Five things to watch this week

At Home with the Furys — Netflix

World boxing champion Tyson Fury puts his home-life under the reality TV microscope in this “docusoap,” that serves mostly to present evidence for why he’s better off in the ring than out of it.

Relying on the tried-and-tested celebrity family reality show trope of presenting the boxer and his family — wife Paris and their six children — as both rich and glamorous and simple ordinary people with the same mundane day-to-day struggles as anyone, the show struggles to generate much in the way of interest once it has introduced us to the Furys, their mansion in Morecambe and Tyson’s vast collection of classic cars.

After that, it’s mostly the kind of car-crash spectacle that tends to stand in place for real drama, that makes every celebrity think that putting their normal life on camera is a guaranteed moneymaker.

Depp v Heard — Netflix

If the much-reported, minutely analysed, often sordid and dirty details of the train wreck that was the marriage of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard weren’t enough for you when the couple went to court in 2022, then this gleefully overextended docuseries is here to remind you of them.

Featuring all the clips that went viral at the time and sound-bite interviews with celebrity journalists who devoted thousands of columns to their implications, it’s overall a Depp-favouring, shallow rehash of all the dirty laundry that we really shouldn’t have been subjected to in the first place, that’s still hard not to be fascinated by, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Dreaming Whilst Black — Prime Video

Created by and starring Adjani Salmon, this slice-of-life London-set comedy series offers a sly and quietly provocative takedown of racial stereotypes and prejudice that’s drily hilarious and timely.

Salmon plays Kwabena, a young black film graduate whose directing ambitions are thwarted by an industry that’s rife with tokenism and paternalism; a disappointed mother who can’t understand why he’s not an accountant; and a dead-end day job that’s populated by seemingly well-meaning white people who inflict racist micro-aggressions and prejudice as easily as they chug pints and sing bad karaoke.

Manhattan — Prime Video

This short-lived but intriguing WGN series from 2014 is enjoying some deserved resurrection thanks to the recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Set in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, it’s a twisting, paranoid drama about the scientists involved and the pressures brought to bear on every aspect of their lives in the shadow of the looming life-changing consequences of their work and the coming madness of the black and white divisions between communism and democracy that would shape the Cold War.

It’s unlikely that the show will ever be revived but for two seasons it offered plenty of strong acting, carefully curated period detail and solidly intriguing and prescient historical drama.

Between the Lines — Mubi.com

This odd but quietly entertaining 1977 film from underground director Joan Micklin Silver is based on her own experiences working as a journalist for the now defunct counterculture stalwart The Village Voice.

In the light of the shrinking influence of journalism in the digital age and the subsequent death of the Voice, the director’s ode to the eccentric characters and tribulations of the staff of her fictional version, the Boston-based Black Bay Mainline, stands as a gently funny and bittersweet tribute to a dying craft and its mad but passionate practitioners.