders life and death – albeit, as he’s at pains to point out, not in a tediously mawkish “Edinburgh festival” sort of way. After all, as anyone who has ever seen Afterlife or Derek will confirm, tedious mawkishness is very much not his bag.
Netflix, from Tuesday 30 December
***
Run Away
An adaptation of one of Harlan Coben’s portfolio of crime thrillers, this drama stars James Nesbitt as Simon Greene (with Minnie Driver as his wife Ingrid), a man in search of his missing daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange). Has Paige been kidnapped? Has she simply run away with her unsuitable boyfriend? Or, as is always possible in Coben’s world, is she a pawn in a bigger story? To muddy the waters further, Simon isn’t the only person hunting for Paige – cop Isaac Fagbenle (Alfred Enoch) and Ruth Jones’s PI Elena Ravenscroft are also on the case. As overripe as a slice of leftover Christmas brie.
Netflix, from New Year’s Day
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The Teresa Battaglia Cases
Back to the beautiful Friulian Alps in northern Italy for another dark adventure in the company of complex criminologist Teresa Battaglia. Teresa and her assistant Massimo Marini are looking into the apparent murder of a young policewoman. It becomes clear that the crime is linked to The Sleeping Nymph – a long-lost, possibly mythical painting created using human blood. This macabre premise is made heavier still by Teresa’s increasingly intrusive cognitive problems. Is she stressed or experiencing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease?
Channel 4, from Friday 2 January
