The mockumentary will have an all-star cast playing fictitious ‘renowned’ historians, looking back at the landmark year of 2020 with real-life archival footage from the past twelve months.
Hugh Grant (The Undoing) will be playing one such historian and will be joined by Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction), Lisa Kudrow (Friends), comedian Leslie Jones (Saturday Night Live) and Kumail Nanjiani (The Lovebirds).
Over the past year, SVoD services such as Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock (NBCUniversal) and AppleTV+ have come on stream, joining the likes of Netflix and Amazon.
Alan Wolk, co-founder of media consultancy TV[R]EV, speaking from New Jersey, dubbed the streaming boom a “flixcopalypse”. He said two more – Paramount+ and Discovery+ – were due to launch soon.
Success is not guaranteed. The short-form streamer Quibi, launched by former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg, collapsed this month after only half a year in business.
From the team behind The Stranger and Safe, the series will follow three key characters whose sinister past resurfaces to threaten their everyday lives. Harlan Coben and Danny Brocklehurst (Brassic) will be collaborating alongside Richard Fee and Nicola Shindler to write and create the series.
The series will see Stay Close relocate to an English setting from the States.
The genealogy documentary series returns, with Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who) tracing her Yorkshire family tree in this opening episode.
Candour is a big deal for Netflix co-founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings. Having argued for “increased candour” early on in this eye-popping account of Netlix’s corporate culture, he returns to the idea some 60 pages later in a section called “Pump up candour”. Not content with that, he makes the point again, towards the end of the book, with the exhortation: “Max up candour” (Chapter 8).
The comedy series follows the sex-obsessed teens of Moordale High School, who seek advice from the unofficial lunchtime sex therapy clinic run by students Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) and Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey).
The second series saw Otis’ best friend Eric get caught in a love triangle between the new French student Rahim (Sami Outalbali) and the headmaster’s bully son Adam Groff (Connor Swindells).
On the face of it, a coming-of-age story about a mother and daughter who live in a quirky Connecticut town and speak at the pace of an Aaron Sorkin script doesn’t sound that comforting. But that would be to judge Gilmore Girls, the cult comedy-drama created by Amy Sherman-Palladino too quickly.
Hitting screens in 2000, the show ran for seven seasons, its cross-generational popularity such that it was revived for a four-part Netflix mini-series in 2016, nearly 10 years after the last episode aired.
A short trailer accompanied the announcement, in which Olivia Colman’s Queen Elizabeth II declares: “Something as important as the monarchy simply cannot be allowed to fail.”
The trailer also introduced the characters of Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana, played by Gillian Anderson and Emma Corrin.
The coming series will follow the arrival of Thatcher as Prime Minister and Diana’s turbulent relationship with Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor).
Debicki will take over the role from Emma Corrin, who will star as Princess Diana in the upcoming fourth series due later this autumn.
Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones) has also been announced to take over from Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip.
Pryce and Debicki will join the cast confirmed for series five and six including Imelda Staunton (A Confession), who will play Queen Elizabeth, and Lesley Manville (Mum) as Princess Margaret.
Lockdown has led to a lot of people getting into the kitchen and cooking, but it can be easy to get stuck in a rut and cook the same things again and again.
