Pick of the week
The Bear
“I refer to everybody as chef because it’s a sign of respect.” Good luck with that, because when Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (the excellent Jeremy Allen White) returns to Chicago from the world of New York fine dining to run the family’s sandwich shop, in the wake of his brother’s suicide, respect is in short supply. Instead, he’s faced with a pressure cooker of resentment, debt and malaise. Can he forge unity? The Bear is equal parts warmth and brutal, whipsmart humour. From cook Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) to Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s furious, spurned interim manager, the brilliance of this series lies in the sense that these characters are lost but just about redeemable.
Disney+, from Wednesday 5 October
***
The Midnight Club
Set in a hospice for terminally ill teenagers, this horror series gets its chills from the characters’ proximity to death. Every night, eight of the patients come together in a spooky basement to tell each other stories – and make a pact that the first of them to die will give the rest of the group a sign from the great beyond. But what happens when they start dying? And how about when some live beyond the time the doctors gave them? Based on a 1994 novel by Christopher Pike, this show is directed by Mike Flanagan (creator of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass) and stars Annarah Cymone and Aya Furukawa.
Netflix, from Friday 7 October
***
Hasan Minhaj: The King’s Jester
Standup Hasan Minhaj has worked with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, he’s ticked a performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner off his bucket list, and his last Netflix special won a Peabody award. So expectations are high for this new show, filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As ever, Minhaj’s comedy is a mixture of the pointed (“I don’t want to be the Tupac of comedy. I want to be the Puffy of comedy. I want to live while more talented people die around me”) and the cheerful: close to the edge but never quite over it.
Netflix, from Tuesday 4 October
***
Nailed It!
It’s Bake Off but not as we know it. This berserk baking show hosted, excitably, by comic Nicole Byer returns for a seventh series. As ever, the fun is in the failure: the contestants attempt to make incredibly elaborate cakes that, frankly, are way beyond their skillsets. We then get to laugh at the ensuing chaos, but it’s less mean than that sounds – everyone is in on the joke so the effect is good-natured. This season has a Halloween theme so horrendously poor cakes based on Netflix shows including The Witcher are served, very badly, amid much hilarity.
Netflix, from Wednesday 5 October
***
Glitch
This mildly hysterical sci-fi mystery from South Korea combines elements of high-school drama and alien fantasy to cook up a never remotely understated tale of abducted boyfriends, social media madness and malfunctioning technology. The glitch of the title is the starting point for extraterrestrial interference: people have been disappearing in places where device errors occur. One of them is the sweetheart of Hong Ji-hyo (Jeon Yeo-bin), who sets out to investigate. Before she knows it, her electronics go crazy …
Netflix, from Friday 7 October
***
A Friend of the Family
If you thought Jake Lacy was hard to like in The White Lotus, wait until you see him in A Friend of the Family. Based on actual events, this drama stars Lacy in an icy and terrifying performance as Robert “B” Berchtold, whose talent for manipulation created a stealthy, slowly unfolding horror story. Over a period of several years, Berchtold – a friend and near neighbour of the Broberg family – groomed, sexually assaulted and twice kidnapped their teenage daughter Jan – all while maintaining a creepy veneer of friendship.
Peacock, from Friday 7 October
***
Conversations With a Killer
Another deep dive into real-life savagery from a platform that is rapidly becoming dangerously awash with killers, rapists, frauds and other assorted criminals. This strand has already taken us into the depraved minds of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy: this time serial killer and sex offender Jeffrey Dahmer gets the treatment. Using previously unbroadcast conversations between Dahmer and his defence team, this three-parter attempts to uncover the motivations of a predatory killer who stalked the Milwaukee gay scene in search of victims.
Netflix, from Friday 7 October
