📺 Watching: One Day, The Tourist, The New Look...
+ revisiting Percy Jackson, plus 4 new and returning series & 1 new movie
Happy 3-Day Weekend Eve! It’s been a busy week between the Super Bowl, Galentine’s Day (it’s the best day of the year!), and Valentine’s Day, and we hope you’re one of the lucky ones who has off this upcoming Monday for President’s Day. We’re excited for the The Vince Staples Show and Ghosts season 3 premieres tonight and the True Detective: Night Country finale on Sunday. What will you be watching?
In today’s edition:
Weekly Watchlist
One Day (Netflix)
The New Look (Apple TV+)
The Tourist (Netflix)
Percy Jackson and the Olympians (Disney+)
— Jenni Cullen and Jess Spoll
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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.
Ghosts (Season 3) — The U.S. version of this comedy series about a young couple who inherit a haunted mansion and plan to turn it into a B&B returns.
Watch on CBS/Paramount+: February 15The Vince Staples Show (Limited Series) — Loosely inspired by events from Staples' own life, this new comedic and gritty series follows the “kind of famous” and “sort of rich” rapper as he navigates the challenges and surprises of everyday.
Watch on Netflix: February 15 (all 5 episodes)Life & Beth (Season 2) — Nearly two years after this comedy-drama’s first season, Amy Schumer returns as Beth, a woman who reevaluated her life after an unexpected incident and is now engaged. Michael Cera also stars.
Watch on Hulu: February 16 (all 10 episodes)Land of Bad (Movie) — Starring Russell Crowe and Liam Hemsworth, this action-thriller tracks a Special Forces operation that devolves into a brutal 48-hour battle for survival.
Watch in Theaters: February 16Constellation (Season 1) — A new eight-part conspiracy thriller from Peter Harness (Doctor Who, Wallander) sees Noomi Rapace as an astronaut who survives a disaster in space, only to discover upon her return to Earth that crucial pieces of her life have been inexplicably altered.
Watch on Apple TV+: February 21 (3 of 8 episodes, then weekly)Avatar the Last Airbender (Season 1) — After waking from a hundred-year sleep, a young boy discovers that he alone can stop a century-long war between four elemental nations. This fantasy adventure is a live-action remake of the popular Nickelodeon animated series of the same name. Let’s hope it fares better than the 2010 film, which was panned by fans.
Watch on Netflix: February 22 (all 8 episodes)
Our thoughts on brand new streaming content, and where you can watch.
One Day
Keywords: romance, coming-of-age drama, miniseries
Watch if you like: Normal People, Fleabag S2, High Fidelity, The Flatshare
Jenni’s Rating: A-
This new adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel — previously adapted to film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess — tells the decades-spanning love story of Dexter (Leo Woodall) and Emma (Ambika Mod). After meeting and spending graduation night together in 1988, the two go their separate ways, but their lives remain intertwined for years to come.
As a certified softie and sucker for the “friends-to-lovers” romance trope, I found myself stifling a grin throughout the whole first episode. I was truly just shy of giggling and kicking my feet. Emma and Dexter’s first night together feels so familiar to anyone who’s had a college crush. It’s magical and a bit frantic and nothing happens the way you want it to, but somehow it’s still a perfect memory. Their actual meet-cute moment within the first 5 minutes required me to suspend the tiniest bit of disbelief, but from then on out, I was fully bought-in to the charming, messy, eventually heart-wrenching relationship at the core of this story.
Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall absolutely make the show. They perfectly embody these friends who want the best for each other, even as they work through all their longing, tension, growing pains, and crossed signals over the years. Woodall is so casually dashing and vulnerable in all the right ways; his brokenness during parts of this series had no right to make me ache the way I did. And I adore Mod’s version of Emma; she’s spunkier and pricklier than Hathaway’s film portrayal and feels much better fleshed-out with the time that the 14-episode series allows.
I also feel compelled to mention that, as with any great British coming-of-age and/or romantic drama, One Day has a truly banging soundtrack. In fact, the whole production is pretty great, steering clear of the “too polished” sound stage look that Netflix shows sometimes suffer from.
Having read the book, I knew everything that was going to happen and I still ate this series up and cried when it was over. I’m aware romantic dramas are not for everyone, but One Day is particularly well done for what it is.
— Jenni
Length: 30-min runtime, 1 season / 14 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
The New Look
Keywords: docudrama, WWII, fashion
Watch if you like: Feud, The First Lady, All the Light We Cannot See
Jess’s Rating: C
Biopics and docudramas are all the rage right now, and Apple got in on the trend this week with The New Look. Set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, this series follows the rise of the now-world-famous couturier Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and his rivalry with Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche).
