From a prestige drama about one of the nation’s Founding Fathers to new horror, documentary, and even musical releases, pretty much all the major streaming services have teed up a slew of must-watch content to enjoy over the next week. Apple’s streamer, in particular, has a pair of new releases that caught my eye for standing out a bit from the rest of the more run-of-the mill streaming pack — and we’ll get into all the details about them as well as several other new releases below.
Let’s start first with what’s now streaming, before we move into the titles that are still to come. These first four new releases all hit Apple TV+, Netflix, and Prime Video this week.
This first documentary is one of two Apple TV+ releases on our list, and it’s a follow-up of sorts to Apple’s 2020 documentary Boys State.
Both films present basically the same concept: A group of students, in this case the titular girls, gathering together for a statewide experiment in building a working democracy from the ground up. Girls State, from filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, is basically a mock government experiment, wherein a group of several hundred young women from across Missouri gather to campaign and vote for offices like governorships as well as the building out of a Supreme Court to adjudicate divisive issues.
From Apple’s official description, “these young women confront the complicated paths women must navigate to build political power. Following a distinctly female perspective and filled with teenage insecurity, biting humor and a yearning for true friendship, the young leaders of Girls State win hearts and minds — not just elections.”
Sometimes, an hour of TV can change everything.
That’s the moral of this soapy British drama about that infamous interview Prince Andrew gave to the BBC, the one where he weirdly said he doesn’t sweat and denied his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Rufus Sewell, fresh off his performance as an ambassador’s spouse in Netflix’s The Diplomat, gives a skeezy portrayal as the shifty-eyed “Randy Andy,” who’s essentially turned into mincemeat at the hands of journalist Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson).
Based on McAlister’s memoir Scoops, this Netflix release is also a kind of celebration of broadcast journalism, and to the hours of thankless grunt work required before the cameras even enter the picture.
One of Netflix’s fastest-growing content genres is all things Korean, and this sci-fi horror series underscores that the Korean content juggernaut isn’t just confined to romantic comedies and historical dramas.
The story in Parasyte: The Grey — which comes from Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho and is based on the Japanese manga Parasyte — involves spores basically falling from the sky and burrowing into people to turn them into disgusting, tentacled creatures. A team called “the Grey” works to eradicate the threat from all the larvae that are threatening to take over Earth, while one woman tries to coexist with the parasite living inside her.
“All over the world,” Netflix explains, “humans have become infected by unidentified parasites that’ve taken over their brains. The parasites have the ability to control humans and make them do things, make them kill. In response, the government creates an aggressive anti-parasite task force — led by the coldhearted Choi Jun-kyung (Lee Jung-hyun) — to annihilate every last one.”
This next new release scratches the same itch, for me, as does a TV show like Apple’s Acapulco. That is to say, it’s an unapologetically feel-good coming-of-age story, marked by visual delights and a charming protagonist you can’t help but root for.
Música marks the filmmaking debut of Rudy Mancuso, the former Vine personality who also stars here as a young man whose life is all about music, passion, and love (regarding music, by the way, all of the ordinary sounds of daily life turn into actual music in Rudy’s hyperactive imagination). One of the movie’s secret weapons is that his love interest Isabella is played by his real-life girlfriend Camila Mendes — the two of them displaying an abundance of on-screen chemistry, with Mendes’ performance, especially, also elevating this movie beyond cliche territory.
Upcoming new releases
Now, let’s shift tacks and talk about the future. Specifically, two can’t-miss streaming titles that will be available to watch in the coming days — one, a creepy Netflix true-crime documentary film, while the other is Apple’s Franklin, a series dramatizing a specific part of the life of Benjamin Franklin. The show is all about his long-shot gambit to convince France to support and underwrite the US colonies during the Revolutionary War.
What Jennifer Did (Netflix, April 10): This documentary from Jenny Popplewell revisits a deadly home invasion in Ontario, Canada, back in 2010 which resulted in a young woman named Jennifer Pan calling dispatchers in a state of hysteria. Armed gunman, she told them, had forced their way into her family’s home, demanded money, tied her up, and shot both of her parents. Per Netflix, “Initially, the Pans appeared to be the random victims of a deadly home invasion, a shocking anomaly in their quiet residential neighborhood.
“But as more details emerged, it became clear that Jennifer knew more about what happened that night than she was letting on.”
Franklin (Apple TV+, April 12): Based on the book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, this limited series stars Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin in what looks set to be Apple’s version of HBO’s Paul Giamatti-led Adams.
The series explores the gamble that Franklin undertook in December 1776, when the 70-year-old put all of his political acumen to the test by embarking on a secret mission to France to convince the monarchy to underwrite the America’s radical experiment in democracy. What’s all the more impressive about Franklin, the show, is that it takes material that usually amounts to a dry history lesson and not only turns Franklin into a flesh-and-blood, three-dimensional character, but that there’s also a bit of spy-adjacent cloak-and-dagger to the whole affair, as well.