NZ fans are being forced to wait for The Bear
One of the year's most hyped shows is taking an extra month to get here. Why? Plus, Indiana Jones returns at age 80, and everything else landing this weekend...
Kia ora and welcome to Rec Room, the place we pull the messy and unhinged world of TV apart and attempt to put it back together. After a week without wifi, I’m back in action and loving life again. Sometimes, it’s good to take a break from TV to remind yourself how good you’ve good it. So I’m smashing my way through Black Mirror, Silo and The Righteous Gemstones, and even finding time to hate-watch The Idol, one of the year’s silliest series. But there’s one show I’ve been waiting for that no one in New Zealand is able to watch yet, and that’s the one we’re going to talk about today…
-Chris Schulz, senior writer, The Spinoff
The four-week wait facing fans of The Bear
Come December, when the year’s best TV shows are chewed over and spat out, it seems we may already have found ourselves a winner. “This roaring rager of a series … serves up TV at its brilliant, blistering best,” says the TV critic Peter Travers, who dubs this masterpiece “the Succession of chef shows”. “It’s better, richer and more satisfying than its first [season] and TV viewers are fortunate to have it,” declares Vulture. “It is a well-choreographed, foul-mouthed ballet,” exclaims USA Today. “[It] transforms something beautiful into something completely breathtaking,” rants the breathless Entertainment Weekly.
Sounds good, right? Sounds like a TV show you should watch immediately. Sounds like something you should absolutely cue up and binge your way through the moment you get home today with a bowl of salty, corn-based snacks and a cold drink at hand.
I’m really sorry to break the news to you, but you can’t do any of that.
This past weekend, American TV critics were given plenty of reasons to smash superlatives into their keyboards. The Bear, last year’s best new TV show and something we’ve been hyping up the return of all year, dropped all 10 episodes of its second season. You couldn’t come across a pop culture website or use Twitter without someone saying something amazing about something that happens in episode three, six, or nine. There are listicles about the show’s big-name cameos, and predictions are being made for what might happen in season three. The hype train is real.
We’re not on it. In Aotearoa, we couldn’t take part in any of that. I recently moved and was forced to take a week off from telly-watching while our wifi was sorted out. By Saturday, it was all hooked up and I had one thing only in my sights. So, that night, I cued up Disney+ and clicked on tile for The Bear – the chef show based in a gnarly Chicago sandwich shop that surprised and delighted with a hectic first season fuelled by donuts and chaos energy – only to be greeted by very sad words.
Season two was’t available, and it wouldn’t become available for quite some time.
In the age of global streaming domination, this is a problem. Netflix has a new season of Black Mirror on offer, as well as the second instalment of the movie juggernaut Extraction. Prime Video has several new shows to get excited about, including The Power and Dead Ringers. Apple TV+ has the season finale of Silo looming, and Platonic is a friendly, easygoing hang. Neon is rolling along nicely with new seasons of And Just Like That…, Outlander, and Yellowjackets. TVNZ+ just added live sport to its roster, including the latest Ashes test. There’s a lot going on out there. No one is running out of options. If you want something to watch, you don’t have to go far.
So not offering your fans something that’s likely to make best-of lists at the end of the year at the same time as everyone else is a big problem. We’re all getting better at savvy-switching, spending a month on one streaming service before cancelling and signing up to another. It’s not like Disney+ can use its other big recent release Secret Invasion – slammed for its AI-created credits and called “dour” and “dull” by The Hollywood Reporter – as a reason to stick around on its service. A month is a very long time in the world of streaming. By July 19, many things could have changed.
I tried to ask a Disney+ spokesperson why New Zealand faced a four-week wait to see something everyone else was already watching, but the company recently sacked its local on-the-ground team in a global restructure and all I got were sad autoreply statements saying, “Sorry, I no longer work at Disney”. After several days, an overseas rep sent me a response on background, saying vague things about programming decisions relying on many factors including variables in different territories. Follow-up questions weren’t responded to by deadline.
So fans have two options: wait until July 19, or find an alternative way to stream The Bear, the technical methods for which I am not going to list or promote here. (According to my Twitter feed, which includes many local viewers already boasting about how good The Bear’s second season is, illegal streams remain a go-to option for those that have no other options.) You could pass the time by bingeing your way through The Bear’s excellent first season again. But that just may make you even more grizzly about the lengthy wait time for season two.
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The bizarre sight of Indiana Jones at 80
Ten minutes. Back in 2015, that’s how much time I was granted to interview a grumpy Harrison Ford. Halfway through out chat, his phone rang. Yes, Ford answered it, putting his finger up to make sure this chump sitting in front of him would cease his yammering. I sat there counting the seconds being wasted as he talked domestic chores with his wife, Calista Flockhart. “Right,” he said gruffly, putting his phone under his chair. “Where were we?” One thing was obvious: in this Sydney hotel room, where this mega-star was spending hours talking about his return to the world of Star Wars for a lengthy queue of journalists, Ford didn’t want to be there.
