Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal star in a steamy, fraught murder mystery, and Steven Knight’s brooding boxing thriller returns for a second round. Plus, a jaw-dropping documentary about the family who adopted a booze-loving bear
The brutal murder of an anonymous woman? Rarely a promising start to a drama, but thankfully things get more interesting from this point. The killing is the backdrop to a dangerous game of cat and mouse between tightly wound detective Jack (Jon Bernthal, on fine, nervy form) and Tessa Thompson’s broadcast journalist Anna, whose career has hit the skids following a personal trauma. She views the case as a source of professional redemption, but there is history between the pair – and it turns out the victim might not be unknown to them. A dark thriller, adapted from Alice Feeney’s novel, that utilises the steamy heat and fraught racial politics of Atlanta to tense, claustrophobic effect.
Netflix, from Thursday 8 January
Back to the squalor of late Victorian east London for another season in hell with Steven Knight’s charismatic desperados. A year has passed and Stephen Graham’s Sugar Goodson has spent it drinking heavily. Meanwhile, Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) is pining for Jamaica and fighting for loose change, and Erin Doherty’s Mary Carr is in hock to predatory crimelord Indigo Jeremy. Mary has a plan – but she’ll need accomplices with clear heads. However, this season’s wildcards are the French anarchists who have arrived bearing seditious intent and plenty of dynamite. It’s brooding, bloody and oddly poetic.
