SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Undoing (Oct. 25, 9 p.m., HBO)
PHOTO CREDIT: Niko Tavernise/HBO
If you can’t get enough of Nicole Kidman on television this drama will be right up your alley. “The Undoing,” which reunites Kidman with creator David E. Kelley, is mainly a showcase for Kidman’s talents. And unlike their other show together, “Big Little Lies,” the Oscar winner doesn’t have to share top billing with other powerhouse women.
She plays another well-to-do wife, psychologist Grace Fraser. Grace seems to live a charmed life with husband Jonathan (Hugh Grant), a pediatric oncologist, and son Henry (Noah Jupe), but you just know it’s about to get turned upside down, especially when Grace meets an unsettling young woman named Elena (Italian actor Matilda De Angelis) in the first episode.
Elena ends up brutally murdered in her art studio, Jonathan goes missing and life as Grace knows it unravels.
Based on the 2014 novel “You Should Have Known” by Jean Hanff Korelitz, “The Undoing” is one of those shows that keeps you guessing from episode to episode. I’ve seen five of the six instalments and I really have no idea how it’s going to end.
Other talent includes Canadian actor Donald Sutherland as Grace’s father (he has a scene involving the dressing down of his grandson’s private school principal that you really don’t want to miss), Noma Dumezweni as a tough-as-nails lawyer, Ismael Cruz Cordova as Elena’s bereaved husband and Edgar Ramirez as a persistent police detective. Emmy winner Susanne Bier (“The Night Manager”) directs.
The settings and the cinematography are beautiful. Kidman looks like a Pre-Raphaelite vision as she traverses Manhattan with her flowing red curls and long, velvet coats.
“The Undoing” is not perfect by any means — we get very little sense, for instance, of who Elena was other than a murder victim who might have been disturbed — but it’s definitely watchable.
Darkness: Those Who Kill (Oct. 19, Acorn)
Whatever the state of pandemic TV production, there seems to be no danger of running out of psychological crime thrillers, what with other countries’ output to draw on.
This Danish series has familiar elements: young female victims (a depressing commonality of many crime dramas), a male killer, a driven male detective who, in this case, teams up with a female criminal profiler.
After detective Jan Michelsen (Kenneth M. Christensen) and profiler Louise Bergstein (Natalie Madueno) link a decade-old disappearance and murder with the kidnappings of two other young women in a town near Copenhagen they try to get inside the suspect’s head (Mads Riisom) in the hope of finding at least one of the victims alive.
Elsewhere, the series has been compared to Welsh crime drama “Hidden.” It also put me slightly in mind of “The Fall,” in that we know who the killer is early on.
Be warned that the show lives up to its title; in the two episodes I screened there was a brutal rape scene.
The Queen’s Gambit (Oct. 23, Netflix)
Given the resemblance of this seven-episode series to a biopic I at first thought perhaps it was based on a real person but, silly me, there were no elite female chess players in the 1950s and ’60s. In fact, I have read that a woman didn’t break into the top 10 until 2005, more than two decades after the publication of the Walter Tevis novel on which this show is based.
The fictional heroine here is Beth Harmon, played by Anya Taylor-Joy (“Peaky Blinders,” “The Dark Crystal”), a child chess prodigy who discovers her talent while living in an orphanage, which is where she also develops an addiction to the tranquilizers given to the girls to control their moods.
To be fair, I got access to the screeners just this morning and only had time to watch one episode, so I can’t pass judgment on the series as a whole. Based on what I’ve seen so far, it seems like a fairly straightforward biographical tale with the twist that the troubled genius is female.
The series was created by Oscar nominee Scott Frank (“Logan”) with Allan Scott. Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov was involved as a consultant to keep the chess scenes as authentic as possible.
Netflix also has Season 2 of “Unsolved Mysteries” debuting Oct. 19 and Season 3 of David Letterman’s “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” on Oct. 21.
Year of the Goat (Oct. 24, 8 p.m., CBC and CBC Gem)
Couldn’t you use something warm and fuzzy to take the edge off a stressful year? This documentary, airing on “CBC Docs POV,” gives you an up close and personal look at goats and the people who love them.
Filmmakers Michael McNamara and Aaron Hancox (“Catwalk: Tales From the Catshow Circuit”) spent a year embedded with several Ontario farm families and their critters in the run-up to the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, the “Super Bowl of agricultural fairs,” where their animals were part of the dairy show competition.
Yes, there’s lot of footage of cute, cuddly animals but also a look at the hard work involved in caring for them, with a special emphasis on the farm children’s devotion to their charges.
One thing comes through loud and clear: these animals are well loved, poop and all.
Odds and Ends
As a partner in the imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival, which runs online Oct. 20 to 25, Crave has introduced an Indigenous Stories collection of films. The titles on offer include two from filmmaker Jeff Barnaby: zombie horror flick “Blood Quantum” and “Rhymes for Young Ghouls,” which stars Devery Jacobs (“American Gods,” “The Order”). There are also inspirational story “The Grizzlies,” the debut of “Trickster” co-star Anna Lambe; “Falls Around Her,” starring Tantoo Cardinal; “Maliglutit” (“Searchers”) by Inuk filmmakers Zacharias Kunuk and Natar Ungalaaq; Oscar winner “Jojo Rabbit” by Taika Waititi and more.
If you’re in the mood for some reality TV, “Battle of the Blades” debuts its sixth season on CBC Oct. 22 at 8 p.m. — one week late after the earlier premiere was scrapped when a member of the production team tested positive for COVID-19. CTV2 has Season 19 of “The Voice” (Oct. 19, 8 p.m.).
If you like country music and/or pandemic entertainment, you can check out how country star Brett Kissel brought live music back to Canada in a physically distanced way in the documentary “Brett Kissel: Live at the Drive-In” (Oct. 21, 8 p.m., CTV2). On the same night, CTV has new episodes of “The Conners” at 7:30 p.m.
Showcase has the new comedy series from Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Funny or Die, “No Activity” (Oct. 25, 10 p.m.), which according to the show blurb “celebrates the mundane.”
Disney Plus has something for “Frozen” completists with “Once Upon a Snowman” (Oct. 23), which reveals the “untold origins” of Olaf, the snowman from the blockbuster animated movies.
Finally, science and/or space geeks might enjoy “Touching the Asteroid” on “Nova” (Oct. 21, 9 p.m., PBS), about the seven-year mission of spaceship Osiris Rex to collect pieces of the Bennu asteroid 200 million miles from Earth and potentially unlock secrets of the origins of our solar system.
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