Although the series is named after Dior’s first fashion line, it is proving to be less of a Dior-centric biopic and more of a WWII drama that happens to involve a few French fashion designers. In other words, if you were expecting a focus on the art of couture or fashion, you will be disappointed. While the production design is technically faultless, it’s all rather drab and uninteresting, especially for a show about two of the most prolific clothing designers in history.
Seeing past that (if you can), there is an interesting story here, and one that is surprisingly not well-known: Chanel’s involvement with the Nazi party. In these first 3 episodes, she has the far more interesting storyline, as we see the circumstances that led to her connections to the Third Reich. She is the foil to the guileless Dior, who thus far doesn’t do much besides look after his sister (Maisie Williams), an active member of the Resistance.
At best, it looks like The New Look will be a mostly perfunctory examination of the psyches of two people on opposite sides of a war. I can’t help, though, but to yearn for the fashion-centric biopic that I thought we were getting.
— Jess
Length: 50-min runtime, 1 season / 10 episodes (3 available now, new on Wednesdays)
Watch on: Apple TV+
Where we feature a show that you may have been tempted to check out, but we’re here to tell you…it might not be worth it. 🤷♀️
The Tourist
Keywords: action, mystery, drama
Watch if you like: The Missing, Reacher, Surface
Jess’s Rating: C-
The Tourist first aired on BBC One in 2022 and was picked up by Netflix earlier this month (which will air its second season at the end of February). So no, this isn’t new, but it is on Netflix’s Top 10 list currently, so I belatedly checked it out. The mystery-thriller series stars Jamie Dornan as a man who wakes up with amnesia in an Australian hospital and has to piece together who he is and how he ended up there, all while being hunted by shady criminals.
Amnesia mysteries are tricky because the supporting characters have to do all the heavy lifting, given that the main character has no personality traits beyond questioning who they are, and they can’t figure that out without help. In The Tourist, the people helping “The Man” (Dornan) put the pieces together are no more than hackneyed stereotypes: the vaguely foreign supervillain, the hot and mysterious woman, the naïvely nice cop. Dornan does well as a man of potentially dubious morals having an identity crisis, but he isn’t given more depth until the very last moment of the season. You could argue that this sets up intrigue for a second installment, but I’d argue that it doesn’t justify sitting through 6 episodes of monotony.
There is some fun to be had in The Tourist; it is, after all, an action-centric mystery with lots of misdirects and surprise reveals. If you can see past the show’s reliance on twists to further the story, this might satisfy your urge for escapism, if nothing else.
— Jess
Length: 60-min runtime, 1 season / 6 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
We reviewed a show in its early days on air. Now that we’ve watched more of it, would we change our initial rating?
Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Keywords: YA, fantasy, Greek mythology, comedy-drama
Watch if you like: Spy Kids, Lockwood and Co, American Born Chinese
Jenni’s Original Rating: C
Jenni’s Updated Rating: C-
I first reviewed this adaptation of Rick Riordan’s YA series about modernized Greek mythology back when it premiered in December. As a quick recap: the first season follows demigod Percy Jackson’s quest to stop a war among Olympic gods after Zeus’s lightning bolt is stolen. Now that all eight episodes are out, I have new thoughts.
At first I assumed the show wasn’t working for me simply because I had aged out. But now I think the problem is that Disney+ didn’t actually make this series for the kids who would be interested in Riordan’s books. Instead, they created a show for the families of tweens — a distinction that rounds out all the edges of middle schooler snark and flattens the dimension of storytelling to a bland “safeness” that is palatable (i.e. not awkward) for parents and kids watching together. It’s so much less fun.
On top of that, Percy Jackson and the Olympians in its current form is full of high-exposition, low-stakes storytelling. There are hardly any transitions or significant obstacles despite an underlying narrative that’s meant to be a dangerous hero’s journey. The main trio says everything they’re thinking out loud, and when they come up against a problem, one of them figures out a solution within minutes. It’s all very “set ‘em up, knock ‘em down” in a way that deflates any attempt at plot tension before it’s even begun.
As of last week, the series has been renewed for a second season, rumored to follow the events of book two in Riordan’s series, The Sea of Monsters. For the sake of Walker Scobell, Leah Sava Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri — who play Percy, Annabeth, and Grover, respectively — I hope it regains some of the YA novels’ spark.
— Jenni
Length: 60-min runtime, 1 season / 8 episodes
Watch on: Disney+
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I'm so happy you included Life & Beth here! Nobody has talked about it, but I found the first season really good and am so excited about the second. Plus, I like that Amy Schumer is a little more dramatic here too!