This Week in Streaming: Nobody Is Having a Normal Workday

Sunday, September 6th belongs to The Marlow Murder Club (PBS, season three premiere), which returns to the extremely dangerous English town of Marlow, where retired archaeologist Judith Potts and her friends Suzie and Becks continue doing what apparently nobody else in the area can: noticing the alarming number of people being murdered. This is the fundamental promise of British cozy mysteries. Cottages, tea, and obviously a picturesque river—someone has been bludgeoned to death near all three.

Vibe: A beautiful English village where Zillow really should be disclosing the homicide rate.

Monday, September 7th gets considerably less cozy with O.J. Unseen: Exploitation of Evil (Investigation Discovery/HBO Max, limited-series premiere), a new documentary series returning to the O.J. Simpson case through archival material and perspectives surrounding one of the most exhaustively examined crimes in American history. At this point, the Simpson trial has generated documentaries, dramatizations, books, podcasts, miniseries, interviews, and enough television hours to recreate the Bronco chase in real time approximately six hundred times. ID has nevertheless located another angle. Television archaeology continues undefeated.

Vibe: America has reopened the O.J. Simpson file because apparently we missed a drawer.

Tuesday, September 8th brings us The Drop: A Snowfall Saga (FX/Hulu, series premiere), returning to the world of Snowfall and 1990s Los Angeles with Wanda Bell and Leon Simmons. The crack epidemic is receding, West Coast hip-hop is exploding, and Wanda is trying to build a music empire while record labels, gangs, money, and ambition all begin circling the same cultural movement. In other words, she has successfully escaped one extraordinarily dangerous Los Angeles industry and immediately walked into another. Gail Bean and Isaiah John return, and the eight-episode series moves the Snowfall universe from the drug trade into the increasingly lucrative battle over who gets to control rap music.

Vibe: Snowfall discovered the music industry and somehow found a business with equally trustworthy management.

Wednesday, September 9th gives us Last Seen (Apple TV, series premiere), which wins this week’s award for Premise Most Likely to Immediately Ruin Your Evening. Patrick Brammall stars as a former detective now working as a police dispatcher whose daughter disappeared eleven years ago. Then he answers a distress call from a teenage girl and becomes convinced the voice on the other end belongs to her. This is either the breakthrough he has spent more than a decade waiting for or the beginning of something psychologically catastrophic. Given that Apple has ordered six episodes rather than a four-minute phone call followed by a happy family reunion, we can probably eliminate one option.

Also returning Wednesday is The Paper (Peacock, season two), the Office universe mockumentary about the deeply underfunded staff attempting to keep the Toledo Truth Teller alive. Season two arrives all at once, because apparently the only thing more stressful than working at a dying newspaper is having a documentary crew preserve the experience for future generations.

Vibe: The worst possible phone call, followed by six episodes of everyone begging this man to stop investigating it himself.

Thursday, September 10th goes to Colin From Accounts (Paramount+, third and final season), returning Patrick Brammall—yes, again, he is having an extremely productive week—and Harriet Dyer for one final season of the Australian romantic comedy about two people whose relationship began because one of them flashed the other, causing him to hit a dog with his car. Three seasons later, this remains one of television’s less reproducible meet-cutes. Gordon the dog returns…presumably still unaware that he is personally responsible for an entire television series.

Vibe: Boy meets girl. Boy hits dog. Girl meets boy. Dog accidentally receives executive-producer credit for three seasons.

Friday, September 11th is understandably different. 102 Minutes Inside the Towers (History, documentary special) reconstructs the 102 minutes between the first plane striking the World Trade Center and the collapse of the second tower through footage and recordings captured by people who were there. There is no need for television to manufacture suspense here. The chronology itself does that—less a conventional retrospective than an attempt to preserve the experience of those minutes as they unfolded, before anyone inside them knew what the rest of the world would soon know.

Vibe: No joke here. Just 102 minutes everyone already knows the ending to and still wishes could end differently.

Saturday, September 12th closes the week with Angel in the Rubble: The Genelle Guzman Story (Lifetime, movie premiere), dramatizing the true story of Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the final person rescued alive from the World Trade Center rubble after September 11. Guzman was trapped beneath the debris for more than a day before rescuers found her alive, and the film follows both the ordeal of those hours and the extraordinary circumstances of her rescue. Coming one day after the anniversary, it offers a deeply personal perspective on September 11, narrowing an event remembered on an enormous scale to the experience of one person waiting beneath the rubble to be found.

Vibe: A remarkable survival story told from inside one of America’s darkest days.

Also this week:

Marble Hall Murders (PBS, Sunday, September 6, limited-series premiere)
A Tale of Two Cities (MGM+, Sunday, September 6, limited-series premiere)
Bobby Flay’s The Line (Food Network, Tuesday, September 8, series premiere)
The Real Housewives of New York City (Bravo, Tuesday, September 8, season premiere)
Stavros Halkias: Uncle Stav (Netflix, Tuesday, September 8, comedy special)
Untold: Mr. T: I Pity the Fool (Netflix, Tuesday, September 8, documentary premiere)
Why Did I Get Married Again? (Netflix, Wednesday, September 9, movie premiere)
Crew Girl (Netflix, Thursday, September 10, series premiere)
The Perfect Lie (Netflix, Thursday, September 10, series premiere)
Physical 100: Italy (Netflix, Friday, September 11, series premiere)
Go Team! (Netflix, Friday, September 11, movie premiere)

This Week’s Hostage: Last Seen

There are safer choices this week.

The Marlow Murder Club offers picturesque British murder, where someone can discover a corpse and still reasonably expect to be home in time for tea.

Colin From Accounts has Gordon.

The Drop has the entire Snowfall universe colliding with the rise of West Coast rap.

But then Last Seen puts Patrick Brammall behind a police dispatch desk and gives him one phone call.

His daughter disappeared eleven years ago.

He picks up the phone.

A teenage girl is asking for help.

And he thinks it’s her.

That is an absolutely disgusting thing to do to me on a Wednesday.

There are only two possibilities here. Either he is right, in which case we are about to discover what happened to his daughter over the last eleven years, or he is wrong, in which case Apple has apparently constructed an entire television series around emotionally waterboarding one Australian man.

Neither option permits casual viewing.

And naturally he is a former detective, which means there is approximately a zero-percent chance he will hand the information to the appropriate authorities and go home. He is going to investigate. He is going to become obsessed. Someone is going to tell him he’s getting too close. He will interpret this as encouragement.

You are watching.

I am watching.

We are answering the phone.