Five things to watch this week

The Idol — Showmax

The most talked about and controversial series of the year arrives on Showmax on June 5. Created by Euphoria’s Sam Levinson and pop superstar sensation Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, this story of sexual exploitation and mental breakdown is set in the high-pressure world of digital-era pop music fame.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Jocelyn, an aspiring pop idol who suffers a nervous breakdown that threatens to end her career. She finds herself in a complicated and potentially dangerous relationship with cult leader Tedros, played by Tesfaye, that will either help her regain the title of “world’s sexiest pop star”, or destroy her. New episodes are added weekly on Mondays.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica — Mubi.com

Documentary auteurs Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s previous films have distinguished themselves for their determination to fully immerse audiences in uncomfortable environments and situations. They have focused on the slimy details of the grim world of North Atlantic commercial fishing (Leviathan 2012) and the macabre psychology of a Japanese cannibal (Caniba 2017).

The duo’s latest film is definitely not for the faint of heart or squeamish as it takes viewers inside the “fabric of the human body”, to reveal the initially visually abstract but often hard-to-look-at details of surgery and interior inspection of patients that make up the daily routine of work in five hospitals in Paris.

Juxtaposing these inner worlds with the dedication of the doctors and health workers responsible for translating what they find inside these bodies into strategies for helping to save them, the film paints a slowly revealing picture of the secret world that lies within us and the ways that the physical realities of human flesh connect us all.

The Days — Netflix

A multicharacter, multiplotted dramatisation of the events and consequences of the 21st century’s Chernobyl moment when in 2011 the largest earthquake in Japan’s history triggered a tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Over seven days it follows a variety of characters who are either directly involved in the operation of the plant or affected by the disaster. The drama paints a devastating and high-tension picture of the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and its still far-reaching consequences for those involved and the world at large.

Mrs Davis — Showmax

The odd-pair teaming of The Big Bang Theory writer Tara Hernandez and Lost, The Leftovers and The Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof results in a madcap, off-the-rails black adventure sci-fi comedy that has plenty to say about the increasingly vexing question of humanity’s relationship to artificial intelligence (AI).

Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a nun who finds herself unable to avoid the intrusions of an all-powerful global domineering AI nicknamed “Mrs Davis”, who tells her that she has been chosen to find the Holy Grail. What follows is an absurd, high-octane but always intriguing struggle between Sister Simone and Mrs Davis for the future of humankind that’s peppered with a cast of memorably bizarre characters and strange encounters.

The first two episodes are available to stream on June 5, with new episodes added weekly.

The Shield — Disney Plus

For six years from 2002 to 2008 and over seven seasons, creator Shawn Ryan’s dark, LA-set police procedural noir rewrote the book for the representation of cops on television. Michael Chiklis’ antihero Vic Mackey and his team of rule-breaking hard-hitting, self-enriching detectives battled on the streets of a city with a volatile history of violent and tense relations between police and citizenry using their own morally dubious but effective code as guide.

Constantly navigating the thin blue line that separated them from the criminals they pursued, the show served as a dark, cynical but hard-hitting reminder of the realities of policing in a world where that line had become increasingly blurred since the explosion of riots after the Rodney King verdict in 1992. It foresaw a great part of the struggle that was to characterise so much of the relationship between the American police and the public in the decades to come.