The Beatles: Get Back
Disney+, November. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has a new trilogy out this month. In The Beatles: Get Back, he has used more than 55 hours of footage (originally shot for the 1970 documentary Let It Be) that tells the detailed story of the making of the band’s final studio album before their breakup. Jackson portrays the Beatles (above) during rehearsals in January 1969, when the songs and arrangements for the album came together. Also captured is the band’s last performance—the rooftop concert in Savile Row. The television event of the year.
Dopesick
Disney+, November. Barry Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam, directs the first two episodes of this eight-part drama examining the causes and effects of the opioid epidemic that took root in America in the late 1990s. It traces how a pain-killing medication introduced by the company Purdue Pharma in 1996—OxyContin, containing the opioid oxycodone—led to mass addiction. Michael Keaton plays a doctor in a small mining town who realises that a drug he is prescribing is destroying lives in his community.
Close to Me
Channel 4, November. Domestic thrillers with close-to-home plot twists seem to be in vogue after a year of spending too much time between the same four walls. ITV’s Angela Black imagined violence inside a seemingly perfect middle-class marriage, while C4’s Close to Me casts Christopher Eccleston and Danish star Connie Nielsen in a tale of family life inside a beautiful country home. After a fall, Nielsen’s Jo experiences memory loss that wipes out the entire past year of her life—which, it turns out, may hide a terrible secret.