That’s exactly the vibe Ford displays in the new Indiana Jones movie. In Dial of Destiny, the franchise’s fifth instalment, he’s old, his jagged edges on full display, pissed off that he’s being dragged back out for one more adventure. When we first meet him, he’s hungover, asleep in front of daytime television in his underwear. He picks up a baseball bat to confront his noisy neighbours. At one point, he’s halfway up a wall trying to solve an ancient riddle with his much younger sidekick when he complains about a dodgy knee. “I drank the blood of Kali,” he says, referencing that grisly scene from Temple of Doom. In other words, he’s too old for this shit.
I wanted to hate all of this: the obvious nostalgia plays, the grandpa gags, the fact that Harrison Ford is 80 years old yet he’s jumping on horses and punching out foes like he’s in Indy’s 1980s heyday. I even wanted to hate the CGI techniques used to de-age Ford for the film’s first half hour. There’s a conversation to be had about what this means – Ford says this is his last outing as Indy, but the question Dial of Destiny asks is whether we need him at all to keep this gravy train running – but that’s for another time.
Instead, I loved the crap out of Dial of Destiny. Like a time machine, it pulled me back to the Whanganui movie theatre I grew up in watching the original Steven Spielberg trilogy with a box of Snifters on my lap. Sure, it doesn’t reinvent the wheel, instead giving Indy a greatest hits line-up of foes – Nazis! Double-crossing agents! Snakes! – to dispatch in his farewell appearance. But it zips along at such a clip that I was never, ever bored. The action scenes are well staged, the dialogue made me laugh, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in full Fleabag mode, and the story’s pretty decent. And as a bonus, Indiana Jones doesn’t answer a single phone call from his wife. I’ll take that as a win.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in theatres now
All the new stuff you can watch coming our way…
Idris Elba is always watchable and in Hijack he might be more watchable than ever. Rave reviews are landing for the seven-part action series that begins today on Apple TV+ and follows a – you guessed it – plane hijacking told in real-time. “Seven hours of brilliant, bingeable nonsense,” said The Guardian in a four-star review. “Only Elba could carry this perfect piece of summer insanity off.” If that sounds like a bit of you, you may also be interested to note the third season of The Witcher debuts on Netflix today, along with the fourth and final season of Jack Ryan on Prime Video.
It’s been a while since Nigel Latta has graced our screens but that changes on Monday when he returns with a scammy new show. In You’ve Been Scammed, the wisened TV wizard takes on the scamming industry to show just how simple it is to find easy victims. With four parts screening across Monday nights and on TVNZ+, Latta’s always educational and informative, but he’s also indulging in a touch of mind magic. If you’re diving in, hold on to your watches (that will make sense after episode one).
Elsewhere, if you’re after less scripted content, ThreeNow has the TV adaptation of the hit lockdown podcast Smartless, in which three famous hosts surprise each other with their famous friends. Netflix has Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorised Story of American Gladiators, and Neon has Angel City, in which Natalie Portman narrates the story of a Los Angeles women’s football team (which is captained by Football Fern Ali Riley).
If you’re after a twinge of nostalgia, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny hits theatres in time for the weekend to give Harrison Ford one last outing at the ripe old age of 80. Elsewhere, Cats in the Museum is landing just in time for school holidays, Succession star Sarah Snook makes a hasty return in the Netflix horror Run Rabbit Run, and American Greg LeMond is the focus of the cycling doco The Last Rider.
The Spinoff’s weekly New to Streaming guide has more.
On the spinoff right now: My Life in TV
In The Spinoff’s new weekly series, we talk to famous faces about their TV viewing highs and lows. Already, Chris Parker has admitted to a hot tub nightmare and Janaye Henry owned up to watching The Human Centipede 2, but she says this was better than being forced to sit through the first episode of The Idol. This Saturday, it’s Homebound 3.0 star Sam Wong’s turn. Weekly instalments can be found here.
Everything you need to know:
Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge is one of the best things about the new Indiana Jones movie. In a new Vanity Fair feature, she talks about that, as well as her departure from the Mr & Mrs Jones reboot with Donald Glover. It’s a good read.
Four visual effects artists and animators have spoken out about their conditions working on Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse. “This production has been death by a thousand paper cuts,” says one. Vulture has more.
Tara Ward and Alex Casey’s love for Love Island UK has been tested lately, so they decided to discuss what keeps them tuning in to the scandalous dating show. Turns out it’s better than ever. “I am ready to give 100% again,” says Casey.
Inky Pinky Ponky is based on the real life experiences of writer and actor Amanaki Prescott-Faletau and tells the true story about the traumas and triumphs of growing up queer. Sela Jane Hopgood argues it’s must-see TV.
The River marks a huge achievement as our first Māori scripted drama podcast. It follows three estranged cousins reuniting to solve the disappearance of their cousin Mihi. Definitely intrigued about this one. It’s all up now on Māori+.
Finally, someone has to make sense of the 129 films announced as part of the NZ International Film Festival line-up. Enter Thomas Giblin, who has chosen 10 movies you should probably nab tickets to. Auckland’s festival opens on July 19, and heads to all major centres after that. You can see the full line-up here.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.
