What to stream this week: The strangest show on TV, plus five more for your list

Sydney Morning Herald

23-04-2025

This week's picks include the latest instalment of Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, an 'over-qualified' crime drama directed by Guy Ritchie and a promising animated comedy co-created by Ramy Youssef.
The Rehearsal (season 2) ★★★★½
Nathan Fielder has done it again, even if it's difficult to fully explain what 'it' actually is. The second season of the conceptual comic's mix of absurdist humour and documentary simulation remains jaw-dropping but difficult to quantify; perhaps it is a mix of absurdist simulation and documentary humour? Fielder, whose voice is so monotone that it suggests hints of menace, once more tries to game out scenarios in search of fail-safe solutions, only for it to escalate in audacious and unforeseen ways.
There should be less shock value the second time around, but the Canadian provocateur has tweaked his goals. In the first season of The Rehearsal, Fielder acted on his God complex, helping applicants prepare for difficult situations by creating elaborate practice spaces for them, complete with sets and actors. In the new season he's searching for answers, although the questions are sometimes murky. This is not car-crash television, it's air-crash television. Literally. Fielder is obsessed with the lack of communication between pilots in air disasters.
Once again, the scale is staggering and the methods alternately droll and alarming: Fielder builds a replica of a terminal at the Houston airport in a Los Angeles studio, then runs scenarios with real-life pilots and actors to provide quantifiable data.
'Pull up! Pull up!' a simulator warns, but Fielder wants to reach terminal velocity. Lurking in the background, his laptop strapped to his chest, Fielder is the Hannibal Collector of this experiment. A mad genius flummoxed by human emotions.
There are still moments of melancholy, but less obvious mawkishness. Still, the series has four credited writers, including Fielder, and it liberally drops hints about its yen for misdirection. 'I've always felt that sincerity is overrated,' Fielder muses at one point, only to be drily sincere throughout the six episodes.
You can view everything that happens here as a metaphor for understanding relationships – when couples can't communicate, their love crashes. If you told me this was Fielder's way of processing a break-up, I would believe you.
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The theoretical leaps and sudden diversions are numerous, but difficult to detail without spoiling. Without context some are otherworldly: was it necessary to ship San Jose air to Los Angeles for a nature versus nurture experiment on a cloned dog? It's Stanley Kubrick's Candid Camera. Let me put it another way: watching the third episode I made noises so loud and inexplicable that my children came to check on me. No one else is making television like this – that actually might be for the best.
MobLand ★★★ (Paramount+)
After a handful of episodes, this over-qualified London crime drama, which stars Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, and was created by Ronan Bennett (The Day of the Jackal), with filmmaker Guy Ritchie as the lead director, is at a comfortably familiar pitch. Snarling crime lords, bruising bursts of violence and inventive invective are all in rotation, as a gang war looms. It is a satisfying genre work, but I keep waiting for a jolting twist.
Hardy plays Harry Da Souza, the capable fixer for Irish underworld rulers the Harrigan family. He cleans up problems for patriarch Conrad (Brosnan) and matriarch Maeve (Mirren). He cajoles, bribes, blackmails and beats, and Hardy wisely dials down his performance to a menacing quiet. The only time Harry's taken aback is when his cuppa comes with oat milk. It's life and death stuff, but his wife, Jan (Joanne Froggatt), has grown tired of his absences.
Everything is in the moment, because the plot is reactive to an initial crisis centred on a cavalier Harrigan grandson, Eddie (Anson Boon). Harry and numerous Harrigans are trying to keep ahead of the chaos, which provides enough momentum to mask the lack of organised crime plausibility. MobLand feels like a throwback: the Harrigans' adversaries are Cockneys, not Albanians. When your needle drops are 30-year-old Prodigy tracks, nostalgia is at play.
#1 Happy Family USA ★★★½(Amazon Prime Video)
Created by Ramy Youssef (Ramy) and Pam Brady (South Park), this promising animated comedy is about family foibles on the cruel cusp of history. An Egyptian-American boy living in New Jersey with his immigrant family, Rumi Hussein (Youssef), just wants to fit in with his school friends, but the debut episode is set on September 10, 2001. There are subsequent trials for the family's adolescents – Alia Shawkat as Rumi's older sister, Mona, is already hiding her sexuality – and adults, and the humour spans the bittersweet to the sadly absurd
Ransom Canyon ★★½ (Netflix)
Wednesday writer April Blair ticks quite a few required genre boxes in this Texan romantic drama, which plays like a cross between Yellowstone, Friday Night Lights and Virgin River. There is a trio of ranching families competing to control the titular spread, a widowed lead seeking retribution who nonetheless looks good in denim (Josh Duhamel), his childhood friend just returned from New York (Minka Kelly) and multiple generations caught up in attractions that can't be denied even as others insist they must. There's a real taste for melodrama here, but the dust never feels authentic.
Memoir of a Snail ★★★★ (Stan*)
The phrase 'national treasure' gets thrown around willy-nilly, but you can at least make the case for Adam Elliot. The Melbourne filmmaker has produced a small but unique body of work with his artisanal stop-motion animations. Nominated for best animated feature at the Academy Awards in March, Memoir of a Snail has the same idiosyncratic appeal and sombre laughs as Elliot's previous works, Harvie Krumpet and Mary and Max. Succession 's Sarah Snook voices Grace Pudel, whose tragicomic life story forms the backbone of a film that is grim and subversively uplifting.
Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing ★★★ (Netflix)
Genuine question: is there a bright side to kidfluencing? Based on this three-part documentary series about a child ruthlessly promoted online by her mother, you would think not. Piper Rockelle's journey from child beauty pageants to lucrative adolescent YouTube channel was controlled by her mother, Tiffany Smith, who framed her daughter's image in deeply questionable ways and had an inappropriate level of control over the other children in her troupe. It's bleak, thorough, and sadly none of it is surprising. Smith is the show's villain, but what about the system that rewarded her?
*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.