Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist
Hustlers in trouble
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Friday September 6
Everyone looks to be having a whale of a time in this eight-part series, based on Shaye Ogbonna’s hit true-crime podcast of the same name. It’s the remarkable side story to Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback fight in Atlanta. There was an armed robbery on the night of the fight, and it set in motion a chain of events that ultimately shaped the destiny of the city itself. Samuel L Jackson plays the notorious gangster Frank Moten, Kevin Hart is Chicken Man, the flamboyant hustler who finds himself in the frame for the heist, and Don Cheadle is the police detective who has to try to sort out what the hell is happening.
Emperor of Ocean Park
Middle-class murder mystery
Screening: SoHo, 8.30pm, from Sunday September 8
Streaming: Neon
The back story here is a notable one: in 2002, when Stephen L Carter scored a US$4.2 million advance for his debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, it was seen as a game-changer for African-American literature – and a signal that such works could be successfully marketed to the mainstream. Early responses to this screen adaptation by Sherman Payne (best-known as a writer on Shameless) have been more mixed. But Forest Whitaker’s performance as Oliver Garland, a conservative black judge whose suspicious death sends his family into a spin, has earned plenty of praise. Grantham Coleman plays the lead role as Talcott Garland, the judge’s son, whose comfortable life is upended as a conspiracy-minded journalist presses her belief that the judge was murdered.
Celebrity Treasure Island
Once more onto the beach
Screening: TVNZ 2, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, 7.30pm from September 9
Streaming: TVNZ+
Labour’s deputy leader Carmel Sepuloni is among this year’s 18 contenders vying to win $100,000 for their chosen charity. This has brought some criticism for her becoming, like past Dancing with the Stars entrants Rodney Hide and David Seymour, an MP taking time off representative duties to be a reality show contestant. TVNZ itself has escaped criticism for now having CTI as its only primetime show where a politician might be taken to task for an extended period. Sepuloni’s involvement was outed in May when she was observed hobbling around Parliament because of an injury reportedly suffered during the filming at Te Whanganui-o-Hei/Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel. No, that’s not an island. And as always, the word “celebrity” has also been applied loosely. Among the more well known in the mix are Suzanne Paul, who was on the show back in 2003, All Black great Christian Cullen, Silver Fern great Casey Kopua, actors James Rolleston and Michelle Langstone, broadcaster and Listener online columnist Duncan Garner, and one of Sepuloni’s former political colleagues, Tāmati Coffey. Among the rest, this series has its first drag queen in Spankie Jackzon, and first world boxing champion in Mea Motu. Bree Tomasel returns to host with past contestant Lance Savali. The series runs for six weeks and has three Monday-to-Wednesday episodes a week.
Total Control
The halls of power
Screening: Rialto, 8.30pm, from Tuesday, September 10
This Australian political drama wrapped this year across the Tasman with its third and final season, but it’s here from the beginning of the story, with Deborah Mailman (Offspring) starring as Alex Irving, an indigenous woman who is offered a place in the national Senate by the calculating prime minister Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths) after she acts bravely in a crisis. She discovers that good faith is an elusive political commodity. Critics differed on the quality of the storytelling, but praise for Mailman’s performance was universal. Screenhub declared her “electrifying. Tectonic. Unforgettable”.
Location Location Location NZ
Home hunting for locals
Screening: TVNZ 1, 7.30pm, Sundays from September 15
Streaming: TVNZ+
A New Zealand version of the UK real estate show – and not to be confused with the show of the same name that made agent Michael Boulgaris a household name in the 1990s. In this one, former athlete and TV presenter Jayne Kiely and actor Paul Glover, whose career arcs have both ended up in the property trade, help house-hunters navigate the real estate market and find the right home for their needs, whether they’re families who need more room or downsizing retirees. Episode one starts on Auckland’s North Shore, where Glover is a local agent.
Under The Vines
This year’s vintage
Screening: TVNZ 1, 8.30pm, Sundays from September 15
Streaming: TVNZ+
The Otago wine country light drama starring Rebecca Gibney and Charles Edwards as odd couple heirs to a vineyard returns for its third season. It has already debuted overseas on international streamer Acorn TV, which backs the show jointly with TVNZ. Season two ended with the arrival of William (Mark Mitchinson), a bloke claiming he, too, had a claim on the vineyard inherited by Sydney socialite Daisy Monroe (Gibney) and disbarred London lawyer Louis Oakley (Edwards). Six months later, he’s still there and the three are heading to mediation to sort out the ownership. Meanwhile, Daisy is planning her wedding to David (Kirk Torrance), Louis finds local cop Yvonne (Amanda Billing) has a thing for him, and the vineyard’s vintner Tippy (Trae Te Wiki) appears to be pregnant but doesn’t want to talk about it.
