📺 What to watch this week
Eight shows + 2 movies
Hi, folks. Check out this week’s watchlist for a handful of exciting new shows coming out in the next few days. It’s felt like there’s been a bit of a lull since the start of the new year, but finally streaming services are cranking out content again.
Also, we know we’ve begun to sound like a broken record about referrals, but go ahead and share Double Take with just one friend this weekend and earn our undying love. Sounds like a bargain, honestly.
In today’s edition:
Weekly watchlist
Pressure Cooker
Blood, Sex, and Royalty
— 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.
Poker Face (Season 1) — A procedural series from Rian Johnson (Knives Out) starring Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll) as a detective who solves crimes using her supernatural ability to always discern when someone is lying.
Watch on Peacock: 4 episodes out now, 6 more to arrive weekly
Wolf Pack (Season 1) — The latest werewolf project from Teen Wolf creator Jeff Davis follows a group of teenagers who are turned into werewolves and band together to find out the secret behind their transformations.
Watch on Paramount+: 1 episode out now, 9 more to arrive weeklyLockwood & Co (Season 1) — This supernatural YA series, based on novels by Jonathan Stroud, is set in an alternate reality where the dead return as angry ghosts and the only people that can see them (and thus hunt them) are teens.
Watch on Netflix: January 27 (All episodes)Shrinking (Season 1) — From Ted Lasso creators Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein comes a dark comedy about a therapist who breaks ethical rules when he starts to tell his patients exactly what he thinks. Jason Segal and Harrison Ford star.
Watch on Apple TV+: January 27 (2 episodes, 8 more to arrive weekly)
Shotgun Wedding (Movie) — Jennifer Lopez and Josh Duhamel star in this rom-com about a destination wedding that goes awry when the party is taken hostage by criminals.
Watch on Prime Video: January 27
You People (Movie) — Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, Lauren London, and Nia Long star in this romantic comedy about two soon-to-be-united families clashing over their cultural differences.
Watch on Netflix: January 27
Where we give takes on docs & reality TV and give ‘unscripted’ shows a time to shine.
Pressure Cooker
Keywords: cooking competition, reality drama
Watch if you like: Masterchef, Cook at all Costs, Big Brother
Jess’s Rating: C
If you’ve ever wished that Top Chef was a little more like Big Brother, then you’re in luck! Netflix’s newest cooking competition, Pressure Cooker, bucks the trend of “nice” reality competitions à la Great British Bake Off and takes a page from more competitive and drama-filled competition shows like Survivor and Big Brother.
11 contestants from varying professional cooking backgrounds compete against each other while living together in a house with an industrial kitchen and shared bedrooms. The last person standing will receive a grand prize of $100,000. The challenges are fairly standard for a cooking show, with the added twist that they are forced to vote each other out. There are no formal judges; there’s not even a host. While the format of the elimination process changes each week, one thing remains the same: it’s up to the competitors to decide who stays and who goes.
From the first episode, you get backstabbing, alliance forming, and double-crossing. Even when cooking competitions aren’t as sugary as Great British Bake Off, there’s still a buttoned-up professionalism to the rivalries in shows like Masterchef, and it’s amusing to see that tossed out the window. The show is fairly unconcerned with the actual talent of the chefs, and that may bother some, but I like the idea that this is an experiment in how fair contestants are or aren’t when forced to judge themselves. Plus it’s still fun to see what they cook.
— Jess
Length: 45-min runtime, 8 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
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. 🤷♀️
Blood, Sex, and Royalty
Keywords: historical drama, docuseries, miniseries
Watch if you like: The Other Boleyn Girl, Marie Antoinette, Dangerous Liaisons
Jenni’s Rating: D-
This show is billed as a docuseries about Anne Boleyn and follows her life from teen years as a lady in waiting, to courtship with Henry VIII, through to her (spoiler alert) beheading in 1536. However, Blood, Sex, and Royalty leans much more heavily into the historical dramatization than the “documentary” aspect of the series, and the expert talking head scenes feel a lot like cobbled-in afterthoughts that only serve to ruin the flow.
It’s clear through the modernized retelling and the experts’ points of view that the showrunners are trying to bring a fresher, more feminist context to Anne’s story, but the execution — pardon the pun — is lacking. The acted portions suffer a bit from the same attempted Fleabag-itization as last year’s Persuasion, and the talking head interviews begin to repeat themselves and share less novel and interesting information as the series goes on.
Unfortunately, though the concept behind Blood, Sex, and Royalty is intriguing, I think Netflix tried to add too much embellishment to an already fascinating story and smothered it somewhat in the process.
— Jenni
Length: 45-min runtime, 1 season / 3 episodes
Watch on: Netflix
Upcoming new releases:
Wolf Pack: Premieres January 26 on Paramount+
The 1619 Project: Premieres January 26 on Hulu
Poker Face: Premieres January 26 on Peacock
Teen Wolf: The Movie: Premieres January 26 on Paramount+
Lockwood & Co: Premieres January 27 on Netflix
Shotgun Wedding: Premieres January 27 on Prime Video
Shrinking: Premieres January 27 on Apple TV+
You People: Premieres January 27 on Netflix
The Watchful Eye: Premieres January 30 on Freeform
The Ark: Premieres February 1 on Syfy, the next day on Peacock
Freeridge: Premieres February 2 on Netflix
Wow cannot wait to see shotgun wedding, had no idea it existed until now lol