From an adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, to Maya Rudolph as a sympathetic billionaire; here are the best things to watch on TV in June 2022
In The Midwich Cuckoos (Sky Max, June 2), the inhabitants of an affluent commuter town outside London pass out en masse, only to wake up the next day with all the womenfolk mysteriously impregnated. Was it God wot put the babies there? Aliens? A constituency visit from Boris Johnson? The Night Manager screenwriter David Farr investigates in this 21st-century take on John Wyndham’s sci-fi classic, starring Keely Hawes as a child psychologist who, frankly, has her work cut out in a town shortly to be full of creepy-as-all-hell kiddiewinks.
Adapted from Dolly Alderton’s memoir of the same name, Everything I Know About Love (BBC One, June 7) is an ensemble coming-of-age comedy about four girls moving into their first London flatshare in the heady days of 2012. It opens on a train journey – and possible wink towards Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise – as two 20-something strangers strike up intense conversation. The guy is wearing a fedora hat and quotes Larkin in reference to the indescribable agony of life in your mid-20s, which sounds awful, but then a woman sitting opposite rolls her eyes and you think OK, this might actually be good. By the time we get to the bit where square kid Birdy (Bel Powley) says she feels like a character out of Trainspotting after doing her first line of coke, and her friend retorts “you are literally wearing Karen Millen”, we’re sold. Fun, in a word.
20 years after The Wire first aired, it’s a measure of public faith in US policing that many in the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond are calling to defund it altogether. The show’s writer, David Simon, has taken issue with that stance in interviews and on Twitter, but pulls no punches with We Own This City (Sky Atlantic, June 7), a scabrous – and true – account of corruption in the Baltimore Police Department that returns him to the streets where he made his name.
Joe Barton wrote the criminally underrated Giri/Haji for the Beeb a few years back, so we’re curious to see if he can repeat the trick with The Lazarus Project (Sky Max/NOW, June 16), a time-loop thriller in which I Will Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu must race to save the world from, among other things, a new pandemic that promises to make COVID look like a government-mandated walk in the park. Initial signs suggest this might be a bit more broad-strokes than Giri/Haji (Caroline Quentin as the “steely” head of a top-secret multinational organisation offers a honking great clue), but it’s an off-the-wall premise with some great talent on both sides of the camera, so we’re intrigued to see where this goes next.
It’s 2022. Superyachts are ablaze in Torquay harbour, and a film featuring a scene where oligarchs board a luxury cruise, then projectile-vomit and shit themselves for a straight 15 minutes just walked away with the Palme D’Or at Cannes. Our hatred for the super-rich seemingly knows no bounds, but Loot (Apple TV+, June 24) asks us to spare a thought for Molly Novak, estranged wife of a tech CEO recently divorced to the tune of $85bn, who gets an unexpected shot at redeeming herself after learning that she has inherited a charity foundation as part of her whopping great settlement. Do people this rich deserve second chances in life? Let us hope we’re not in for some profoundly irritating ‘learning moments’ in this show, sharply scripted by Matt Hubbard (of Parks & Rec and 30 Rock) and Aslan Yang (Master of None). It definitely helps when you have the great Maya Rudolph starring as your maybe-likeable billionaire.
