Tune in for sex, crime and faux workplace docs

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/11/2024 (398 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

No, it’s not too cold to be outside. The freakishly warm weather spoils us all even as it tweaks climate anxiety. So go check out Winnipeg’s composting initiative before heading out on a walk, and then indulge in these screen options.

Rivals

(full season streaming now Disney+)

English Teacher

(full season streaming Disney+)

Disclaimer

(season finale Friday, Nov. 8 on Apple TV+)

These three disparate series are not only great but offer interesting stops on the roadmap of how to use sex on a small screen.

Deliciously and rightfully recommended as a “romp” by a fellow TV devotee, the U.K. series Rivals is set in “the ruthless world of independent television in 1986” with a cast led by David Tennant (Dr. Who, Staged). Sex here is strategic, athletic and jiggly, but judged from the halfway mark, this series also offers glimpses of the cost of quantity over quality.

From a more dreamy part of the spectrum, actor, writer, creator, social-media star Brian Jordan Alvarez’s English Teacher is a sharp, even blasphemous comedy about education from the perspective of a mostly single teacher with a serious work crush and big life anxiety. By the end, however, it is also a very sexy take on courting one’s own self, ending with the best and most satisfying kiss this side of the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This.

And from disturbing end of sex-on-TV treatments comes Disclaimer, featuring blistering performances by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline and Sacha Baron Cohen in a deadly serious tale of revenge for a long-ago indiscretion. The first three episodes introduce characters then and now with the flashbacks of vacation sex bathed in a golden glow that turns harsh and mortally uncomfortable. Sex as beautiful, brittle and brutal.

St. Denis Medical

(series premières Tuesday, Nov. 12, airing weekly on CTV, NBC)

This new faux workplace documentary from the makers of Superstore and American Auto champions health-care workers while also lampooning them.

Stalwart comic actors Allison Tolman (Fargo), Josh Lawson (House of Lies) and David Alan Grier (Joe Pickett) lead the cast of characters in a threadbare, understaffed Oregon hospital.

The preview contained shades of Scrubs-type sharp characters and broad humour. Early reviews of St. Denis Medical take issue with thin plotting, but the performances are credited as solid anchors.

Bad Sisters

(Season 2 premières with two episodes Wednesday, Nov. 13, on Apple+)

After a brilliantly crafted award-winning debut season that finally revealed who did the killing — and leaving many wishing they could’ve had a hand in it — it turns out that the case of the dead husband is not quite resolved.

It’s two years later, widow Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) is heading to the altar, Fiona Shaw’s snoopy church lady is taking too keen an interest, intimate partners are unwisely entrusted and the police have found a body. Through it all, the Garvey sisters itch and twitch their way through the Dublin days, hoping they can believe Eva (creator, star and executive producer Sharon Horgan) when she says, “It’s gonna be all right.”

Cross

(series premières with all eight episodes Thursday, Nov. 14, on Prime Video)

Already renewed for a second season, novelist James Patterson’s Alex Cross comes to series television after a handful of movie adaptations (including Kiss the Girls with Morgan Freeman in 1997 and Alex Cross starring Tyler Perry in 2012).

Here Aldis Hodge (City on a Hill) is a more youthful detective, forensic psychologist and widower/single dad who brings all his skill and pain to the task of catching a serial killer. The trailer is freighted with scenes of villain and victims in creepy masks.

Day of the Jackal

(series premières Thursday, Nov. 14, on Showcase, StackTV)

The “exceptional assassin” named Jackal is quite good at his job. But so are those hunting him. Eddie Redmayne (Fantastic Beasts) is our intrepid Jackal, starring opposite Lashana Lynch (Bob Marley: One Love) as the lead British spy-catcher. Frederick Forsyth’s anti-hero, who first appeared in the 1971 novel, never looked so good. Completists can check out the 1973 movie starring Terence Alexander and Edward Fox via video on demand.

Broadcast dates subject to change. Questions, comments to denise.duguay@winnipegfreepress.com.