Watchable the week of Dec. 7, 2020

SHOW OF THE WEEK: A Suitable Boy (Dec. 7, Acorn)

Love is the universal language of some of the best TV drama and the main preoccupation of “A Suitable Boy.”

The sprawling 1993 novel by Vikram Seth has been given the prestige TV treatment: a BBC One adaptation by Andrew Davies, who gave us TV delights like “Pride and Prejudice” (the 1995 miniseries) and “Bleak House,” directed by Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding,” “Queen of Katwe”).

Like the book, the series is set in 1951 India, four years after the British divided the country into two states, majority Muslim Pakistan and majority Hindu India, a decision that triggered massive violence and whose reverberations are still being felt today. That political and religious tension is woven into the familial drama of the miniseries.

Our main focus is Lata Mehra (rookie actor Tanya Maniktala), a university English lit student who’s being pressured to marry by her widowed mother Rupa (Mahira Kakkar). Lata has three suitors — student Kabir (Danesh Razvi), renowned poet Amit (Mikhail Sen) and shoemaker Haresh (Namit Das) — only one of whom her mother considers suitable, particularly since Lata is Hindu and Kabir is Muslim.

(The characters’ kiss has sparked calls for a Netflix boycott and even a police investigation in India.)

Sister Savita (Rasika Dugal) has made a happy arranged marriage while brother Arun (Vivek Gomber) has married into the well-to-do Chatterji family but is too busy looking down his nose at other people to notice he’s being cuckolded by vivacious wife Meenakshi (Shahana Goswami).

The other major romantic entanglement concerns Maan Kapoor (Ishaan Khattar), son of a government minister, brother-in-law to Lata, who has fallen in love with Saeeda Bai (Indian superstar Tabu, who gets top billing in the series), a singer and courtesan. His best friend Firoz (Shubham Saraf) is courting Saeeda’s sister Tasneem (Joyeeta Dutta).

If it sounds like a lot, it is. There are also side plots involving politics and corruption, economic inequality, and violence between Hindus and Muslims, but luckily the miniseries is not quite as sprawling as the 1,349-page novel.

It was shot in India — beautifully so — and offers a view of Indian culture that we’re not used to seeing in mainstream North American television, but the characters’ affairs of the heart, especially Lata’s, are eminently relatable.

The Wilds (Dec. 11, Amazon Prime Video)

Nine teenage girls, on their way to a retreat in Hawaii, are stranded on an island after a plane crash. It becomes clear, through the series’ flashback structure, that something very bad has happened to those young women on that island — even worse than a plane crash. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to tell you much more than that because: spoilers.

“The Wilds” is billed as “part survival drama, part dystopic slumber party,” but what drew me in — based on the few episodes I screened — wasn’t the mystery and the twists and turns but the characters in all their messy, angsty, adolescent female glory.

There are some cliches and some predictability lurking, to be sure, but how often do we get a drama that’s exclusively focused on teenage girls?

Australian Oscar nominee Rachel Griffiths (“Six Feet Under,” “Brothers & Sisters”) is the name star, as the head of the corporation that runs the retreat, but the young stars — Sophia Ali, Shannon Berry, Jenna Clause, Reign Edwards, Mia Healey, Helena Howard, Erana James, Sarah Pidgeon and Chi Nguyen — are the ones who command your attention.

For the Record (Dec. 11, CBC Gem)

It’s a small world in this web series, which weaves vignettes about love, sex and identity into six interconnected, 18-minute episodes, each one underscored by a piece of music.

It starts and ends with Ray (series creator Julian De Zotti) and Angela (Anna Hopkins, “The Expanse”), whom we meet as they’re divvying up their record collection post-breakup.

Subsequent episodes have Angela trying to teach niece Madison (Alexandra Beaton) about the futility of love; Ray trying to impress the parents of new girlfriend Sara (Moni Ogunsuyi) and failing miserably when dinner degenerates into an argument about cultural appropriation; Angela’s pastor ex, Stefan (Lyriq Bent), exploring his sexuality with married parishioner Lily (Kira Clavell); Lily’s widowed mother, Joy (Alannah Ong), finding new love and defying cultural and familial expectations with Fiona (Theresa Tova); and Fiona’s pregnant daughter Rain (Justine Nelson) seeking help from newly single-again Ray after she gets into trouble at an EDM festival — which brings us back to Ray and Angela.

