From Ringo Starr getting a little help from his friends in a Nashville music special to John Mulaney’s bonkers new talk show, we round up our top 10 shows to watch this week
1. No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski – Sunday, March 9, National Geographic Channel | Series Premiere
Queer Eye’s resident food and wine guru Antoni Porowski launches a side hustle that sees the Montreal native travel the globe with a different celebrity each week, digging into their heritage through a culinary lens.
Season one’s taste quests include a trip to South Korea with Shang-Chi star Awkwafina, a jaunt to Italy with The Leftovers’ Justin Theroux, plus Germany with Westworld actor James Marsden, Malaysian Borneo with Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding, and Senegal with Issa Rae, creator/star of HBO’s Insecure.
But tonight, the show serves up its first course, as Antoni and Oscar-nominated actress Florence Pugh (Little Women) head to the U.K., where both culinary delights and family revelations await. Click here to watch trailer.
2. Dark Winds – Sunday, March 9, AMC | Season Premiere
AMC’s roundly acclaimed neo-noir based on Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee books returns for a third twisted mystery. This time, 1970s Navajo cops Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are on the hunt for two missing boys. The only clues: “an abandoned bicycle and a blood-stained patch of ground left in their wake.”
Meanwhile, the third member of their triumvirate, Bernadette Manuelito, is now 500 miles away, adjusting to her new gig with Border Patrol, where she stumbles across a conspiracy that involves both human and drug trafficking.
As ever, the crimes of the present moment are only half the story, as the sins of the past re-emerge to torment our heroes. Here, they’re dredged up by a new FBI agent in town, played by guest star Jenna Elfman (Fear the Walking Dead), who arrives in the American Southwest chasing a case that’s connected to Leaphorn. Also joining the cast this year is Canadian Bruce Greenwood (The Resident) as a New Mexico oil baron driven to extreme lengths to save his floundering business.
AMC has already renewed the show for a fourth season.
3. Ringo & Friends at the Ryman – Monday, March 10, CBS
Filmed at Nashville’s famed Ryman Auditorium back in January, this two-hour concert special features Ringo Starr performing his biggest hits with a little help from his friends — including Sheryl Crow, Rodney Crowell, Mickey Guyton, Emmylou Harris, Sarah Jarosz, Jamey Johnson, Brenda Lee, Larkin Poe, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, The War and Treaty and Jack White — in celebration of his recently released country album, Look Up.
4. Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party – Tuesday, March 11, Paramount+
Airing just once on MTV back in 1983, this documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers marked the directorial debut of Cameron Crowe. The original footage was discovered last year, more than 40 years later, and this new version — restored from its original 16mm source — follows the band as they record the Long After Dark album and take the new songs on tour.
“Heartbreakers Beach Party occupies a special place in my heart,” said Crowe. “Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers leaned into the making of the film with a kind of hilarious music-filled honesty that still feels fresh 40 years later. It was also my first experience as a director [and] we’re bringing it back in all its reckless glory. I’m especially happy to add a postscript with the never-seen outtake footage I always treasured. The fact that the original film was yanked from MTV after only one airing shows that it was, and still is, an outlandish feast for fans in the best ways. Turn it up!” Click here to watch trailer.
5. Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney – Wednesday, March 12, Netflix | Series Premiere
You can’t fault Netflix for not giving it a go in the talk show arena. Chelsea Handler, the late Norm Macdonald and a few others have hosted talk shows for the streamer, while David Letterman’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction is ongoing.
Netflix’s latest talk show also promises to be its weirdest, with comedian John Mulaney welcoming an eclectic group of guests each Wednesday for Everybody’s Live. He’ll be joined by sidekick Richard Kind and Saymo, an Uber Eats food delivery robot.
“This will be the one place where you could see Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting next to Nikki Glaser sitting next to a family therapist with music by Mannequin Pussy,” said Mulaney of his new show. “That’s just a brief sampling of guests. We don’t know if we can lock in Mannequin Pussy, but we are in talks with them.”
Added Mulaney: “This is a really fun experiment. Not since Harry and Meghan has Netflix given more money to someone without a specific plan.”
The new show follows on the heels of Everybody’s in L.A., a series of six specials Mulaney hosted during the Netflix is a Joke comedy festival, when the world’s funniest folks congregated in the City of Angels. Along with a who’s who of the comedy world, Mulaney peppered each episode with the likes of O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, plus some unexpected and atypical guests. “We had a hypnotist. We had an expert on coyotes in Los Angeles. We had a palm tree expert. We had an earthquake expert,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.
“It’s one of those shows that neither Netflix nor I really needed to do,” Mulaney quipped. “I never wanted to host a talk show and they were getting out of the talk show game. It was the perfect moment to do this.”
6. Adolescence – Thursday, March 13, Netflix | Series Premiere
The same day that the aforementioned Boiling Point series comes to Canada, the star and director of the film that preceded it will debut their latest project.
In addition to leading the cast, Stephen Graham (who played Boiling Point’s tortured head chef Andy) also serves as co-creator on Adolescence — another four-parter out of England. The show opens with 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) being arrested for the murder of a classmate. It’s an utter shock to his loving father Eddie (Graham) and mother Manda (Christine Tremarco), who awake to their doors being kicked in by a S.W.A.T. team — their terrified son dragged out of bed and hauled down to the station by a cop (Missing You’s Ashley Walters), who is certain he’s got his “man.” But that can’t possibly be true . . . or can it?
