Micheal Ward returns for season four as Jamie, young pretender to the title of “top boy”, who Dushane (Walters) wants to recruit and Sully (Kano) wants to dispatch with permanently. Since being revived by super fan Champagne Papi, the tale of east London drug dealers has been given an injection of Netflix polish, but has lost none of the realism that makes it so compelling. As well as allowing leads Ashley Walters and Kano to show they had more to offer the world besides their music, the first two seasons – which aired on Channel 4 from 2011 to 2013 before the broadcaster dropped the show – featured a young Letitia Wright and Michaela Coel. Way before Drake got involved, Top Boy was already one of the most authentic and gripping dramas on UK television – not to mention brimming with young British talent. Consider yourself forewarned: it will take you less time to actually watch the series than to trawl through Reddit’s million-plus fan theories, and debate how your own group of friends would react in the Yellowjackets’ shoes. The Hollywood newcomers assembled to play the teenaged Yellowjackets are standout (particularly Ella Purnell as manipulative team captain, Jackie), but it’s Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis as the present-day team members (made infamous by a cannibalism-themed US Weekly story) that make this essential viewing. If you somehow missed the hype around Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s gory 10-part drama, it flashes between two storylines: one in the riot grrrl-dominated ’90s, when an all-female soccer team, the Yellowjackets, is stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash, and and one in the present, when the survivors are reckoning with the consequences of their 18 months in the Rockies, battling potential mystical forces and subsisting on a diet of… each other. Yellowjackets is a programme best watched with an empty stomach, in a well-lit room, through your fingers. We fall in love with Sasha as we get to know her – through flashbacks to a difficult childhood, surreal set pieces and irreverent original songs, including one that plays out in a benefits office and is alone worth the price of admission. The tone glides from sexy to stomach-turning, euphoric to uneasy, but what’s striking throughout is the show’s abundant empathy and lack of judgement. Having run out of options, Sasha moves in with her and falls down a rabbit hole of hard partying, OnlyFans and elderly sugar daddies, before embarking on an ill-fated work trip. Enter Carly (Lara Peake), a Northern firecracker she meets through friends, who is an influencer by day and cam girl by night. Then, she’s quickly brought back to reality – her boyfriend has left her, her mum needs her to move out, and she must find a way to make money while waiting for her big break. Nicôle Lecky’s exuberant six-part series opens with a bang: our heroine, Sasha (played with verve by the writer herself), a 25-year-old aspiring singer, struts down a London street, crooning about being in love. Special mention to Patricia Arquette’s utterly chilling performance as Cobel. When Mark S’s “work best friend” disappears, however, he begins to suspect there’s more to the story than Lumon is letting on. In essence, while at work, they have no memory of their life beyond the office’s fluorescent lighting, “waffle parties” and employee handbook, while at home, they cannot recall anything about their 9 to 5 – incapable of recognising their colleagues, or even telling people the precise nature of what they do. For those who have yet to fall down a subreddit dissecting Dan Erickson’s quietly devastating masterpiece, it centres on Mark S (Adam Scott), part of a “data processing team” at biotech giant Lumon Industries, where a certain number of employees have voluntarily had their consciousness bisected through a cutting-edge neurological procedure. It’s a testament to the slow-burning brilliance of Severance that it takes a few episodes – if not the full first season – to fully register the true emotional cost of the titular procedure.
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