📺 What to watch this week, plus 'The Power', 'Extrapolations', and 'Up Here'
Happy Thursday, Passover, and Easter! Today we’re excited because the A24-produced series starring Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, Beef, drops on Netflix. Check out the watchlist below for more upcoming shows to have on your radar. And for our podcast listeners, savor the episode that we released yesterday, because it’ll be the only one for this week as we take some time off for the holidays. We’ll be back next week with our normal schedule.
Listen to the Double Take Podcast: Spotify / Apple
In today’s edition:
Weekly watchlist
The Power
Extrapolations
Up Here
— Jess Spoll and Jenni Cullen
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We keep an eye on all of the new streaming content that is set to premiere. Here’s a list of new shows and movies to watch this week.
Jury Duty (Season 1) — This mockumentary-style workplace comedy follows a group of jurors (including one played by James Marsden) throughout the course of a trial. However, one of the jurors is a regular person who doesn’t know he’s amongst actors following a script.
Watch on Freevee: April 7 (4 of 8 episodes, then 2 per week)Tiny Beautiful Things (Limited Series) — Adapted from a collection of essays by Cheryl Strayed that were pulled from her long-running advice column “Dear Sugar”, this miniseries stars Kathryn Hahn as an advice columnist whose life begins falling apart.
Watch on Hulu: April 7 (all 8 episodes)Transatlantic (Limited Series) — From Unorthodox creator Anna Winger and adapted from Julie Orringer’s novel The Flight Portfolio, this drama tells the true story of an international group that evacuated more than 2,000 refugees from Nazi-occupied France during WWII. Gillian Jacobs (Community) stars.
Watch on Netflix: April 7 (all 7 episodes)Below Deck Sailing Yacht (Season 4) — Jess’s favorite Below Deck spin-off is back for a 4th season! And in other great news, Glenn, Gary, Daisy, and Colin are back aboard Parsifal III.
Watch on Bravo/Peacock: April 10 (1 episode, then weekly)Am I Being Unreasonable? (Season 1) — This BBC comedy-thriller was created by and stars Daisy May Cooper as a grieving mother whose dark secret is at risk of being revealed when she makes a new friend.
Watch on Hulu: April 11 (all 6 episodes)Single Drunk Female (Season 2) — This drama-comedy is back for a second season, with recovering alcoholic Samantha Fink navigating her new job and new potential love interest.
Watch on Freeform/Hulu: April 12 on Freeform then weekly; all 10 episodes available April 13 on HuluFlorida Man (Limited Series) — Not the meme, but a series about an ex-cop who gets involved in a shady operation when he’s exiled to his home state of Florida.
Watch on Netflix: April 13 (all 7 episodes)
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
The Power
Keywords: drama, thriller, sci-fi
Watch if you like: Station Eleven, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Man in the High Castle
Jenni’s Rating: B-
In this decently faithful adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel, teen girls across the globe suddenly develop the ability to produce electricity at will. The series kicks off with this shift, and the first three episodes follow the flood of initial reactions to the discovery that young women are now the physically dominant members of society.
As a book, The Power was an engaging and thought-provoking read, and so far, the series appears to hold up. The available episodes play a lot like prologue, but it’s intriguing prologue — we’re introduced to a handful of compelling characters right off the bat that provide several points of view for us to follow the world’s impending transition of power. Toni Collette plays Margot Cleary-Lopez, the mayor of Seattle and one of the first politicians to address the events. Further east, Allie (Halle Bush) is on the run after using her newfound power to escape unsavory foster parents in South Carolina. In Nigeria, journalist Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh) decides to document the epochal shift, while in London, the wronged daughter of a crime lord looks to use her new skill for revenge. In Moldova, Tatiana watches in wait as her autocratic leader husband suggests using capital punishment to quell the rise of recent electrical “attacks.”
I admit, because I’m already bought into the premise, I don’t mind that the first few episodes are jam-packed, shifting from one storyline to the next without the benefit of the novel’s limited-perspective chapters. I can definitely see how new viewers might find the pace a bit jarring, but I would urge them to hang tight. Though it’s a flood of information at the start, the underlying performances and dialogue of the series are solid, and it feels like this adaptation might just do justice to the source material.
