Just Act Normal (BBC Three) | iPlayer
The Last of Us (Sky Atlantic) |(Sky/Now)
The Stolen Girl (Disney +)
Government Cheese (Apple TV+)
Do not miss Janice Okoh’s Just Act Normal on BBC Three. Its six episodes are adapted from Okoh’s Bruntwood award-winning 2013 stage play Three Birds, originally starring Michaela Coel. I was steeled for bleakness because of the usual trajectory of stories such as this: three home-alone minors in a Birmingham tower block flat whose drug-addicted mother is no longer around scrabble to evade being sucked into the care system.
The kids are brilliantly played by newcomers: Chenée Taylor as 17-year-old Tianna (has makeup artist dreams but is forced into adopting the mother role: “We need to act normal – do you want them to split us up?”); Akins Subair as the other teenager, Tionne (has mental health pressures, and for reasons I can’t reveal ends up with an emotional support chicken); and Kaydrah Walker-Wilkie as nine-year-old Tanika: pert and sparkly, practising her dance for a school competition (“A West Side Story/ballet mashup”). Theirs is a survival odyssey against the odds: affirmations (“Black is good, black is beautiful”), singalongs (TLC’s No Scrubs: Rihanna’s Diamonds), but also poverty, vulnerability, wet beds and the paralysing fear of a knock on the door.
Elsewhere, a drug-dealing loser, Dr Feelgood (Sam Buchanan from Back to Black), turns out to have a good heart beating beneath his cheap leisurewear. “Drug dealing requires gravitas, which is something you lack,” he’s informed. Even the children’s deadbeat dad (Ivanno Jeremiah) isn’t a monster. Tanika’s teacher, Miss Jenkins (Romola Garai), seems the nicest of all, though you start to wonder what’s needy and wriggling beneath her golden benevolent surface.
Just Act Normal delivers on multiple levels: a sociological comment on the care system, with whiffs of early career Ian McEwan; a darkly realised comedy drama (singer Jamelia is funny as a lairy neighbour who’s prepared to impersonate the kids’ mother); and a grim fairytale about stress, danger, lack of childhood safety, best exemplified by the siblings’ routine of sitting outside a posh house imagining they live there (“In the real house, we’re going to be together and happy”). The series is a little baggy – it doesn’t need the full six episodes – but it’s a gem.
The Last of Us, HBO’s video game turned dystopian thriller, is back for season two. Featuring fungus-themed zombies (the “infected”) terrorising a broken, Cordyceps-infested future world, echoes of the Covid pandemic are loud and clear. Created by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann, the first series saw Joel (Pedro Pascal) staggering through the smoking ruins of personal trauma to get to safety with fiery, stubborn Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager immune to the Cordyceps virus.
The new seven-parter is set five years on, with the pair in the quarantine-zoned town of Jackson, Wyoming. Ellie is at odds with her ersatz father, Joel (she thinks she has her reasons), spending her time on fungi-slaughtering patrols, or moodily booming out foraged grunge music cassettes. Iced out by Ellie, Joel even more resembles Burt Reynolds brutally battered by a cyclone. He’s even resorted to seeing a booze-sipping therapist (a waspish Catherine O’Hara), whose infected husband he dispatched.
I’ve only seen the opener, and though things do happen, they happen slowly. Ellie’s emerging sexuality manifests in a crush on her friend Dina (Isabela Merced). There could be a new breed of zombie to deal with, and trouble brewing from a gang led by Abby (Kaitlyn Dever), whose kin were killed by Joel. There’s even a crash through a floor redolent of the video game origins of The Last of Us. Overall, however, it’s all a bit auto-dystopia, even sluggish. Still, in the last series, a brilliantly evocative third episode featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett got the engines sparking. I’m keeping the faith that the mushroom apocalypse will deliver again.
Sometimes it’s just fun to succumb to a preposterous psychological thriller featuring plush emulsion paintwork and women with Airwrapped hair. Adapted from the Alex Dahl novel Playdate, Catherine Moulton’s The Stolen Girl is five episodes of deluxe implausibility. In our UK culture of overprotective parenting, would flight crew mum Elisa (Denise Gough) let her daughter go on a playdate with a girl whose mother, Rebecca (a glacially ominous Holliday Grainger), she met only minutes ago, even if her house does have a sumptuous kitchen with the dimensions of an aircraft hangar?
When the lush gaff turns out to be a holiday let, and Rebecca and the girls go awol, would the police response be so lacklustre? In the event, Rebecca manages to smuggle the trio all the way to France to hide out in a (divine!) mini chateau, the case pursued by Ambika Mod’s dogged journalist.
Jim Sturgess plays Elisa’s lawyer husband, but this is all about the women, as any glossy, self-respecting 21st-century psychological thriller should be. The cast go for it, but it’s pure mini-break noir; I try to concentrate on the secrets and murk of the convoluted plot but keep getting distracted by the shabby Euro chic of the mini chateau. The Stolen Girl is totally absurd and strangely moreish.
Over to Apple TV+ for new, highly irregular US dramedy Government Cheese. Set in Los Angeles county in the late 1960s, it stars David Oyelowo as Hampton Chambers, a fraudster who emerges from prison, born again, only to be received with shrugging ennui by his wife (Simone Missick). One of his sons (Evan Ellison) has chosen pole vaulting over education; the other (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) is angry and politicised. Undeterred, the preternaturally optimistic Hampton wants to hawk his make-or-break invention – a self-sharpening drill bit – to an aerospace company.
Government Cheese – a reference to state-distributed welfare food – attempts to take the concept of US suburban aspiration and warp it, Coen brothers/Wes Anderson-style. Everything and everyone feels tilted, off-kilter, including the music: one minute rootsy or gospelly; the next, a blast of Can. There’s an intriguing, wilful surrealism here: it’s like looking at the American dream in the back of a spoon. Halfway through the 10 (largely half-hourish) episodes, however, and the studied whimsy starts to weigh a little heavy.
Star ratings (out of five)
Just Act Normal ★★★★
The Last of Us ★★★
The Stolen Girl ★★★
Government Cheese ★★★
What else I’m watching
Rebuilding Notre Dame: The Last Chapter
(BBC Two)
Five years after the fire that devastated the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, historian Lucy Worsley pays the restoration team a well-timed visit to scrutinise the final stages.
Barristers: Fighting for Justice
(Channel 4)
Docuseries with a difference, taking a backstage look at the trials and tribulations of some of the UK’s leading young defending legal counsels as they fight for justice for their clients.
The Piano
(Channel 4)
Claudia Winkleman is back hosting TV’s sweetest show – where ordinary people get to tinkle the ivories in public spaces. New expert, US singer-songwriter Jon Batiste, helps judge the amateur pianists.
