what to stream in April
- Written by Stuart Richards, Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies, University of South Australia
Drowning in streaming choices? If so, you’re not alone – as our experts have a particularly wide range of picks this month.
From musicals and comedy, to serial killers and twisted fictional corporations, there’s plenty to get stuck into.
The Pitt
Binge (Australia), Neon (NZ)
The Pitt is best described as a cross between ER and 24. The series follows an emergency room in Pittsburgh in real time across a 15-hour shift. Each one hour episode is an hour of their shift. Creator R. Scott Gemill and executive producer John Wells both worked extensively on ER, as did Noah Wyle who plays Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending.
The day in question falls on the anniversary of the death of Robby’s mentor during the COVID pandemic and he experiences several flashbacks throughout the shift. The ER ward is chaotic due to the nursing shortage and failing American healthcare system. The series regularly cuts to the overcrowded waiting room of desperate people, waiting to receive care.
The large ensemble is fantastic and it’s great to see a medical show that actually includes nursing staff as key characters (take note, Grey’s Anatomy!). By unfolding in real time, we get a sense of how chaotic their work is, with several doctors jumping between patients. Several key cases also unfold across several episodes, with many building to dramatic effects.
It should also be noted that due to having its home on a streaming platform, the show is allowed to depict graphic and sometimes gruesome medical scenes without intruding soundtracks or montages, which only adds to the realism.
– Stuart Richards
Severance, season two
Apple TV
In absurdist psychological thriller Severance, individuals working for the multinational biotech corporation Lumon Industries can have their work-selves surgically “severed”, separating the memories and experiences of their workplace “innies” from those of their “outies”.
The second season, three years in the making, looks at the fallout from season one’s cliffhanger finale, in which the innies of Macrodata Analysis, Helly R (Britt Lower), Irving B (John Turturro) and Dylan G (Zach Cherry), led by Mark S (Adam Scott), staged a revolt and busted briefly into their outies’ worlds. In doing so, they exposed shocking secrets about Lumon – including that outie Mark’s wife, thought dead, is somehow alive but being held by Lumon.
This season has been as stylish and weird as the first, revelling in striking cinematography, impeccable direction, quirky scripting and inspired world-building. It also becomes increasingly eerie, focusing more on Lumon’s bizarre, cult-like history and culture, and the unsettling nature of the innies’ jobs.
Although lore-heavy, the show has avoided many of the pitfalls of “puzzle box” shows, balancing revelations with astonishingly good performances, particularly from Trammell Tillman as Lumon floor manager Mr Milchick. This uncanny and perversely funny season deserves its status as a water cooler hit. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait three more years for a resolution.
– Erin Harrington
Happiness
ThreeNow (New Zealand) from April 3
With their new show Happiness, airing on Three and Three Now, Kip Chapman and Luke Di Somma have created a welcome New Zealand answer to the popular style of “backstage” musical TV show.
The protagonist is stage director Charlie (Harry McNaughton), who has returned from New York to his hometown of Tauranga having been dismissed from helming a Broadway revival of Cats. In a desperate attempt to demonstrate competency for a renewal of his visa, and to please his mum Gaye (Rebecca Gibney), Charlie decides to help out the local amateur musical theatre society Pizzaz (“the finest large-scale yet boutique classical musical theatre company in Tauranga”) with its latest production, an original musical called The Trojan Horse.
While the story is fairly predictable, the show blessed with an engaging pastiche score by Luke Di Somma that references a variety of fun musical theatre tropes. It is a welcome addition to the “let’s put on a show” backstager genre, and will appeal to fans of musical theatre as well as workplace comedies.
Happiness paints New Zealand musical theatre talent in a positive light – showing what the locals can do – while being highly entertaining in its own right.
– Gregory Camp
Running Point
Netflix
Running Point is writer-producer Mindy Kaling’s return to her roots with an office-family comedy. After spending some time in high-school with Never Have I Ever and college with Sex Lives of College Girls, Kaling returns to where she started her TV career with The Office and The Mindy Project. Based very loosely on the real-life story of Los Angeles Lakers President Jeanie Buss, this Kate Hudson vehicle is ripe with satire, family dynamics and absurdity.
When her older brother (Justin Theroux) goes to rehab, he names his sister (Hudson) as the new president of their family business: basketball empire the Los Angeles “Waves”. Running Point feels like a more fully-realised version of Kaling’s previous short-lived family sports comedy Champions.
The cast is stacked with TV comedy MVPs including Brenda Song, Drew Tarver, Scott MacArthur, Jay Ellis, Max Greenfield and Jon Glaser. Hudson is at her most Goldie Hawn-like here, mixing physical comedy with goofiness and heart. It’s easy and enjoyable watching, even if (like me) you are not a big sports fan!