Each episode takes place in real-time, filmed by director Philip Barantini in a single, unbroken shot that captures the visceral experience of not just the accused and his family, but the cops, the boy’s public defender (Mark Stanley), a social worker (Erin Doherty) sent to evaluate the situation and, in one especially striking episode, the schoolmates and teachers of the victim.
Speaking with Netflix’s Tudum, Graham teed up a very different sort of crime show. “We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser. Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, ‘My God. This could be happening to us!’ . . . and what’s happening here is an ordinary family’s worst nightmare.”
“One of our aims was to ask, ‘What is happening to our young men these days, and what are the pressures they face from their peers, from the internet and from social media?’ ” Graham continued. “The pressures that come from all of those things are as difficult for kids [in the U.K.] as they are the world over.” Click here to watch trailer.
7. Dope Thief – Friday, March 14, Apple TV+ | Series Premiere
The director of such hit films as Alien, The Martian and, most recently, Gladiator II, Ridley Scott is also a prolific producer of TV fare like The Good Wife and The Man in the High Castle. His latest small-screen endeavour is based on a 2009 novel by Dennis Tafoya about two small-time crooks in Philadelphia who hatch a scheme to pose as DEA agents and rob a mysterious house out in the country — only to find they’ve ripped off some major players, and exposed the largest hidden narcotics corridor on the Eastern Seaboard. The two knuckleheads in question are played by Atlanta breakout Brian Tyree Henry, along with Wagner Moura — best known as Pablo Escobar on Narcos.
Beyond producing, Scott directs the first episode, while the series was penned by Peter Craig, writer of Top Gun: Maverick and The Town. Click here to watch trailer.
8. The Electric State – Friday, March 14, Netflix
Set in the aftermath of a robot uprising in an alternate version of the ’90s, this sci-fi action-comedy follows an orphaned teen (Millie Bobby Brown) who ventures across the American West in search of her brother, joined by a cartoon-inspired robot (Alan Tudyk), a smuggler (Chris Pratt) and his robot sidekick (Anthony Mackie).
9. The Parenting – Friday, March 14, Crave1
A long-overdue new film by director Craig Johnson (the man behind The Skeleton Twins and Alex Strangelove) puts a satirical, topical spin on the traditional haunted house yarn.
When young gay couple Rohan and Josh (Twisters’ Nik Dodani and 13 Reasons Why’s Brandon Flynn) plan a weekend getaway to bring their respective parents together for an introduction, they’re keenly aware it could be a disaster. On one side, you’ve got the ultra-conservative Frank (Succession’s Brian Cox) and Sharon (The Sopranos’ Edie Falco); on the other, laidback Liddy (Friends’ Lisa Kudrow) and Chuck (Breaking Bad alum Dean Norris). A culture clash is all but imminent — yet social awkwardness becomes the least of their concerns when it turns out that the woman they rented the house from (Parker Posey, late of The White Lotus) failed to mention they’d be sharing the place with a 400-year-old poltergeist. Worse yet, after the spirit possesses one of their parents, Rohan, Josh and their rambunctious pal Sara (Vivian Bang, Always Be My Maybe) must somehow inspire the rest of this disparate bunch to put aside their differences and exorcize their demons.
If this all-star cast looks just a tad younger and spryer than usual, it’s because The Parenting was actually shot back in 2022, but has been sitting on the shelf amidst distribution issues. Click here to watch trailer.
10. Bill Burr: Drop Dead Days – Friday, March 14, Disney+
He’s among the most successful standups of the 21st century — and Bill Burr has, indeed, parlayed that success into a wealth of different opportunities, including guest-arcs on Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian, as well as co-writing, directing and starring in semi-autobiographical hit film Old Dads.
Yet at heart, the Canton, Massachusetts native is a creature of the stage — why would the man be anything else when he has the global star power to sell out both his hometown’s Fenway Park and London’s Royal Albert Hall.
And so it is that Mr. Burr returns with a new special this week. Filmed in Seattle, Drop Dead Years has Bill serving up “hilarious takes on everything from male sadness to dating advice” in a night of cantankerous absurdity that “might be his most personal and introspective hour yet.” In a chat with Variety, Burr delved into the sadness aspect of his new routine, noting: “When I started doing the material, there was this really excited, happy feeling I had — that I wasn’t the only one that felt that way. Men were laughing. They related to this reality of, ‘I don’t feel good right now. I feel sad, and I’m not allowed to say that as a guy because it’s considered weak.’” No doubt, that speaks to how time has changed both Burr and his material: “I don’t want to be up there just pointing my finger at the crowd the whole time. God knows I was guilty of that earlier in my career, but that’s just where I was as a young man,” he continued. “I was lashing out at everything. As you get older, hopefully you realize that you’re bringing some of the problems to the table, and maybe the way you handle things isn’t the best way to do it . . . A lot of the things I used to believe, that women are difficult and blah, blah, blah — it was my issue of not understanding myself.”