The featured music includes classics from the Beach Boys, Bob Marley and Nina Simone, and Canadian artists The Weeknd, Johnny Orlando and Zeds Dead. 

Documentary Corner

Two documentaries this week remind us of musicians who are no longer with us.

In the case of John Lennon, the loss for many people had the same “Where were you when you heard he died?” resonance as for giants like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

In “Lennon’s Last Weekend,” releasing on BritBox on Dec. 8 — 40 years to the day that Lennon was shot to death at the entrance of his Manhattan apartment building — the tone is elegiac. Although its content reflects Lennon when he was alive and happy and fulfilled — as captured in an extensive radio interview he gave the BBC’s Andy Peebles just two days before he died — a sense of loss permeates the film. TV producer Malcolm Gerrie sums it up perfectly when he says, with tears in his eyes, “If only. If only John hadn’t come back (to the Dakota) when he did.”

The documentary contains Lennon’s own words — on why the Beatles stopped touring, on the “more popular than Jesus” controversy, on his past drug addiction, his rivalry with Paul McCartney, his 18-month separation from Yoko Ono, his love of “Fawlty Towers” and more — combined with film footage (mercifully, very little from the scene of his murder) and expert interviews. Most poignantly, Lennon tells Peebles how safe he feels living in New York.

The doc argues not just for what the world lost in the way of a musical talent but as an activist. “I think we need a John Lennon now,” Gerrie says. “We need that kind of outspoken force of nature, which is what he was.” 

In “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” (Dec. 12, 8 p.m. HBO, Crave), the fact that only one of the three Bee Gees (four, if you count baby brother Andy Gibb, who died in 1988 at just 30) is still alive is inescapable, but there’s also a buoyancy to the film, which is more of a standard career survey than the Lennon doc. 

The brothers Gibb — survivor Barry, now 74; fraternal twins Maurice and Robin, who died in 2003 and 2012, respectively — first started performing as children in Australia. Their three-part harmonies propelled them through distinctive career phases as 1960s balladeers, with hits like “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and “(The Lights Went Out in) Massachusetts”; pop/R&B/disco stars when the brothers’ songwriting talents and Barry’s falsetto made the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack one of the biggest selling albums in history; and, after the massive disco backlash that had them fending off death threats, songwriters for hire for stars like Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross and Celine Dion.

If your only knowledge of the Bee Gee is from their disco heyday (and for the record, I love their disco songs), you’ll learn something from this film and maybe even gain a new appreciation.

Odds and Ends

Netflix has a new medical documentary series to tempt viewers who loved “Lenox Hill.” “The Surgeon’s Cut” (Dec. 9) devotes each of its four episodes to a different doctor, beginning with Dr. Kypros Nicolaides, who has devoted his life to fetal surgery with some astonishing, and occasionally heartbreaking, results.

HBO has “40 Years a Prisoner” (Dec. 8, 9 p.m., HBO, Crave), about a controversial 1978 police raid in Philadelphia on a radical, back-to-nature group called MOVE, which resulted in the death of a police officer and the imprisonment of two MOVE members.

We’re well into holiday TV and movie season, including all those many, many Christmas movies. Amazon Prime Video has “Happiest Season” (Dec. 10), starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis as the love interests, with Daniel Levy of “Schitt’s Creek” as the gay best friend. On Citytv you can catch “A Christmas Exchange” (Dec. 12, 8 p.m.), starring Canadians Laura Vandervoort (“Smallville,” “Bitten”) and Rainbow Sun Francks (“High Fidelity,” “The Listener”) as strangers who fall in love long distance after they swap digs. Disney Plus has “High School Musical: The Musical: The Holiday Special” (Dec. 11), which if nothing else presents you with the gift of too many colons.