Passenger
It’s strange up north
Screening: Rialto, 8.30pm, Sundays from September 15
Broadchurch actor Andrew Buchan makes his screenwriting debut with this darkly comedic paranormal thriller. Former Metropolitan Police detective Riya Ajunwa (Wunmi Mosaku, Lovecraft Country), having followed her former husband to the small Lancaster town of Chadder Vale five years ago, is bored silly by the lack of serious crime to investigate. Then a series of increasingly strange and horrific crimes changes everything. Reviewers have compared it to everything from Hot Fuzz (a good deal of the comedy comes from Ajunwa’s hapless trainee officers) to Happy Valley and even Stranger Things.
Nightsleeper
A runaway train in real time
Streaming: ThreeNow, from September 16
Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders) and Alexandra Roach (The Light in the Hall) respectively play an off-duty cop and a senior cyber-security expert who must work together to save lives when the Glasgow to London sleeper train is taken over by mystery hackers and becomes a “guided missile”. The next six hours, as the train hurtles towards apparent disaster, play out in real time over six episodes, all of which are available at launch.
Tulsa King
A Sly return
Streaming: TVNZ+, from September 18
The critics thought Sylvester Stallone’s mob character unlikeable, but apparently audiences didn’t mind: the Hollywood Reporter reported that the premiere had more viewers than House of the Dragon. Consequently, Sly is back for season two, although he’s in a spot of bother, having been arrested at the end of season one.
A Very Royal Scandal
Don’t sweat it, Andy
Streaming: Prime Video, from September 19
Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew in the second screen dramatisation (after Netflix film Scoop) of events around the Prince’s fateful 2019 interview with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis about his alleged involvement with the late sexual manipulator Jeffrey Epstein and his accuser Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre alleged that she had been forced to have sexual encounters with the prince when she was a minor and eventually won a reputed £12 million settlement in a civil suit. Maitlis, played by Ruth Wilson (His Dark Materials), is also an executive producer on the three-part drama, “so you know everything to do with her is coming from the horse’s mouth,” Sheen told the Guardian recently.
Agatha All Along
Witches behaving badly
Streaming: Disney+, from September 19
A spin-off of Marvel’s WandaVision centred on the witch next door, Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), who finished that series trapped in Westview, New Jersey. When she escapes with the help of a gay teenage goth known only as Teen (Joe Locke, from the Netflix teen series Heartstopper) – who appears to be based on the Young Avengers character Wiccan – she is without her powers. In a bid to get her powers back, the pair set out to form a new coven. The trailer is a reality-distorting riot.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story
Fraternal felons revisited
Streaming: Netflix from September 19
The second in Ryan Murphy’s true-crime Monsters series for Netflix revisits – and reportedly revises – the story of the two Menendez brothers, who were sensationally convicted of murdering their parents in 1996. It comes as the brothers, who were sentenced to life without parole, may be the closest they have ever been to overturning their conviction, thanks to years of work by journalist and author Robert Rand. Rand has found evidence that the boys’ claim they were being sexually abused by their father, with the compliance of their mother – which was dismissed as a grotesque lie by the courts – may actually be true.
The Penguin
Bat-baddie’s solo spin-off
Streaming: Neon, from September 20
Screening: SoHo from September 23, 8.30pm
With a second Joker movie out at cinemas next month, another Batman villain is getting his own solo screen outing. This eight-part HBO series is a spin-off of the 2022 film The Batman, in which an unrecognisable Colin Farrell played the Gotham City gangster Oswald Cobblepot, who was nicknamed The Penguin for his gait and his appearance. His incarnation did manage to ditch the top hat, monocle, brolly, and cigarette-holder of the comic book and 1960s TV incarnation. The show’s story follows the aftermath of the movie, with Cobblepot deciding it’s time to build his own empire and manipulate the rivalry between Gotham’s crime families to divide and conquer. Beneath the facial prosthetics, Farrell’s portrayal might remind more of Tony Soprano than previous Penguins, like Danny DeVito’s nasty little critter in Batman Returns. No, there is no Batman in the show but by the looks of it, it’s already dark enough without him.
