Crime fans are in for a treat on Kiwi streamers this month, according to Dan Slevin.
Kristen Bell is back as Veronica Mars on Neon. Photo: 2019 Hulu
Crime and comic books are the order of the day on New Zealand’s streaming services. After a brief period in limbo – that may or may not have been a bit of a publicity stunt – the first season of the new version of the detective series Veronica Mars has made it to Neon from Friday August 2. That gives you less than 24 hours to binge watch the first three season (from 2004-2006) and the sequel movie (2014) so that you are up to speed.
Also on Neon, the Showtime drama City on a Hill stars Kevin Bacon in a series about crime in 1990s Boston and how the authorities turned it around. Unorthodox methods, I’ll be bound. This one is currently up to episode four of ten. Lightbox has a new show – something they are calling a “psychic procedural” – called The InBetween. Cassie Bedford (Aussie actress Harriet Dyer) uses her special powers to help her detective father solve crimes. I haven’t seen any of these yet so I can’t tell you whether the individual stories in each episode tie together to greater whole at the end or not.
Tangentially related to crime – in the sense that almost everything he did the stench of criminality or corruption about it – The Loudest Voice (also on Neon) stars Russell Crowe as media executive and creator of Fox News, Roger Ailes. The late Mr. Ailes was best-known as an enabler of right wing political speech on television and the dumbing down the discourse but also for being a serial abuser of his female colleagues. Rupert Murdoch paid him US$40 million to leave the company, which is a kind of justice I suppose, I’m just not sure what.
Russell Crowe is Roger Ailes in The Loudest Voice. Photo: Showtime
If your tastes turn to the more vintage version of crime, Prime has the entire first season of The Barbara Stanwyck Show from 1961, which features individual stories of all kinds, but there are some crime stories in there. Ms. Stanwyck – famous for the classic noir Double Indemnity – stars in all but four of the 27 half hour episodes and won an Emmy for Outstanding Performance by an Actress for the show.
TVNZ On Demand has a couple of Euro-crime series on offer: 13 Commandments is Flemish-noir and Elite Squad is set in Paris. Meanwhile, TVNZ also offers up our first crime-crossover show for this column – Pennyworth is a prequel from the Batman universe that follows Jack Bannon as Alfred, the eventual butler to Bruce Wayne, in his 1960s prime as a former Special Forces soldier fighting crime with Bruce’s father Thomas (Ben Aldridge). “Some people just want to watch the world burn,” indeed.
Jack Bannon as Alfred Pennyworth in Pennyworth. Photo: Epix
The Boys is a genuine comic book adaptation on Prime and stars Kiwis Karl Urban and Anthony Starr in a darkly comic tale of a team of corrupt superheroes doing the bidding of their corporate paymasters (when they aren’t following their own base desires).
We haven’t mentioned Netflix yet, which is unusual, as they don’t have much that meets the thesis this month but they do have an Indian supernatural series called Typewriter which looks intriguing, a spinoff of the Australian young adult futuristic fantasy Tomorrow When the War Began and a historical epic from the UK about the fall of the Romanovs in Russia at turn of the 20th century, The Last Czars.
When I looked this one up on IMDb, I noticed there’s a feature called Plot Keywords and the two offerings are “propaganda” and “cranberry” which should be all you need to know, I reckon.
And, of course, Netflix has dropped season three of Stranger Things and season two of Dark but if you are into both of those things – like many in my own house – you will have already heard that.
Every month, Dan Slevin highlights some of the best and most interesting TV shows that are new to Kiwi streaming services.
