Big Little Lies (Showcase) is back with a vengeance; her name is Celeste, and she’s played by Meryl Streep. Celeste is the mother of Perry, who was killed, pack-style, by the “Monterey Five” at the end of Season One; now she prowls amongst them, sniffing them out and deploying every weapon in the passive aggressive arsenal to throw them off-balance. Under Andrea Arnold’s direction, this season seems to have veered deeper into black comedy (away from issue-based mystery), and that’s working just fine for me. Let the bloodletting begin.
Season Five of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (Netflix) is an unprecedented disappointment. There are three episodes, in increasing degrees of quality, from the first, which I felt was unwatchably badly scripted and directed, to Ep 3, which is quite fun and at least competently made. Ep 2 suffers from a truly overblown performance from Andrew Scott, who is having a moment as the Hot Priest on Fleabag; he’s a notorious overactor, and that’s certainly the case here. For the first time the series seems to be behind the technological eight-ball; Brooker’s deal with Netflix should allow him the time to relax, reflect, and re-group. He’s much better than this season would suggest.