Pick of the week
One Day
Dexter is a posh, entitled southerner. Emma is a working-class northerner with a social conscience. On their final night at university in Edinburgh in 1988, they have an awkward but memorable one-night stand. This romantic drama – adapted from David Nicholls’s hit novel – follows the not-quite couple every year as their lives proceed. It’s never a straightforward love story: the pair click in a slightly counterintuitive way and their mutual wariness means they seem doomed to keep slipping through each other’s fingers … There’s a wistful sense of melancholy about receding youth, with very likable performances from Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall.
Netflix, from Thursday 8 February
***
Hot Mess Summer
Rylan Clark hosts this funny but infuriating reality show in which eight of the UK’s most unappealing young people (“I describe myself as one of the biggest players in Sussex,” says one, oafishly) are taken to the Greek island of Zante. They are told they’re appearing on a reality show called Party Summer, before having their dreams crushed by the news that they’ll actually be working behind the bar. Worse still, they’ve been nominated by their friends, who are fed up with their selfish and lazy ways, and tell them so, over video links. Cue much schadenfreude and very tentative character building.
Prime Video, from Wednesday 7 February
***
G’wed
This lively scouse sitcom carries DNA traces of Derry Girls, both in the situation specifics (Jake Kenny-Byrne’s Christopher is a fish out of water, marooned in an intimidating new environment) and in the general tone (cheerfully rude working-class teenagerdom). It’s nowhere near as accomplished as Lisa McGee’s masterpiece but it’s still engaging enough thanks to a vibrant young cast. Most notable is Dylan Thomas Smith who plays Reece, a cocky but charming bad boy whose attempts to befriend Christopher don’t always go according to plan.
ITVX, from Monday 5 February
***
Dee & Friends in Oz
This animation is a very loose spin-off from L Frank Baum’s celebrated 1900 children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and it journeys into the same enchanted realm visited by Dorothy and her friends. The updated angle on a familiar classic sees Dee and a small posse of pals (a lion, a dog, a tin man … you know the drill) finding a portal to a mysterious land where numerous magical adventures and a climactic quest ensue. Its fresh rendering feels a little garish but it might just appeal to a few impressionable young minds.
Netflix, from Monday 5 February
***
Raël: The Alien Prophet
In 1974, an eccentric French journalist called Claude Vorilhon founded a new religion. Styling himself as Raël, he hypothesised that an extraterrestrial species called the Elohim – with whom, handily, he alone had the ability to communicate – created humans. Our purpose, apparently, was to harness their technology and then wait for utopia to arrive. However, as this wild ride of a documentary series shows, it was never that simple – or that benign. Raëlism spiralled into cultism amid controversies about sex, cloning and various forms of control.
Netflix, from Wednesday 7 February
***
Halo
The Spartans v the Covenant round two: this gritty sci-fi returns with Master Chief John-117 (Pablo Schreiber) still holding the galaxy’s fate in his hands. Stylistically, Halo owes its DNA to the 2001 first-person shooter video game, with impossible military derring-do alternating with earnest moral lessons. As we rejoin John, an uneasy truce prevails. But disturbing news from another planet convinces our hero that something very bad is coming. Soon, with humanity’s greatest stronghold under threat, John is on a mission with the highest stakes imaginable.
Paramount+, from Thursday 8 February
***
Reindeer Mafia
Expect a splash of blood on pristine snow: the next foreign language drama from the Walter Presents stable is this self-consciously dark and chilly Finnish crime thriller set in the bleak isolation of the Arctic. It’s basically an all-or-nothing succession drama: when Brita Nelihanka (Rea Mauranen), the matriarch of the region’s most powerful crime family (the reindeer mafia of the title) dies, her relatives gather to hear details of her will. However, as shocking revelations about the family’s history emerge, battle lines are drawn – with explosive results.
Channel 4, from Friday 9 February
