Netflix has a repository of series belonging to different genres and a little hodgepodge might help you unwind without guilt
Miniseries, a show with a limited series, are for those times when you are less willing to give into a long, winding plotline. These are narratives that wrap up succinctly instead of stretching to an awful number of episodes and seasons. Of late, the streaming app has added quite a few gems; be it a dark comedy, a cliffhanger, a historical non-fiction, a coming-of-age story, an adaptation of a canonical work of literature, or something breezy and feather-weighed. And a compilation of these works has been long due.
Harlan Coben’s Safe is a whirlpool of interlocking mysteries starring Michael C. Hall from Dexter and Six Feet Under. The show has its share of attempted pompousness but is sure to keep you hooked for the better part of the night. Never for once the show gets sloppy or disappoints as a weekend companion. At the end of the series, you are left hankering for more from Hall, perhaps a wider emotional spectrum in the later instalments of Safe.
Your plunge into a soothing cocoon, one to shield you against harsh reality checks throughout the weekend. The magic of Gilmorisms shines throughout albeit the show dulls with the constant nagging references to the past each time a new character is introduced. This constant tug at the past could be overwhelming but what works for the show is its intensity and pacing. Not really a blast from the past, A Year in the Life would still make you curl up and sip on some hot chocolate as you binge-watch it.
Beef starts with a road rage incident between the blue-collar proletariat Danny Cho and capitalist-consumerist Amy Lau sparking off a venomous battle that places them at different crossroads in life. The constant bubbling of anxiety in Beef may remind you of Bear. Both the shows set a stellar record of making viewers commit irrespective of the heebie-jeebies. Ali Wong’s dark, existential thriller is also a comic genius—a drama full of rage and spite. Beef is a tirade against the lux-hippy culture while injecting in you a disconcerting existential crisis. It takes you to the dark, lurid places of the human mind, and it is a journey which is most fascinating and compelling in the recent memory of streaming history.
Tom Verica’s gorgeous take on Queen Charlotte and King George III’s interracial romance, a cinematic portrayal of the legendary “first Black queen of English,” a statement which previously lacked support and was labelled as a myth. Besides bravely depicting the monarch as Black, and undeniably so, the show also does an astounding job of dealing with the King’s gradual descent into madness. A lot of speculation has been made on the origin of Queen Charlotte-- German-born Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz with African ancestry, and the show certainly aspired to put an end to those.
Directed by Mary Harron and based on Margaret Atwood’s novel, the miniseries has been tagged “cerebral” for its poignance, beauty, and pathos while offering us a journey into Grace’s mind, one that is on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. We see some disorienting close-ups of Grace, a technique which accomplishes the task of at once alienating and trapping us in gossamer of her mind. The world of Alias Grace is restricted when compared to The Handmaid's Tale but the show still delivers with a promising emotional grounding that compels one to dissect the characters and revisit the show time and again.
