Queer Eye is back this week!!!
And you should be getting into The OA before that comes back too.
Hello,
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Anyway, here is what is worth watching this week…
Queer Eye (Netflix on Friday) - YAAAAAS etc. New episodes drop this Friday. Now to be honest, I was a bit sceptical at first about this season. The first two seasons were filmed at exactly the same time so this is the real Season 2. I was anxious that the show’s hype and various avocado memes would start to overwhelm the direction and transformational appeal of the show itself.
Luckily, it hasn’t. It continues to be great. It still manages to break new ground. There’s a great lesson in the fourth episode about the dangers of self-deprecation, how openly criticising yourself to fit in with other people can hurt your self-esteem. Basically: “Nobody else is saying these things about you. It’s you saying these things.”
Also, there’s a great sequence in another episode when Antoni, the food expert, is trying to find out the secret recipe to some BBQ sauce that the two people at the heart of the episode have invented and they just won’t give it to him. No matter how many times they ask. He gets so frustrated by the whole thing. It is gold.
RuPaul’s Drag Race (Netflix) - If you haven’t got into the show so far, now is the time. Netflix are dropping new episodes the same week they air in the US, so you can finally get swept up in the show’s social media reaction in the UK too. Untucked, its side-kick show, is not a half-bad watch either.
There’s also a lot of good stuff on… there’s Derry Girls (Channel 4, Tuesday 9.15pm), This Time with Alan Partridge (BBC One, Monday 9.30pm) and Fleabag (BBC Three). Oh and Ricky Gervais’ After Life (Netflix) is interesting in the way it tackles grief.
Plus James Acaster is hilarious on Celebrity Bake Off this week. The celebrity version is now better than the original series. I wrote about this week for The Guardian.
A show worth catching up on…
The OA (22nd March, Netflix) - You will either absolutely love or categorically hate this show. This drama is so absurd at times, so creative and so unlike anything else you will either be carried along be the vibe or utterly disorientated and alienated. The second season is back later this month and even if you watched the first in 2016, it’s easy to have forgotten a lot of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a go now. If you have, try to watch it again as a little bit of a recap before you thrown into it again.
Here’s what is not worth watching this week…
Cheat (ITV, Mon-Thurs 9pm) - No, this isn’t a drama about the sexy kind of cheating. It’s more about the academic kind of cheating (you at home: “ok”), where a student is accused of cheating by her tutor, the student responds by not liking her tutor very much and the whole thing escalates and escalates until TA-DA someone is dead.
I think my reaction to the whole thing is when one of the characters is asked by the student accused of plagiarism and he responds: “I couldn’t care less.” Same, mate. I tried to connect with it, but couldn’t.
Also, as a new feature, here’s a recommendation from David Q, one of our readers about a show that he thinks other people should be watching: “Here’s a weird thing: the new series of Top Gear is actually really very good. I feel like this is some sort of secret people should know. Le Blanc’s totally comfortable with it now, shame he’s leaving. Trust me, this is as much a surprise to me as anybody.”
If you’ve got a TV recommendation of your own, respond to this email!
Scotty x