TOP WEEKEND PICK
DEAD RINGERS
Amazon Prime Video
David Cronenberg’s creepy 1988 film Dead Ringers, with Jeremy Irons as twin gynaecologists who share everything, including women, is one of his best, but it wouldn’t seem to be the obvious choice for a gender-flipped remake.
It should be intriguing, then, to see what this miniseries starring Rachel Weisz as twins Elliot and Beverly Mantle (the same names as in the film) makes of the material. All six episodes are available at once.
Friday
THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME
Apple TV+
Describing a thriller series as “Hitchockian” is an awfully big boast to live up to, but we’ll see. Jennifer Garner plays a woodworker whose accountant husband Nikolaj Coster-Waldau disappears in the midst of a scandal at his company. All she and his teenage daughter from a previous relationship have to go on is a note he left her.
THE MARVELOUS MRS MAISEL
Amazon Prime Video
The fifth and final season takes a surprise turn, jumping between the 1950s and the 1980s to see if Rachel Brosnahan’s housewife-turned-comedian ever made the big time.
UNREPORTED WORLD
Channel 4, 7.30pm
The documentary series returns with a look at the financial crisis in Lebanon, which is now so bad that more than a million people have been locked out of their bank accounts. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets one couple who are in such desperate straits, they believe the only way to get their savings back is to rob the bank.
PROJECT HOME
Channel 4, 8pm
Another twist on home-improvement shows features couples being shown virtual reality realisations of their individual makeover plans and then trying to reach a compromise that pleases both of them.
HAVE IT GOT NEWS FOR YOU
BBC1, 9pm
Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker is a fitting guest host to open the 65th season of the satirical panel show, which arrives at a time when the world has never looked more like one of Brooker’s dystopian nightmares.
THE LATE LATE SHOW
RTÉ1, 9.35pm
Ryan Tubridy reels in a big fish: Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk, who was in Dublin for a one-man, one-night-only show at the NCH on Thursday. He’ll be talking about his career in comedy and straight drama (he has a memoir out), his reinvention as an action star in the terrific thriller movie Nobody, and how comedian Dave Allen inspired him.
The other guests are Hozier, writer Stefanie Preissner, Maurice and Kandice Barron, who, along with their daughter Ava, a cancer survivor, were referenced by US President Joe Biden in both his State of the Union and his St Patrick’s Day addresses, and folk-trad band The Tumbling Paddies.
Saturday
MAGPIE MURDERS
BBC1, 9.15pm
In part three of the mystery-within-a-mystery, Susan (Lesley Manville) seeks inspiration from fictional sleuth Atticus Lund (Tim McMullan), the hero of the unfinished novel in her possession, and imagines him materialising in her home so the two of them can chew over clues. Clever and engaging.
ANGELA SCANLON’S ASK ME ANYTHING
RTÉ1, 9.25pm
The third season of the breezy chat show kicks off with Keith Duffy, Majella O’Donnell and Jarlath Regan.
LYRA
Channel 4, 9.25pm
The killing of journalist Lyra McKee, shot in the head by republican dissidents while observing a riot in Derry in 2019, shocked the world. This feature-length film, directed by her friend, BAFTA-winning filmmaker Alison Millar, utilises recovered voice recordings and home movies.
RIPPING YARNS
BBC4, 10.30pm & 11pm
Fawlty Towers got most of the attention, but for me, Michael Palin and Terry Jones’s riotous spoof of stiff-upper-lip Boys’ Own adventure stories is tied with Eric Idle’s The Rutles as the best post-Python TV project of all.
Video of the Day
This double bill features the pilot episode, Tomkinson’s Schooldays (you can guess what that’s based on), and The Testing of Eric Olthwaite, with Palin as the most boring man in Yorkshire, who accidentally falls into a life of crime.
Sunday
OUR CHANGING PLANET
BBC1, 7pm
Last year, six presenters assessed environmental habitats around the globe. This two-part follow-up sees Steve Backshall back in the Maldives, Liz Bonnin revisiting ancient woodlands in northern California and Chris Packham returning to Greenland.
Liz Bonnin returns to California in BBC1’s Our Changing Planet
SCARED OF THE DARK
Channel 4, 9pm
Danny Dyer’s reinvention as a presenter continues with this daft reality show, stripped across the week, featuring eight celebrities — Chris Eubank and Paul Gascoigne among them — trying to live in total darkness for eight days.
THE HUNT FOR RAOUL MOAT
ITV1, 9pm
Controversy-courting three-part drama, showing on consecutive nights, about the manhunt for the thug, played by Matt Stokoe, who killed one person and wounded two others, including a police officer, who was blinded and took his own life two years later. Lee Ingleby stars.
KIN
RTÉ1, 9.30pm
I have a couple of episodes to catch up on, so I’d better get a on as this is the penultimate one. Despite a bit of a viewer drop-off, it’s still hugely popular and a third season is already in the can.
