Here’s what caught my eye over the past week of screening.

Dead Still (May 18, Acorn TV)

Michael Smiley as post-mortem photographer Brock Blennerhasset in “Dead Still,” a co-production of Ireland’s Deadpan Pictures and Canada’s Shaftesbury for Acorn TV. PHOTO CREDIT: Acorn TV

This is my favourite new show of the week. It starts with the premise of a post-mortem photographer, i.e. a photographer who takes portraits of families with their dead loved ones – catnip for anyone with a taste for the macabre. But that’s just one element of this six-episode series that’s also a murder mystery, a period drama, a family drama, a black comedy and a glimpse of how people lived in 1880s Dublin, both the upper and lower classes.

The characters spring to life from the very first episode, particularly the central trio: photographer Brock Blennerhasset, played by Michael Smiley (“Luther”), who seems to prefer the dead to the living; his aspiring actress niece Nancy (Eileen O’Higgins of “Brooklyn” and “Mary Queen of Scots”), who’s naive and worldly at the same time; and his assistant Connal (Kerr Logan of “Alias Grace” and “Game of Thrones”), a gravedigger with the soul of an artist.

The secondary characters are just as well drawn. They include Aidan O’Hare (“Dublin Murders”) as the police detective trying to solve the murders with no backing from the higher-ups; Canadian Mark Rendall (“ReGenesis,” “Versailles”) as a sculptor who courts Nancy; and Peter Campion (“Derry Girls,” “Peaky Blinders”) as Nancy’s rake of a brother, Henry.

Besides post-mortem photography, a fascinating Victorian practice, the series touches on the fad for spiritualism and seances, and even Victoria porn. There’s a wonderful episode in which Brock and Connal appear to be haunted by the ghost of a little boy they’ve just photographed. And the Dublin locations are fantastic.

Acorn, which commissioned the series, releases two episodes May 18, with more to follow weekly. It also airs Fridays at 10 p.m. on Citytv.

(If you’d like to read my Toronto Star interview with Mark Rendall, director Craig David Wallace and executive producer Paul Donovan, go to thestar.com and search Dead Still.)

Hightown (May 17, Starz on Crave)

Monica Raymund stars as Jackie Quinones, who’s trying to stay clean and solve a murder at the same time in “Hightown.” PHOTO CREDIT: Starz via Bell Media

This is a meaty post-“Chicago Fire” project for Monica Raymund, who stars as a hard-partying fisheries office in Provincetown, Mass., who finds a young woman’s body on the beach after a bender. After skipping out of rehab, Jackie tries to stay sober while tracking down a fellow drug addict who may be entangled in the crime. That brings her into the orbit of Detective Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale, “The Pacific,” “24”), who’s trying to solve the murder, which is linked to the area’s opiod epidemic. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, Raymund said she was glad to be playing “something completely different” from Gabby Dawson in “Chicago Fire.”  “This role is really about battling my inner demons, trying to find redemption, trying to fill something within me that I can’t fill.”

Homecoming (May 22, Amazon Prime Video)

Stephan James as Walter Cruz in Season 2 of “Homecoming.” PHOTO CREDIT: Amazon Prime Video

I can’t say too much about Season 2 of the series here because there is an embargo on reviews until May 18. Suffice to say the seven episodes I watched kept me entertained. Stephan James is back as veteran Walter Cruz, a former subject of the mysterious Homecoming program. This season, he acts opposite new recruits Janelle Monae and Oscar winner Chris Cooper. And there’s a bigger role this season for Hong Chau (“Watchmen”) as Geist Group employee on the rise Audrey Temple. Check thestar.com this week for my Toronto Star interview with Stephan.

Little Fires Everywhere (May 22, Amazon Prime Video)

Kerry Washington as Mia and Reese Witherspoon as Elena in “Little Fires Everywhere.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Erin Simkin/Hulu

After shepherding “Big Little Lies” to the screen, Reese Witherspoon has brought another bestselling book about complicated women to television, this time Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere” with Kerry Washington (“Scandal”) as her co-executive producer and co-star. This is really Washington’s and Witherspoon’s show. They star as mothers Mia and Elena – one a guarded artist with an unconventional approach to parenting, the other a journalist who tries to mould her kids to her idea of perfection – who are pitted against each other. Neither comes across as particularly likeable, but they are interesting to watch. Class differences, racial divisions and white privilege form the context of what is essentially a story about mothers and daughters. Lexi Underwood and Megan Stott stand out as Mia’s daughter Pearl and Elena’s daughter Izzy.

If you missed it …

“The Great” debuted May 16, also on Amazon Prime. It’s history with a wink, loosely based on the story of Catherine the Great, empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796, and her coup against her husband, Emperor Peter III. Elle Fanning makes an engaging Catherine, intelligent, kindhearted and devoted to Enlightenment ideals. Nicholas Hoult plays Peter as a needy and callous man-child, preoccupied with drinking, fighting and screwing the wife of his best friend. Phoebe Fox is fun as Marial, Catherine’s servant, a former aristocrat demoted to serf, and Sacha Dhawan plays Catherine’s co-conspirator Count Orlov.

Odds and ends

A new episode of “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet” comes to Apple TV Plus on May 22. “The Masked Singer” has a two-part season finale May 19 and 20 at 8 p.m. on CTV. “A League of Their Own” is the latest instalment of “Stay at Home Cinema” from Crave and the Toronto International Film Festival on May 19, with a Q&A with Geena Davis at tiff.net at 7 p.m. and the movie at 7:30 p.m. on Crave.