– Jessica Ford
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer
Netflix
True crime documentaries, particularly those concerned with serial killers, are often criticised for their silencing of the victims, while elevating the perpetrator and perversely celebrating their crimes.
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer bucks that trend. Its focus is on the women who were murdered by Rex Heuermann, and the families and friends who band together in their shared suffering and pursuit of justice over a period of more than two decades. In particular, it is the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, and her mother’s dogged perseverance in keeping the police department’s attention on her missing daughter, which leads to the discovery and identification of the bodies of another six women.
Like his namesake, the “Long Island Ripper”, Heuermann relied on the fact that his victims were sex workers – assuming their deaths would be of little consequence to law enforcement, or that their disappearances wouldn’t even be noticed. For some time this was true, as one interviewee observes: “knowing that sex workers might be afraid to come forward with information, police were not active in reaching out to them and making them feel comfortable coming forward”.
But these women were mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. Gone Girls rejects the marginalisation of the victims, just as their communities had worked so hard to do.
– Jessica Gildersleeve
Adolescence
Netflix
Why do children kill other children? What makes an intelligent boy from a loving suburban family borrow a knife from a school friend and, on a casual Sunday evening, stab another child to death? When someone so young commits a horrific act, who is to blame – the child, the family, or society?
With its technical mastery and gut-punch power, Adolescence is a tour de force. The series tracks the story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) after he is arrested and later charged with the murder of his classmate, Katie. Co-creator Stephen Graham stars as Jamie’s father, Eddie.
The series is a harrowing take on male violence and rage, and the misogynist radicalisation of vulnerable boys. Trapped in the dark mirrors of the manosphere, and allured by the grim logic of Andrew Tate, Jamie represents a generation of boys tragically and perhaps permanently lost to incel culture.
Skilfully filmed in Philip Barantini’s signature one-shot style, the series pushes the limits of television production. The high-wire act of timing and trust amplifies the message that one misstep can lead to failure. In Adolescence, however, there are no easy outs. Just as the continuous filming style offers no reprieve, the show refuses to offer a simple explanation for why Jamie did it.
Adolescence is not an easy watch, but for those parenting teens, it is a necessary one.
– Kate Cantrell
The Role of a Lifetime
ABC iView (Australia)
Edutainment at its finest, The Role of a Lifetime approaches contemporary parenthood with good humour and even better, good research. Informative without being preachy, the short series focuses on parenting tweens (children in late primary school) and above, with a sympathetic approach to the pressures of modern life. In a nutshell: social media is everywhere, what can and should we do about it?
Leads Kate Ritchie and Nazeem Hussain serve as part-segment presenters and part-parent role players in this mixture of magazine show and sitcom, while the steady hands of Amanda Keller and Maggie Dent provide context and permission to get it wrong.
Aimed very squarely at a nuclear heterocentric Australian middle class, there are moments that still stray into cliché. For instance, why is mum still in charge of dinner even though she’s also worked a full day, often still in full work clothes, until late at night? Nonetheless, the warm dynamic between the family members and the chosen experts makes the show really engaging and invites further discussion rather than dictating rules and failures.
The featured “young experts” who participate in the casual panels are also excellent. If they are anything resembling Australia’s future, we are in good hands.
– Liz Giuffre
Nickel Boys
Prime Video
Nickel Boys, a new film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, follows Elwood Curtis – a studious, law-abiding teenager who is sent to the Nickel Academy in mid-1960s Florida after he unwittingly accepts a ride in a stolen car and is unjustly convicted as an accessory to the theft.
The Nickel Academy, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, is a segregated reform school operating as a front for the coercion of unpaid labour from the boys detained there. These boys are subject to beatings, rapes and psychological torture. And their efforts to run away or resist often prove fatal.
At Nickel, Elwood bonds with another 17-year-old inmate, Turner, whose cynicism provides a foil to Elwood’s idealism. A second timeline follows the adult Elwood’s efforts to build a life and maintain relationships in the aftermath of his imprisonment and escape.
You don’t watch Nickel Boys so much as experience it – seeing and hearing what Elwood and (later) Turner see and hear. The film’s first-person approach can sometimes be distracting, not least because of the impulse to compare it with your own sense of what looking looks like.
That said, the film honours Whitehead’s ambivalence, developing a visual style that amplifies a major plot twist in the novel. It turns the darkest events into a luminous fable of endurance.
– Sascha Morrell
Authors: Stuart Richards, Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies, University of South Australia
