It's too easy to miss brilliant streaming shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit play on or skip.
The Umbrella Academy
Netflix
Viewers with little tolerance for undies-on-the-outside shenanigans might have written off The Umbrella Academy, assuming it to be a lame Hogwarts for misfit no-name superheroes (with a talking chimpanzee, no less!). But the first season wasn't like that at all.
The impressively engaging superhero misfits team of Umbrella Academy.Credit:Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix
Sure, we did learn that one day in 1989, some 43 women around the world suddenly gave birth, despite not having been pregnant at all moments earlier – and that many of those kids wound up with superpowers of one kind or another. And that seven of them were adopted by eccentric billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), who raised them to be an ultraviolent crime-fighting team.
The new wrinkle was that the series started with Hargreeves having just died, and with most of the adult kids – long estranged from Hargreeves and from each other – meeting up for the first time in years to do the funeral stuff and reckon with their abusive upbringings.
Perhaps the most traumatised of all would be Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), who still appeared as his 13-year-old schoolboy self. Why? Because he was 13 when he made a rash gamble on time travel and then spent 45 years stuck by himself in a post-apocalyptic near future, finally succeeding in making it back to the present day just in time for the old man's funeral.
Just as alienated was outcast Number Seven (Ellen Page), who as a kid turned out not to have a superpower at all. Or maybe there's something that she and the others just don't know...
In the meantime, everyone had to pull together to try to avert the mysterious impending extinction of the human species.
The plot, based on the comic-book series by rock star Gerard Way and illustrator Gabriel Ba, was hugely imaginative, the production expensive and the action spectacular. But it was the emotional freight that made it an uncommonly engaging piece of fantasy madness.
The new second season brings a brilliantly filleted serving of something similar. Number Seven has untidily dropped himself and the others off at various points in time in the Dallas of the early 1960s in order to avert another impending cataclysm.
The thing is that they have no clue what's going on and are stuck in such places as a racist police lock-up and Jack Ruby's strip club. Once again the series' wry sense of humour shines through, striking a fine balance with the spectacle and the emotional oomph. Great stuff.
Ritu Arya as Lila and Kate Walsh as The Handler in The Umbrella Academy. Credit:Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix
World's Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji
Amazon Prime Video
How would you like to take part in a brutal 11-day race across 671km of Fijian jungle, mountain, river and ocean? How about we throw in Bear Grylls hanging out of a helicopter yelling things like "We've got a team down! Team down!"?
Survivor creator Mark Burnett is the evil genius behind this moving ordeal for four-person teams. Presumably one of the hard-core professional teams will win, but others are focused on surmounting personal challenges, such as Alzheimer's disease. Compelling telly.
Harley Quinn
Amazon Prime Video
This foul-mouthed, exceedingly violent series looks like an old-fashioned Saturday-morning cartoon, but it quickly sets about sending up superhero shows, romantic comedies, male chauvinism and anything else. Our heroine is clown-suited psycho Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco), ex-girlfriend of Batman supervillain The Joker (Alan Tudyk). Harley's long-suffering gal-pal Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) has her work cut out in trying to get Harley to forget about her toxic ex.
Kids for Cash
Iwonder and DocPlay
A shocking documentary looking at some of the thousands of lives ruined by Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella, who would himself go to prison for hiding a huge kickback from a private children's prison to which he sent countless kids for the most minor offences and technical probation violations. The cases are almost unbearably tragic – one girl developed PTSD after being jailed at 14 for slapping another girl – and the film raises questions about private prisons and the post-Columbine criminalisation of children's behaviour.
The cases in Kids for Cash are almost unbearably tragic.Credit:iwonder
Little Birds
Stan*
There's quite a striking resemblance between the mid-century Tangier of Anais Nin's erotic short stories and that of William S. Burroughs' hallucinatory writings. Both involve loads of libertine sex in various permutations, rampant drug use, sexual predators using social status to force themselves on others, and other basic excesses you'd expect to see in the unwitting twilight of colonialism.
Nin went without the narcotic-dripping mugwumps, but that's OK.
Little Birds is engrossing stuff from the outset as American ingenue Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) farewells her toxic, self-involved family and boards an ocean liner heading east towards her wedding to cash-strapped British toff Hugo (Hugh Skinner). That Hugo is gay and in financial thrall to her arms-manufacturer father (the marvellous David Costabile), young Lucy is blissfully unaware.
Juno Temple as Lucy Savage and Hugh Skinner as the toff Hugo in Little Birds.Credit:Stan
And bliss is something there's plenty of in Tangier – at least if you're the right class or nationality.
Things are tougher for locals like sex worker Cherifa (Yumna Marwan), but she does at least get paid to flog one of her masochistic French rulers. With big, knowingly written female characters to the fore, it's an exotic trip.
The Deceived
Stan
Emily Reid brings a winning vulnerability to this watchable psychological thriller miniseries about a Cambridge student who makes the mistake of falling for a slimy professor. When student Ophelia (Reid) realises she's pregnant she goes to break the news to professor Michael (Hollyoaks veteran Emmett J. Scanlan) at his home in Ireland. As it happens, Michael is out at the funeral of his wife, who just happens to have died in a house fire. Eleanor Methven is a treat as Michael's slightly scary mother-in-law.
*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
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