It’s getting hot out there! If you’d rather chill, we’ve got some bingeable options – starting with The Airport Chaplain, a top flight Australian drama starring Hugo Weaving and The Pitt’s Shabana Azeez.
If you’d like something with more cardigans and murder, our critic recommends Bookish, with the entire second season now on shelves.
Like drama? Divisive Netflix documentary Raygun: Breaking Badly is a bona fide water cooler moment and guaranteed conversation starter.
Or you might prefer the plot-twists and machinations of Survivor’s latest, anything-goes season.
For tears, head to Floran Zeller’s The Father, starring Anthony Hopkins as a man living with dementia and Oli
For laughs, head to Slo Pitch: a mockumentary about a queer beer-league baseball team.
Enjoy!
Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly
The Olympic performance of Australian breaking athlete B-girl Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – reverberated wildly across the globe for long afterwards.
Calculating that she could not compete with her opponents’ athleticism, Gunn developed a breaking aesthetic based on Australiana. Dressed in an Australian tracksuit, while kangaroo hopping and jerking like a water sprinkler, she tried to impress the judges with creativity rather than power moves.
Gunn was unsuccessful, losing all three round-robin battles and scoring zero. The backlash that followed was overwhelming.
All this drama has now resulted in the Netflix documentary Untold Raygun: Breaking Badly.
If viewers are expecting bombshell revelations, they will be disappointed.
The documentary offers an intimate portrait of Gunn’s experience before, during and after Paris, with substantial input from her husband and parents. The narrative is largely favourable to her, with no mention of her legal threats regarding Raygun: The Musical.
The program displays various sides of Gunn – including vulnerable contestant, successful Olympic qualifier, credentialed academic, and wry self-critic – but does so in the absence of any critical interrogation.
Breaking Badly reveals how Gunn, like many other athletes, was seriously under-prepared for the intense, often unforgiving scrutiny of the global “media sports cultural complex”.
Few could have handled the torrent of intrusive attention that submerged her. Yet, ironically, she agreed to let Netflix resurrect her turbulent times for public consumption.
The Father
The Father (2020) is the directorial debut from French playwright, novelist, and filmmaker Florian Zeller. Adapted from his stage play of the same name, the film is both a tender and devastating meditation on loss, mortality, and the task of caring for those we love.
Led by the stellar performances of Anthony Hopkins and Oli, a man living with dementia, as he gradually loses his grip on reality
Set largely within Anthony’s flat — although later revealed to belong to his daughter, Anne (Colman) — The Father transforms this ostensibly recognisable suburban home into a site of mortality.
Through manipulations of time and space, the viewer experiences the world through Anthony. Zeller’s reality-bending logic articulates how the domestic space, for a subject undergoing cognitive decline, becomes a frightening harbour of uncertainty and unknowability.
Zeller sensitively captures the lived experiences of memory impairment and dementia, while transfiguring an ordinary suburban residence into a material manifestation of mortality. Furniture and objects mysteriously rearrange, disappear, and reappear, while multiple actors appear as the same character, morphing Anthony’s flat into an uncanny labyrinth of time and space.
The Father thus not only embodies cinema’s ability to explore the interplay between memory, death and time, but exposes how this dynamic forcefully materialises within the suburban environment.
The Airport Chaplain
Starring national treasure Hugo Weaving, alongside rising talent Shabana Azeez, SBS’s new drama The Airport Chaplain is even better than I’d hoped.
Weaving plays Tobias Wallace, the titular chaplain, who is more “a social worker in a fluoro vest” than a man of God. His job is to provide support for all faiths passing through Melbourne Airport. He works as a fixer of myriad crises. He knows and helps everyone – albeit in unorthodox ways.
But while Tobias’s phone may be ringing off the hook, his role is immediately cast into doubt by the new terminal manager, Mira (Shabana Azeez, in her first major local TV debut). Mira is trying to trim the fat, and her obsession with protocol sparks something of a power struggle with Tobias. Together they make a wonderfully combative pair.
This eight-part series effectively uses the cultural melting pot of the airport setting to fulfil SBS’s multicultural remit. We see a fantastically diverse cast of new and familiar faces, depicting one of the country’s busiest workplaces. Hierarchical clashes sit alongside quietly profound moments of cultural conflict and connection, with a beautiful underpinning of humour and humanity.
The Airport Chaplain shows what the SBS can achieve when it shifts its focus towards premium content.
Bookish, season two
I only discovered Bookish recently and quickly binged the whole thing, including the newly released second season. It’s a mixture of nostalgia, high camp and murder – although the police procedures make Midsomer Murders seem realistic.
Set in immediate post-war London, the series revolves around three characters: bookshop owner Gabriel Book (Mark Gattis, who also created the series), his wife Trottie (Polly Walker), and the recently imprisoned petty criminal Jack (Connor Finch), whom they adopt.
Season two of Bookish attracts some big names, with Simon Callow, Rupert Graves and Miranda Richardson all appearing. Book and Jack travel to Germany in search of the truth about the dead Felix, which leads, inevitably, to a string of implausible murders and a denouement which left me unsatisfied – and greedy for the next season.
Slo Pitch
Many success stories started as a bunch of friends making scripted content online, and it seems this might also be the case for Slo Pitch, a new mockumentary about a “mostly queer” recreational softball team, which started out as a web series.
Having finished last in the league six years running, Joanne (Jess Salgueiro) is determined to lead her ragtag crew through a winning season now that her ex-girlfriend (Emily Hampshire) is playing for a rival team.
Made for Crave – the streamer behind the smash hit Heated Rivalry – and backed by Elliot Page’s production company, Slo Pitch is an unashamedly queer show from a group whose collective filmography speaks to a focus on telling inclusive and diverse stories.
Co-creators Karen Knox and Gwenlyn Cumyn, along with director J Stevens, transposed the original web series into 10 half-hour episodes without losing its humour and charm, retaining much of the original cast and crew.
While not quite a sapphic equivalent to Heated Rivalry, it is refreshing to see an ensemble cast of women and queer people being unkempt, irreverent and horned up in a genre usually dominated by boys being boys. Here’s hoping they continue to hit it out of the park.
Survivor USA, season 51
Survivor has returned for its 51st season, a mammoth achievement for any show. It’s also entering a new era.
Survivor’s history has been divided into eras – there is the classic era, the experimental era, the golden years, the dark era, the renaissance, and the much aligned “new era”, which began in Season 40.
Season 51 marks the beginning of the “open era”, which according to host and producer Jeff Probst means anything goes.
Season 51 feels like a response to backlash against the new era, which was criticised by fans for being repetitive, short on the big personalities of earlier seasons, and closer to a “corporate retreat”.
To counteract this, season 51 removes the predictable structures and reintroduces the twists, mechanics and advantages from the show’s better eras.
The first episode showed that this season has promise, with the cast featuring villains (Devin), eccentric characters (Eric) and players to cheer for (Kristin and Jenna). I will be watching, hoping for a return to what made Survivor so brilliant in its earlier years.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
