📺 From ballet to battlefields: New TV shows to stream
Reviews of 'Étoile' (Netflix), 'Ransom Canyon' (Netflix), 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' (Prime Video), and 'Spy High' (Prime Video), plus our regular weekly watchlist.
Happy Thursday! If The Last of Us has been living rent-free in your head all week, same here—we’re breaking down every episode on the podcast, so tune in if you’re watching along. Now, onto this week’s new releases.
In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
Étoile (Netflix)
Ransom Canyon (Netflix)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Prime Video)
Spy High (Prime Video)
— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll
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Below is a selection of new shows and movies premiering this week on streaming. Our unabridged list of April releases, including 5 movies premiering in theaters this week is available for premium subscribers.
Étoile (Season 1) — Amy Sherman-Palladino’s latest drama is set in the world of professional ballet, where passion, betrayal, and ambition entwine on and off the stage.
Watch on Prime Video: April 24 (all 8 episodes)You (Season 5) — The fifth and final season of this psychological thriller sees Joe return to NYC in an attempt to finally settle down peacefully, but his dangerous tendencies threaten his new life.
Watch on Netflix: April 24 (all 10 episodes)Havoc (Movie) — Tom Hardy plays a bruised detective fighting his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s son. Written and directed by Gareth Evans (The Raid).
Watch on Netflix: April 25Babygirl* (Movie) — This erotic thriller follows a forbidden romance between a high-ranking CEO (Nicole Kidman) and a significantly younger intern (Harris Dickinson).
Watch on Max: April 25 (*Streaming Premiere)Carême (Season 1) — Set in Napoleon-era France, this lush period drama follows pioneering chef Antonin Carême as he revolutionizes French cuisine while becoming entangled in the dangerous world of espionage.
Watch on Apple TV+: April 30 (8 episodes)
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
Étoile
Keywords: drama-comedy, ballet, ensemble
Watch if you like: Bunheads, Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Jess’s Rating: C+
The Palladinos are back, this time trading stand-up stages and small-town charm for the high-class world of professional ballet. Split between New York and Paris, Étoile brings the TV-writing duo’s signature quick-fire dialogue to a setting that feels more niche—and a lot less inviting.
Étoile drops right into the esoteric politics of two ballet companies, throwing in a fair amount of French-spoken exposition and a cast of characters who are more prickly than compelling. Without a clear emotional anchor or immediately compelling hook, the series flits between characters and storylines without much urgency or direction. Characters arrive as surface-level archetypes, and the show spends too many episodes circling them before revealing any depth. By the time you start to understand and care for them, you’re already halfway in.
Yet, if you stick with it, it evens out into something pleasant enough. Lou de Laâge, as star ballerina Cheyenne, is the clear highlight—her charisma cuts through the elegant emptiness and gives the show a much-needed center. And fans of the Palladinos will appreciate the familiar cadence, along with a few familiar faces from Gilmore Girls.
Étoile is unlikely to spark the same kind of obsession that the Palladinos’ past work did. It’s polished on the surface—glossy, well-acted—but too often feels like an insider’s world that never fully lets you in. With a second season on the way, time will tell if it can match its polish with something deeper under the surface.
— Jess
Length: 60-min runtime, 1 season / 8 episodes
Watch on: Prime Video
Ransom Canyon
Keywords: romantic drama, western, soapy
Watch if you like: Virgin River, Heartland, Yellowstone
Jenni’s Rating: C-
Piggybacking off the success of romance dramas like Virgin River and western epics like Yellowstone, Netflix delivers a combination of the genres in Ransom Canyon, an adaptation of Jodi Thomas’s book series of the same name. Set in a small Texas town simmering with old feuds, land disputes, and tangled romances, this new series follows a community in transition and the three ranching family dynasties at the heart of it all.
Starring Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights) and Josh Duhamel (When in Rome) as the central romantic pair, Ransom Canyon reaches for sweeping emotion and steamy drama, but delivers mostly surface-level storytelling and hollow sentiment. Kelly and Duhamel certainly look the part, but their chemistry is underbaked, and with too many side characters packed into just ten episodes, there’s little room for anyone’s arc to truly develop. The series throws out twists and emotional beats without really earning them. Relationships form and dissolve at a dizzying pace, and plot-defining moments—including a pivotal character death—fall flat.
Shots of wide Texas landscapes offer a grounding “touch grass” element and moments of visual beauty, but the rest of the show’s world feels like glossy set dressing—all shine no substance. Ransom Canyon may scratch an itch for soapy, small-town drama, but it’s ultimately second tier junk food: fun in the moment, but really just empty calories.
— Jenni
Length: 60-min runtime, 1 season / 10 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Keywords: war drama, limited series, book adaptation
Watch if you like: The Pacific, The English, Patrick Melrose
Jess’s Rating: B-
Some series are easier to admire than to enjoy, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North fits squarely in that category. Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s novel is a carefully crafted, emotionally weighty exploration of war, memory, and regret. It’s anchored by strong performances from Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds as different versions of the main character, but it rewards only those willing to endure its deliberate pace.
The limited series unfolds across three timelines, shifting between pre-war romance, wartime brutality, and post-war reflection. It’s an ambitious structure, but one that keeps viewers at a distance for too long. The first episode feels more like orientation than storytelling, and it takes time before the emotional core solidifies. Even then, the pacing remains unhurried and measured, the supporting characters thinly drawn, and the visual style leans overly dark.
Once The Narrow Road to the Deep North finds its footing, it delivers a quiet, devastating payoff. It’s not designed to be bingeable or easy to digest, but by the end it leaves an impact. This is prestige TV in its most restrained form—beautifully made and intentionally subdued, but not an easy watch along the way.
— Jess
Length: 45-min runtime, Limited Series / 5 episodes
Watch on: Prime Video
Where we share our takes on documentary and reality TV and give unscripted shows a time to shine.
Spy High
Keywords: docuseries, privacy scandal, high school
Watch if you like: My So-Called High School Rank, American Vandal, Social Studies
Jenni’s Rating: B+
Back in 2010, 15-year-old Blake Robbins discovered that Lower Merion School District—a wealthy township outside Philadelphia—was using the webcam on his school-issued MacBook to spy on him at home. The discovery set off a legal and cultural firestorm. Spy High, directed by Jody McVeigh-Schultz and produced by Mark Wahlberg’s Unrealistic Ideas, revisits this unsettling chapter. The docuseries unpacks the legal, ethical, and emotional fallout of the case, capturing the early stirrings of modern digital privacy paranoia and the very real consequences of institutional overreach.
Though Spy High doesn’t quite justify its four-episode length—occasionally reusing footage and retreading familiar ground—it is elevated by sharp editing and a soundtrack that taps into the cultural moment of the early 2010s. Needle drops like Will Smith’s Summertime and Meek Mill’s Ima Boss bring a nostalgic charge to scenes layered with Facebook wall posts, instant messages, and grainy video chats. The series captures a remarkable specificity of both time and place—from the accents and personalities interviewed to the backdrop of privilege and quiet social pressure. I grew up in a very similar Philly suburb, and the persistent undercurrent of class tension and unequal distribution of resources as backdrop to this story about suburban surveillance rings true.
While Spy High might have benefited from tighter pacing, it is a true-crime doc that resists sensationalism and never loses sight of the bigger picture: how quickly technology can outpace our moral frameworks. (I’m looking at you, AI.) Even stretched thin across its runtime, Spy High lands as a provocative and strangely nostalgic tale of digital privacy that is both deeply local and universally applicable.
— Jenni
Length: 40-min runtime, Limited Series / 4 episodes
Watch on: Prime Video
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