— Jenni
Length: 45-min runtime, 3 of 9 episodes available now with a new one each Friday
Watch on: Prime Video
Extrapolations
Keywords: miniseries, drama, climate change, anthology
Watch if you like: climate change documentaries
Jess’s Rating: D
Apple TV+ is essentially a vanity project for the trillion-dollar company. Unencumbered by the tight finances of other streamers, the execs can pull from their deep pockets to produce big-budget, eclectic content. That is, perhaps, why we have Extrapolations, a dirgeful miniseries featuring a stacked cast including Meryl Streep, Kit Harington, Matthew Rhys, Edward Norton, David Schwimmer, Sienna Miller, Daveed Diggs, Tobey Maguire, Gemma Chan, Marion Cotillard, Keri Russell, Murray Bartlett, and more.
Extrapolations is a quasi-anthology series, with each episode featuring a different standalone story, but with a link that connects them. Set in the future between 2037 and 2070, the series focuses on a group of interconnected characters who are coping with the reality of climate change.
Unlike the 2021 movie Don’t Look Up, which centered the same subject matter, this series takes itself very seriously. But as a cautionary tale, it’s not effective. It comes close to maligning a Jeff Bezos-esque tech CEO (played by Kit Harington) but takes too soft of an approach. Perhaps because Apple itself is a mass contributor to environmental degradation? And the episodes focus primarily on sheltered, wealthy people who live in relative comfort amidst the global crisis.
Most frustratingly, the series is monotonous and offers very little in the way of entertainment. The dialogue is full of exposition dumping and lecturing. By keeping the characters around for such a short time and giving them very little depth, it’s hard to care about their plight, which undermines the purpose of the show. I’ll give the creators props for the show’s good intentions, but that’s not enough to make it interesting or watchable.
— Jess
Length: 60-min runtime, Limited Series / 8 episodes (5 available now)
Watch on: Apple TV+
Up Here
Keywords: rom-com, musical, NYC
Watch if you like: Zoe’s Extraordinary Playlist, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Galavant
Jenni’s Rating: D+
Up Here is a musical romantic comedy set in the late 90s that follows two people who often let the voices inside their heads get in the way. Lindsay (Mae Whitman) and Miguel (Carlos Valdes) fall in love while trying to find themselves, and as you can probably imagine, it’s not exactly a smooth ride.
This type of show isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve made my way merrily through some other TV musical comedies in the past. Unfortunately…I don’t think this one is for me. I did try! I watched the first four episodes and just could not bring myself to keep going. It’s not that it was awful, it just wasn’t very good. Whitman and Valdes are a likable enough pair, but their whiplash on-again off-again relationship — the central axis of the plot — is exhausting. It’s hard to feel invested in the “high” stakes of an on-screen romance when there’s not any actual plot or emotional groundwork to back it up.
For a musical, the music is just…fine. None of it made me want to stay in the world of the show longer than necessary. I bet I would find a few of the songs pretty catchy if I listened through a few more times, but the first impression was lackluster. Also, some of the lip-syncing in the musical numbers seemed off, which is a trivial detail to pick on, but one that definitely annoyed me.
I like Mae Whitman a lot and would ordinarily follow her to the ends of the earth. However, I will likely not be picking this show back up, unless someone tells me that the last few episodes are world-shatteringly good.
— Jenni
Length: 30-min runtime, 1 season / 8 episodes
Watch on: Hulu
Your shows, returned:
Below Deck Sailing Yacht, Season 4: Premieres April 10 on Bravo / the next day on Peacock
Single Drunk Female, Season 2: Premieres April 12 on Freeform / the next day on Hulu
Upcoming new releases:
Beef: Premieres April 6 on Netflix
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies: Premieres April 6 on Paramount+
Jury Duty: Premieres April 7 on Freevee
Tiny Beautiful Things: Premieres April 7 on Hulu
Transatlantic: Premieres April 7 on Netflix
Am I Being Unreasonable?: Premieres April 11 on Hulu
Florida Man: Premieres April 13 on Netflix