56 DAYS
There's an awfully big tease to kick off 56 Days, Prime's new steamy thriller. We open with the discovery of a badly decomposed body submerged in a bathtub. A hooded figure takes a photo of the corpse, then leaves.
We then rewind - you guessed it - 56 days to the first meeting of Oliver Kennedy (Avan Jogia, Zombieland: Double Tap) and Ciara Wyse (Dove Cameron, Descendants).
Oliver, an architect of sorts, and Ciara, a PR executive, make an attractive pairing and immediately hit it off.
But things are a little off on both sides. In fact, the more time they spend with each other, the more their relationship turns into red flag city.
Oliver and Ciara's story plays out in flashbacks as we follow detectives investigating the dead body in the present time.
The split timeline is effective at stringing along the mystery and posing lots of questions, but if you think about it for too long, everything that's happening 'now' stretches credulity and relevance a bit too far.
The detectives, Lee Reardon (Karla Souza, How to Get Away with Murder) and Karl Connolly (Dorian Missick, Two Weeks Notice), each have their own personal dramas happening, but rather than adding to the richness of the story, their issues feel like a distraction, an annoying interruption that you have to sit through before you can get back to the juicy stuff.
Add to that the fact that they're getting results in their investigation far too quickly (they've sorted the whole case within two days) and the present timeline falls apart snappily.
The series lives and dies on the performances of Jogia and Cameron, who both come from children's TV. Luckily, they don't overact here, and Jogia in particular plays the moral ambiguity with great aplomb. You never know if his character is a true sociopath or just messed up and traumatised, even as the final episode rolls along.
While 56 Days is not top-tier, prestige TV, it's still an enjoyable, engaging mystery elevated by stylish shooting and a standout performance from Jogia.
THE NIGHT AGENT
Peter Sutherland is back for another high-stakes adventure in the third season of Netflix's popular action series.
Season three of The Night Agent sees Peter (Gabriel Basso, good as always) carrying a tremendous amount of guilt over sharing sensitive information with a malevolent broker (Louis Herthum) in order to stop an attack on the UN headquarters last season.
He's dived headlong into his work, desperate to settle some cosmic score that'll lessen his guilt.
He gets his chance when he's assigned a new case - travel to Turkiye and locate Jay Batra (Suraj Sharma, Life of Pi), a financial analyst who is believed to have killed his boss and fled with classified documents. In Turkiye he meets Isabel de Leon (Genesis Rodriguez, Special Ops: Lioness), a journalist working with Jay.
By the time all three are back in the US, the broker has come calling - he wants Peter to hand over Jay.
While the search for Jay and his sensitive files gets the ball rolling this season, on the whole it's much more about finding and uncovering the identity of the broker, and figuring out what sort of hold he has on the newly-elected president.
This being The Night Agent, of course, we're not far away from the White House. Trusty Secret Service agent Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola) is back, and working the First Lady's detail. In a shock to no one, the First Family has some secrets.
Jennifer Morrison (House) plays the First Lady, just one of the slightly high profile names to join the cast this season. There's also Stephen Moyer (True Blood) as an unnamed assassin, Oscar-winner Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People) as a corrupt politician and Michaela Watkins (You Hurt My Feelings) as an even more corrupt banking official.
This season also welcomes Aussie actor David Lyons (The Beast in Me), a great addition to the cast as a fellow night agent whose motives are questionable at best.
The action and storylines are predictably decent without being remarkable, but the show has lost some of its spark with Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) not returning this time around. Commendably though, The Night Agent has resisted the urge to immediately pair Peter up with the next woman his comes across. One of the best parts of his character is his loyalty and commitment, and it would not seem right for him, as a character, to jump straight into a convenient dalliance with someone when he's still in love with Rose, even if they're apart.
THE LADY
You might think a four-part BBC drama following the personal dresser of Duchess Sarah 'Fergie' Ferguson might seem like an odd choice for a series. And you'd be right, it is.
Another show that opens with the discovery of a dead body and then continues to flash back to the main action, The Lady is far less fun than 56 Days.
Pulling from reality, with some characters and events fictionalised for dramatic purposes, the show centres on Jane Andrews (Mia McKenna-Bruce, Persuasion), a decidedly working class girl with aspirations of a glamorous life, who secures a position as Fergie's (Natalie Dormer, Game of Thrones) dresser at Buckingham Palace in the 1980s. The pair become fast friends, but of course Jane is the help, not the aristocracy, and she struggles to remember her place in the pecking order.
The Lady just feels out of touch and oddly timed. Do we really want a rehash of the troubles of Fergie's life amid daily Epstein revelations?
It's a shame, as McKenna-Bruce is a real talent and deserves to be in something more reflective of her skill.
ALSO STREAMING
If various seasons of Kitchen Nightmares, Hell's Kitchen and frequent Masterchef appearances are still not enough to sate your hunger for a certain potty-mouthed chef, then you're in luck: you can catch new reality series Being Gordon Ramsay on Netflix and hang out with the whole family as the Brit works towards opening his biggest venues yet. Also on Netflix is new comedy special Taylor Tomlinson: Prodigal Daughter. Meanwhile on Binge you'll find How to Lose a Popularity Contest, a quite bad teen movie with a TikToker in one of the lead roles. Over on AppleTV+ the second season of Jennifer Garner/Angourie Rice thriller series The Last Thing He Told Me has kicked off, while Disney+ has the second season of sci-fi thriller Paradise.
