This is an excerpt from The Spinoff’s pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up to have it delivered to your inbox every Friday here.
If you want a middle-aged white man to play a disappointed-with-the-state-of-their-life middle-aged-white-man, you have two options: Jason Segel or Chris O’Dowd. Clearly, Segel was already busy with Shrinking, so The Big Door Prize goes with O’Dowd and is apparently all the better for it. The Hollywood Reporter calls this a “charmer” about a small town changed by a future-predicting machine that turns up by chance. It’s on Apple TV+ from today.
Meanwhile, The New York Times calls Unstable, Netflix’s new Rob Lowe series, “comedy gold”. It follows the exploits of a biotech genius (played by Lowe) spiralling after the death of his wife and trying to connect with his son (Lowe’s real-life son, John Owen Lowe). It sounds promising. On the same service, Riverdale’s seventh season debuts, and Celese Barber’s first TV show Wellmania is getting great reviews.
Elsewhere, Amazon Prime has Toni Collette’s female empowerment series The Power (“Electrifying,” says The Telegraph), Neon has British crime series A Town Called Malice (“Zippy, brash and so 80s it’s exhausting,” says The Guardian), and Apple TV+ has Tetris, a movie about the creation of the block-busting game that’s getting surprisingly good reviews. Finally, catering comedy Party Down has never been available on New Zealand screens – until now. Catch all three seasons on TVNZ+.
If you’re heading out to theatres, you’re probably going to see the country’s No. 1 film John Wick 4 (read Rec Room’s supremely positive review here). If not that, then Dungeons & Dragons (yes, it’s based on the dice game we all played at high school) is getting incredible reviews (“Endearingly dorky,” says The Age.) Sam Neill fans may want to check out The Portable Door, an adaptation of Tom Holt’s fantasy book series.