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Ten best TV series to binge-watch this February

From satire to political thrillers, here are some of the top TV series to watch this month:

1. Miss Austen

After Jane Austen died, in 1817, her sister, Cassandra, destroyed many of her letters, guarding her privacy and setting generations of Janeites’ and scholars’ hair on fire. Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby’s bestselling novel, imagines what might have been behind all that. The series is wonderfully cast, with Keeley Hawes as Cassandra. It begins years after Jane’s death, when Cassandra visits Isabella Fowle (Rose Leslie), the niece of her long-dead fiancé, with the secret purpose of trying to find letters from Jane that might be in the vicarage. In flashbacks, Synnove Karlsen is the younger Cassandra and Patsy Ferran the young Jane. Hawes teased the show in an interview with the Guardian, saying: “It feels like a classic costume drama, in the vein of Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Modern takes like Bridgerton are brilliant, but this feels like part of the Austen canon, so her fans will be pleased.” Miss Austen premieres tomorrow, February 2.

2. Apple Cider Vinegar

Kaitlyn Dever takes on a bit of both in this fictional version of a true story. She plays Belle Gibson, an Australian influencer and con woman, who falsely said she had brain cancer and was curing it with natural ingredients and lifestyle, turning that lie into a financial empire selling apps and cookbooks. The show goes beyond her to include four other women in her orbit. One of them is under her spell, another becomes a business rival. The series is set in the early 2010s, at the dawn of Instagram, and tackles the rise of social media influencers. It premieres February 6 on Netflix.

3. Clean Slate

Laverne Cox stars in one of the last projects executive produced by the comedy legend Norman Lear, who died in 2023 at 101. She plays Desiree, a New York art gallery owner whose business collapses, and who returns home to Mobile, Alabama after 23 years away. Putting a new gender spin on some old sitcom tropes, the premise is that her father, Harry (comedian George Wallace), a car-wash owner she hasn’t spoken to in all that time, has no idea that the child he thought of as his son has transitioned. Desiree moves into her old room, and the odd-couple, city-girl-in-a-small-town jokes begin, including one that has Harry putting money in a “Pronoun Jar” whenever he accidentally calls Desiree “son”. Cox has been a staple of red carpet awards coverage lately. Clean Slate premieres February 6 on Amazon Prime.

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4. Yellowjackets

Premiering on this year’s Valentine’s Day, this drama about the decades-long aftershocks from a high-school soccer team’s plane crash is another show returning after such a long gap, almost two years, that you need a refresher course before watching. Last season, as if being stranded in the woods and resorting to cannibalism when they were teenage girls wasn’t enough, the adult versions of the characters faced life-or-death horror at the isolated location where Lottie (Simone Kessell) has formed a cult. As the adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey, the show’s anchor) says in the third season trailer, “Someone wants us dead”. Whoever it is already got poor Natalie in season two. The back-and-forth in time continues, with the main cast returning, including Lauren Ambrose as the adult Van, and Liv Hewson as her younger self, Christina Ricci as adult Misty, always up to something suspicious, and Elijah Wood as Walter, her demented citizen-sleuth colleague. Hilary Swank makes some guest appearances in the present day timeline. All we know so far is that she is already drenched in blood.

5. The White Lotus

Season three of Mike White’s mordant social satire, which premieres February 16 on HBO, is set at the White Lotus resort in Thailand, and now there are snakes and monkeys along with the usual emotional upheaval. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the spa manager at the Hawaii White Lotus in the first season, returns to take a training course at the new location. This time the guests include three old friends on a girls’ trip, played by Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb, along with Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey as a married couple. Lalisa Manobal, better known as Lisa from the South Korean group Blackpink, plays Mook, a health and wellness counsellor at the resort, where health and wellness are undoubtedly in short supply.

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6. Zero Day

The political thriller starring Robert De Niro is intriguing and timely. When a cyberattack hits the US, causing devastation and deaths, former president George Mullen (De Niro) is called in to head a commission investigating the source, working against a barrage of problems and forces: big tech, Wall Street, rival political factions and a world of disinformation. Connie Britton plays Mullen’s former chief of staff and Jesse Plemons is a former aide with political ambitions of his own. Joan Allen plays Mullen’s wife, and Lizzy Caplan their daughter, a member of Congress. The plot deals with the slippery nature of truth itself. Angela Bassett plays the US president in casting that would have landed very differently if the US election had gone another way.

7. Win or Lose

In this animated family series from Pixar, eight members of a middle-school co-ed softball team, the Portland Pickles, are preparing for a championship game, with Will Forte as the voice of Coach Dan. Each episode focuses on a different character, from the school-age players to parents and coaches, and looks at their individual hopes, fears and insecurities, in a show whose message is to consider other people’s points of view. There was recently a flutter of attention to the series for an extraneous reason, though, after word emerged that lines of dialogue identifying one character as transgender had been cut.

8. A Thousand Blows

Steven Knight is right in his wheelhouse with another period piece about a criminal gang inspired by real-life stories, this time set in Victorian London and the world of illegal bare-knuckle boxing. Hezekiah (Malachi Kirby of Small Axe) and his friend Alec (Francis Lovehall, also of Small Axe) are Jamaicans who have come to London and who try to seek their fortunes as boxers. Hezekiah finds himself taken up and exploited by Mary Carr, the leader of the all-female band of robbers known as The Forty Elephants. Erin Doherty, who played Princess Anne as a young woman in The Crown, is far from that role as Carr. Stephen Graham stars as a boxer named Sugar Goodman, determined to defend his turf from the upstart Hezekiah. It premieres on February 20.

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9. The Americas

David Attenborough’s nature documentaries have proven there is an apparently bottomless appetite for the genre. This variation stands apart because it has Tom Hanks narrating, with a sense of wonder. The series, premiering February 23, is an ambitious 10-part look at the Americas, with each episode focusing on a different area, ranging from Canada to Patagonia, the Atlantic coast to the Amazon. The production was epic, with 180 expeditions that took five years, making it what is likely the most expensive non-fiction show Universal Studios has ever done. Universal co-produced the show with the BBC, which also produces the Attenborough series. The music is composed by Oscar-winner Hans Zimmer, whose movie scores include Gladiator and Dune. But the soundtrack here also includes animal sounds, waves, and Hanks luring viewers in by saying, “A wandering salamander. To find a mate he sets out on an extraordinary journey.”

10. Suits LA

Suits, which ran on cable channel USA Network from 2011 to 2019, turned out to be an ideal show to binge. When the series about a firm of high-powered New York lawyers landed on Netflix, it became one of the most streamed series of 2023. We may never know how much that had to do with one of its stars being Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex. We do know that she is not in this spinoff set on the opposite Coast. Neither is the rest of that cast (so far), with the exception of some guest appearances by Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter. The main character now is Ted Black (Stephen Amell), a former federal prosecutor in New York now running a powerful Los Angeles firm specialising in criminal and entertainment law. Aaron Korsh, the creator of Suits, also created the LA version. Suits LA also premieres February 23.

Source: BBC

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