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COMEDY DRAMA
Episodes 1—3 available from Wednesday on Apple TV+ Kristen Wiig is an interloper with nothing to lose in a richly styled dramedy: in Palm Beach, Florida in 1969, a group of middle-aged women rule the social roost from their perch at the exclusive Palm Royale members club. Maxine (Wiig) isn’t a member and has a murky, tenuous claim to being worthy of high society but she’s determined to sit at the top table. The show isn’t sure how malevolent or sympathetic it wants Wiig to be and it could do with being either sillier or more vicious — as it is, it’s a diverting enough swirl of secrets, schemes and gossip. The cast, meanwhile, is a treat: Allison Janney raising a spiky eyebrow as the incumbent queen bee, Ricky Martin with his shirt off more than it’s on, and Laura Dern as a leader of an uncertain but growing feminist movement.
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Apple TV+
HISTORICAL DRAMA
Episode 3 available Friday
Clean-shaven Tobias Menzies may not bear much resemblance to the bushy-bearded Edwin Stanton, but he’s doing a decent job in depicting the pressures felt by the US Secretary of War in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Not only does Stanton have a killer to catch and his own health concerns, but the president’s successor Andrew Johnson is now also in need of schooling when it comes to the details of Reconstruction. Thankfully, these complex political matters are outlined in accessible fashion, and without compromising on the ticking-clock tension.
PERIOD DRAMA
Glenn Close makes a fashionably late entrance into a series that so far largely favours style over substance. Even if that style is terribly good. Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) is searching for the perfect model for his new collection, yet his exacting standards are tripping him up. Not satisfied with the faces walking through the door at his newly created fashion house, he’s also equally lacklustre about what to dress them in. His designs, he believes, are not good enough — and certainly not yet of a standard to be seen by Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow (Close), who’s in Paris looking to unearth the next big name in fashion.
Disney+
PERIOD DRAMA
Episode 5 available from Tuesday
This drama matures beautifully, week by week. War is coming but there is still gutsy psychodrama in the difficulty Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) has in accepting 17th-century Japanese customs, which seem to him to be a misogynist death cult. When an unexpected guest rocks his household, a simple dramatic set-up is expertly exploited: two men who don’t speak each other’s language, relying on a translator who may, or may not, choos