La Maison
Haute speech
Streaming: Apple TV+, from Friday September 20
A stylish-looking 10-part French-language drama set in the French fashion industry. After a viral video featuring design star Vincent Ledu (Lambert Wilson) rocks the Ledu family’s iconic couture house, the rival Rovel dynasty moves in to exact revenge and acquire the business. Vincent’s former muse Perle Foster (Amira Casar) must step in to reinvent and rescue Maison Ledu before it slips from the family’s grasp. Succession – but with catwalks, obviously – is being widely touted as a comparison.
Frasier
The encore continues
Streaming: TVNZ+, from September 20
The revived sitcom is really hitting the nostalgia button in season two, with some of Frasier’s former KACL radio co-workers turning up. There’s sports talk show host Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe (Dan Butler), posh food critic Gil Chesterton (Edward Hibbert) and Frasier’s agent Bebe Glazer (Harriet Sansom Harris). No word on any of the old Cheers gang, though.
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Sherwood
Return to Nottingham
Streaming: TVNZ+ from September 1
With its mix of detective story, setting, social and political history and a great cast, Sherwood was one the best British dramas of 2022. The first season was centred on two killings in a former mining town in Nottinghamshire where the anger over the strikes and pit closures of the 1980s still ran deep. The second season from writer James Graham returns to the same community ten years later, where gang-related violence is on the rise and where former top cop Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has left the police to take up a civilian crime-prevention role. The murder of a young man increases the tensions between local crime families, meanwhile the prospect of a return to coal-mining in the area has battle-lines drawn between local business and a local government representative with a historic job title still used today – the Sheriff of Nottingham. As well as Morrissey, other cast returning from season one includes Lesley Manville, while new additions include Monica Dolan and Stephen Dillane.
The Body Next Door
A strange, true, and sad story
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Monday September 1
When an elderly woman in the Welsh village of Beddau died of cancer in 2015, she left something behind: a man’s body buried in the garden. The investigation to discover whose body it was spanned time and distance, all the way to 1960s New Zealand and five siblings whose parents left them at a nursery one day and then just disappeared. The woman was former cabaret performer Leigh Sabine, who had first moved into the house with her husband John in 1997. Decades before that, the couple had been living in New Zealand when they suddenly abandoned their children, who grew up in state care. In 2016, after Welsh police confirmed their belief that the body in the garden was John’s, one of those children, Jane Sabine, talked to the New Zealand Herald about the trauma of being abandoned – and then later sexually abused in state care – and her occasional interactions with her distant mother. On learning about the body, she said, she immediately knew whose it would be. There’s a good deal more to this three-part true-crime documentary produced for Sky UK – not least, the bizarre circumstances in which the body was discovered. It tells the story of a case “so convoluted, surprising and sweeping that there’s no need for any infuriatingly glacial recapping or other filler”, wrote the Guardian’s reviewer, praising the pace of the documentary and the strength of its storytelling.
Last King of the Cross
The game moves to the party scene
Streaming: ThreeNow, from Tuesday September 3
Officially, Last King of the Cross is a work of fiction, but one “inspired by” the life of former nightclub owner and – according to Australian police – “major organised-crime figure” John Ibrahim. This second season of the drama picks up with the return of the John character from Ibiza to Sydney, where the chance beckons to supply the MDMA fuelling the central city’s party scene. But he’s not going to have it all his own way, as new rivals emerge, and the cops watch every move. The recent launch of the eight-episode season emphasised the strange way that Ibrahim – who has never been convicted of a crime – has become part of the country’s media firmament, with the likes of his friend, notorious radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands, in attendance.
The Boy That Never Was
A face in the crowd
Streaming: TVNZ+, from Tuesday September 3
This Irish drama, screening here only two days after its debut on RTE in Ireland, is based on the bestselling 2014 novel by Karen Perry. Colin Morgan (Merlin) plays Harry, an expat artist in Morocco who is devastated when an earthquake destroys the family home and, apparently, kills his 3-year-old son, whose body is never found. When Harry spots a boy in a crowd back home in Ireland, he becomes convinced that it is his lost son. His wife thinks he’s crazy, but his obsession only grows. Four parts.
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Slow Horses
Things really blow up
Streaming: Apple TV+, from Wednesday September 4
The fourth season of Slow Horses is based on Spook Street, the fourth book in Mick Herron’s Slough House series and the one in which the body count really ramps up. The slow horses of Slough House are not safe: “One of my team just died!” exclaims the malodorous Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in the season four trailer, while seeming not excessively bothered by it. The trailer promises plenty of spectacle – there’s a car-bombing in the first 30 seconds – and Hugo Weaving joins the cast as the villainous Frank Harkness, a very bad former CIA agent.
See our guide to other recent new shows in the August, July, June, May, and April and viewing guides.
