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If there's one theme that reached peak saturation on television and streaming platforms in 2017, it's the hunt for the missing person.
Blame Stranger Things, or perhaps David Lynch, whose triumphant return with Twin Peaks: The Return was one of the most breathtaking achievements on any screen this year.
Whatever the case, my viewing patterns — and recommendations for binge-watching over summer — revolve around characters who go missing in action, including a fictional Pope who decides that hiding away from the faithful is the best way to win new followers.
My one exception? An exquisitely breezy French series about actors' agents in Paris, who making a living placing celebrities in the public eye, that you can dip into when the other shows get too intense.
Twin Peaks: The Return
The ghost haunting Twin Peaks: The Return, streaming on Stan, is just as much FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper as it is Laura Palmer.
In David Lynch's long-awaited second series, set 25 years after the original, Kyle MacLachlan returns as Agent Cooper, seemingly trapped inside that eerie limbo with the red curtains and zebra patterned floor known as The Black Lodge.
He's also playing at least two new characters: a Las Vegas man-child and a wandering assassin — fragments, perhaps, of Cooper's once unified persona, or wayward doppelgangers.
This series confounded many critics for the way it seemed to delight in upending the rules of series television, ignoring basic conventions of scene construction, shunning cliffhanger endings, and frequently detouring into metaphysical realms and visual abstraction (episode eight basically turns into an avant-garde film).
Lynch melds the genres of small-town soap and police drama, but stretches them almost beyond recognition. With this audacious, 18-episode experiment, he manages to fashion a work full of rich detail and cosmic perspective that offers a deep, compassionate rumination on grief, love and memory.
Search Party
I'll be watching the second series of this show over summer. But the first series was one of my favourites of the year, and both are currently streaming on SBS On Demand.
Unlike Twin Peaks: The Return, Search Party is happier staying within the conventions of the serial and waging its revolution from within.
This a satirical comedy drama about a group of New York millennials who become obsessed with a missing girl, evolves into a funny, unsettling and close to the bone exploration of generational anxieties, narcissism and moral hypocrisy.
The Young Pope
Italian director Paolo Sorrentino makes flamboyant, opulent films about the lives of the rich, famous and eccentric.
In his first eight-part series, The Young Pope, he's at the height of his powers as he imagines a chain smoking, cherry coke sipping American Pope arriving to the Vatican with a radical plan and outsmarting all the powerbrokers behind the scenes.
Jude Law puts in a career best performance as a tetchy but charismatic man who does the opposite of the PR friendly popes of recent times — withdrawing from public view in order to make the papacy more opaque, not less. Is he a renegade who will take the Church down with him or a visionary who will give it new life?
Made for HBO, and streaming on SBS On Demand, the series keeps you guessing. It draws you into the intrigue of Church politics, with a gallery of Machiavellian characters, including Diane Keaton as the nun who raised the pope as a young orphan, and Scott Shepherd as the childhood friend and radical cardinal, with a taste for the pleasures of the flesh.
Dark
Imagine Stranger Things, but set between present day and 1980s Germany, and you have an idea of what this series is like.
It's bleaker than the American series, perhaps because there isn't the same glow of Spielbergian nostalgia for times — and films — gone by.
Elements in the mix include missing children, adults with things to hide, a small town, a sinister electricity plant and the real-life Chernobyl disaster.
Dark is part of an ever-expanding slate of foreign Netflix productions now available on the Australian version of the platform. And it has the high production values of the studio's American output, not to mention a recognisable set of themes.
Sure, perhaps there's nothing particularly original about what it does, but the thick mood of dread and unease is expertly maintained, and the acting is superb.
Call My Agent!
This French romantic comedy series is the kind of remedy you need for all the exciting death and corruption on offer on the small screen. Not that Call My Agent!, available on Netflix, isn't serious about its subject matter.
Set in a Parisian office of agents who represent actors and directors, the show features real-life French stars, guest appearing as themselves in each show.
At times, they deal with topics that are very close to home.
The first episode of the first series, for example, features Cecile de France in a dilemma over whether or not to have a face lift to look younger for a new Tarantino film.
Funny, insightful and always self-aware, Call My Agent! is almost in direct opposition to Entourage — a decidedly more testosterone-fuelled portrayal of actors and their agents.
Maybe it's because the French film business, although the biggest in Europe, is a cottage industry compared to Hollywood.
Or maybe it's because the French view screen culture as more about art than commerce. It's still a bare knuckle fist fight at times, but with clothes and scenery to die for.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, film, actor, director
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