Five things to watch this weekend

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story — Netflix

Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary offers a sobering examination of the rise of the world’s most popular pornographic website and the less than satisfactory attitudes of its parent company to accusations of trafficking and sexual abuse made in a series of recent court cases. While the revelations have significantly affected the reputation of Pornhub and other sites, they’ve also led to consequences for those who are not guilty of violating laws and make their income from producing pornographic content on the internet. There are also thorny questions about the delayed response of credit card companies and other beneficiaries of the multibillion-dollar porn industry. They continued doing business with sites shown to have been ignoring laws about sexual consent, in favour of profit until the absolute last possible moment, when reputational damage loomed.

Extrapolations — Apple TV +

Contagion and An Inconvenient Truth producer Scott Z Burns enlists the participation of a who’s-who-of-Hollywood cast in this sprawling anthology series that examines the effects of a climate crisis-ravaged world in the depressingly not too distant future. The show brings together interconnected stories about humans living in a new reality in which climate change is part of everyday life and every decision no matter how big or small is influenced by the undeniable fact that “the planet is changing faster than the population”. The results are mixed but, thanks to the commitment of a cast that includes Meryl Streep, Edward Norton, Kit Harrington and Sienna Miller, never without just enough human drama and intrigue to keep you watching. The first three episodes are now available and new episodes are added weekly.

Do Your Worst — Netflix

Director Samantha Nell’s sweet, short and ably executed comedy is an entertaining modern Johannesburg middle-class fable about a struggling actress who’s forced to confront the mess of her life and the accumulated weight of a long history of bad decisions. It has just enough of the love-hate relationship that characterises so much of life in Joburg to keep you chuckling with recognition at the absurdities set up by its familiar premise.

Stella Murders — Showmax

The team behind the blockbuster docuseries Devilsdorp turn their attention to the shocking and tragic true story of the apparent suicides of two teenage girls in a North West small town in 2018 that soon proved to be not quite what they seemed and left a close-knit community torn and broken when the truth was revealed. Not so much a whodunnit or even a whydunnit as a quietly empathetic examination of what these all too familiar events in a country ravaged by the plague of gender-based violence do to the people who are left behind in their horrific wake.

The Elon Musk Show — Showmax

A three-part BBC docuseries that uses archive footage and interviews with family members and former colleagues to make some small scratches beneath the surface of the legend of how a science nerd, tech-obsessed Pretoria boy went on to become one of the world’s richest, dangerously unstable and influential men. It may leave more than a few very pressing questions unsatisfactorily unanswered but it does offer a solid primer for those looking to know a little more about Musk and the aura of genius that surrounds him.