Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
What to watch in 2023: The best movies (so far)
Justified: City Primeval (FX Now Canada)
Raylan Givens is back ... with some caveats. The U.S. marshal played so slickly by Timothy Olyphant during the initial, and tremendous, six-season run of the FX series Justified, is headlining this new eight-episode crime-comedy adventure, albeit absent the guiding force of original showrunner, Canadian Graham Yost. Instead, former Justified writers Dave Andron and Michael Dinner are in charge, adapting novelist Elmore Leonard’s original Raylan source material, the short story Fire in the Hole, alongside the author’s unrelated 1980 novel, City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit. The new series finds Raylan away from his home base of Kentucky and in Motor City, trying to nail a psychopath (Narcos star Boyd Holbrook) who has eyes on the U.S. marshal’s teenage daughter (a role that went to Olyphant’s own progeny, Vivian Olyphant).
The first two episodes of City Primeval, which were made available to critics, are as darkly funny, excellently cast and fast-paced as any original Justified adventure, even though the spin off lacks the charming scuzz of Raylan’s frenemy Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) or the winking malevolence of Dixie Mafia operative Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns). Olyphant is as cowboy-smooth as ever as the shoot-first-ask-questions-later hero, and the change in locales offers Raylan the opportunity to be taken down a much-needed peg.
The only trick is actually figuring out where and how to watch City Primeval in Canada. In the United States, it’s airing on cable channel FX and then streaming on Hulu. Oftentimes, FX/Hulu series end up being released in Canada via Disney+ with Star ... except not this time. Instead, Canadians will have to watch the episodes as they are broadcast Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET on traditional cable channel FX Canada, or add yet another subscription service to their budget and subscribe to streamer FX Now Canada, where the series will also be available. Good luck!
The Degrassi library (Prime Video)
Queue up the Drake singles and dig out your Zit Remedy jean jacket: This week, Prime Video Canada added a whopping 496 episodes of the homegrown Degrassi canon to its catalogue, cementing the streamer as the ultimate home for the megafranchise. Included are episodes of The Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Degrassi Talks, Degrassi Unscripted, and the beloved, if quite strange, 1992 television film Degrassi High: School’s Out. That’s a four-decade span of Canadian television – from 1979 through 2015 – that should act as your junior high-schooler’s ultimate summer-watching syllabus.
Full Circle (Crave)
Steven Soderbergh just doesn’t know how to stay still. Only a few months after the once-upon-a-time retired director released his latest Magic Mike sequel, the auteur is back with a full-blown television series, filled with the kind of grin-inducing twists and idiosyncratic visuals for which the prolific director is known. But while Full Circle has a big budget and a unique spin on the kidnapping genre in that it focuses as much on the criminals as it does victims, it only half-gels. Come for diverting performances from Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant (big week for him!), Jim Gaffigan, Dennis Quaid and Zazie Beetz, but don’t invest too much attention or energy in trying to puzzle the whole thing out. Call it Sex, Lies and Streaming.
L’immensità (on-demand, including Apple TV, Google Play, Cineplex Store)
After having made the film-festival rounds quietly this past winter, the charming Penélope Cruz vehicle L’immensità is available for those seeking a quieter, more sun-drenched kind of family drama than is currently on offer just about anywhere else. Set in 1970s Rome, the film follows one big unhappy family, with Clara (Cruz) trying to keep the peace between her tempestuous, adulterous husband (Vincenzo Amato) and their 12-year-old child Adriana (Luana Giuliani), who was born a girl but now goes by the name Andrea (a masculine name in Italian) and pursues a romance with a neighbour girl named Sara. Thoughtful and compassionate, L’immensità is filled with small but meaningful rewards.
Asteroid City (on-demand, including Apple TV, Google Play, Prime Video, Cineplex Store)
If you don’t feel like heading to a theatre – where Asteroid City is still playing to reportedly decent crowds! – Wes Anderson will bring his brand of hyper-stylized storytelling to your decidedly less intensely designed home. Ostensibly a story about a group of families (including Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson) who gather for a Junior Stargazer convention in the 1950s municipality of the title, Asteroid City opens with a hall-of-mirrors framing device: The comedy we’re about to watch is actually a televised production of a play written by the famed Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whose life and development process becomes another layer of the narrative. This means that characters are doubled, sometimes tripled, and occasionally cross divisions of mediums and realities. Think of it as the Anderson equivalent of the Marvel multiverse, except entertaining and inventive.