UNDER any other circumstance I would not be caught dead watching a sport-related show of any kind, but my trusted insider at Showmax previously recommended season one of Winning Time: The Rise Of The Lakers Dynasty, and I loved it. Season two drops from today with episodes weekly on Mondays, because HBO be like that.
Season two continues to explore the professional and personal lives of the legendary 1980s Los Angeles Lakers basketball team. This season hones in on the period just after the finals in 1980, building to the first professional rematch of the era’s greatest stars: Magic Johnson (Quincy Isaiah) and Larry Bird (Sean Patrick Small).
Once again exec produced by Oscar- and three-time Emmy winner Adam McKay (Don’t Look Up, Succession), season two’s returning cast includes Oscar winner Adrien Brody (Asteroid City), Critics Choice winner Jason Segel (Shrinking, How I Met Your Mother), and Emmy nominee Gaby Hoffman (Transparent), alongside new cast members like Emmy winner Michael Chiklis (The Shield), hooray!
Ready to binge now is the fifth and final season of New Amsterdam with Dr Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold from BlacKkKlansman, 90210 and The Blacklist) continuing his fight to put saving lives above the bottom line. Based on Eric Manheimeris’ book Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital, the medical drama was created by writer-producer David Schulner (Desperate Housewives), who was nominated for a 2022 award from the Writers Guild of America for Best Episodic Drama.
This season, look out for Oscar winner Marlee Matlin (CODA, The L Word, The West Wing), who makes a guest appearance as Dr. Wilder’s former mentor, Dr. Bev Clemons.
Another one ready to binge from today is A Million Little Things season five and here I must confess this is my guilty pleasure. It’s so cheesy, and so sentimental, and so slushy but I’ve been with it since the beginning and let’s be honest here: sometimes you need to watch a series that doesn’t tax the brain too much even if it requires tissues. It’s the final season so you can expect it to play on all the feels.
Still to come is Angela Black on August 14 and I’ll put this in here because it stars the wonderful three-time Emmy nominee Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey’s Anna Bates) in the title role in Angela Black, and it’s created by Emmy winners Harry and Jack Williams (Fleabag, The Missing).
Critics Choice Super nominee Michiel Huisman (Alex Sokolov in The Flight Attendant and Game of Thrones’ Daario Naharis) co-stars as her husband, Olivier, with BAFTA nominee Samuel Adewunmi (Secret Invasion, The Last Tree) as Ed.
Moving on from the scripted fiction, to the facts. Documentary Moonage Daydream was on M-Net 101 last week, and still on Catch Up but also on Showmax. From Oscar-nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen (Cobain: Montage of Heck), Moonage Daydream is a cinematic odyssey exploring David Bowie’s creative, spiritual, and musical journey.
The film has a 92% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Vogue hailing it as, “Astounding. Among the best films about any artist I’ve ever seen.” In their five star reviews, The Guardian called it “glorious,” TimeOut “spectacular” and The Telegraph “hypnotic.”
Moonage Daydream has the full support of Bowie’s estate and features many of the Grammy Lifetime Achievement winner’s greatest tracks, as well as previously unseen concert footage.
Looking for something new to add to the Barbenheimer conversation? The feature documentary To End All War: Oppenheimer & The Atomic Bomb tells the true story of how one man’s brilliance, hubris and relentless drive changed the nature of war forever, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and unleashed mass hysteria, and how, subsequently, the same man’s attempts to contain the fallout of his invention made him a pariah and led him down a path of deep despair.
Later this month (August 23), watch The Fastest Woman On Earth. Filmed over seven years, it chronicles the extraordinary life of professional racer and TV personality Jessi Combs. Known as the “Fastest Woman on Four Wheels”, Combs set the women’s land-speed record at over 700 km/h. To put that into perspective, typical takeoff air speeds for jetliners are in the range of 240–285 km/h.