The 12 best TV shows to watch in April

1. Beef

Steven Yeun and Ali Wong’s road rage incident escalates into a series of pranks and attacks in this comic drama. Their characters already had reasons to be angry at life. Yeun plays a building contractor with a failing business, and Wong is a discontented entrepreneur in the suburbs. It’s all too much when her gleaming white SUV cuts off his beat-up red pickup truck. The series received extravagant praise when it premiered at SXSW recently, with Angie Han of The Hollywood Reporter calling it, “A feast of sharp comedy, wild thrills and disarming empathy”. Series creator Lee Sung Jin has said he is “grateful to the guy who yelled at me in traffic three years ago. I did not let it go and now we have a show”.

Beef premieres 6 April on Netflix internationally.

2. Dreamland

The latest series created by Sharon Horgan sounds like her stunning dark comedy Bad Sisters without all the murdering. Four sisters reunite in their Margate town in a series based on Horgan’s BAFTA-winning 2017 short, Morgana Robinson’s Summer. Lily Allen plays the sister who pays a surprise visit home, unsettling the dynamic of the three who stayed, including Freema Agyeman. The women’s mother and grandmother add a multigenerational layer to the story of secrets, rivalries and multiple pregnancies. The show was shot in Margate in pop-off-the-screen colours, and while Horgan isn’t in it, her usual hilarious, sophisticated, sardonic take on family, love and sibling dynamics is sure to shine through.

Dreamland premieres 6 April on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK

3. Transatlantic

This World War II drama is based on the remarkable true story of Varian Fry, an American sent to France during World War II to smuggle out great artists and writers targeted by the Nazis, including Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp. Cory Michael Smith plays Fry, Gillian Jacobs is Mary Jayne Gold, the heiress who works with him and funds the escapes, and Corey Stoll plays the American consul in Marseille, where much of the action is set. Julie Orringer’s first-rate 2019 novel, The Flight Portfolio, inspired by Fry’s exploits, heightens his real-life struggle by adding a romance and is the source for a series that promises to be full of intrigue, suspense, heroism and duplicity.

Transatlantic premieres 7 April on Netflix internationally

4. The Last Thing He Told Me

In this suspense series based on Laura Dave’s best-selling novel, Jennifer Garner stars as Hannah, whose husband of a year suddenly disappears, leaving her with a belligerent 16-year-old stepdaughter and loads of questions. “Your husband is not who you think he is,” Hannah is told in the trailer, and their problem isn’t the kind that can be solved by marriage counselling. Somehow it involves a large bag of cash. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, forever Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones, plays her husband. His daughter is played by Angourie Rice, who was Kate Winslet’s daughter in Mare of Easttown and obviously has excellent taste in on-screen parents and stepparents.

The Last Thing He Told Me premieres 14 April on AppleTV+ internationally

5. Mrs Davis

What if Siri developed a messiah complex and a nun tried to take her down? That’s basically the premise of this series from odd-couple creators Damon Lindelof (Lost and Watchmen) and Tara Hernandez (megahit sitcom The Big Bang Theory). Mrs Davis is the name of a religion-spouting Artificial Intelligence with a cult following. Betty Gilpin (G.L.O.W.) plays Sister Simone, who is unexpectedly charged by Mrs Davis with finding the Holy Grail but turns on her all-powerful mission-setter. No wonder the Daily Beast has called the series gonzo and Gilpin describes it as “No country for old Looney Tunes”. With fears of AI and Chat GPT all over the news, the show has a layer of social commentary and even more comic absurdity.

Mrs Davis premieres 20 April on Peacock in the US

6. The Diplomat

In her first series since The Americans, Keri Russell plays Kate Wyler, the new US ambassador to the UK. A no-nonsense career diplomat with political ambitions, she doesn’t even want the job, but takes it to help sort out an international crisis. There is always one of those going on, but never mind. Rufus Sewell plays Kate’s husband, also a diplomat, causing plenty of work-life conflicts. The show has been created by Debora Cahn, known for writing tense political dramas including Homeland and The West Wing, who has said she wants to depict the diplomats’ day-to-day life. Even world leaders, she told Vanity Fair, sometimes “forget to take the tag off their pants”. It will also be fun to see how close to real-life US and UK politics this fiction dares to go.

The Diplomat premieres 20 April on Netflix internationally

7. Dead Ringers

Rachel Weisz stars in this updated spin on the 1988 David Cronenberg film about deeply disturbed and disturbing identical twin doctors, originally played so creepily by Jeremy Irons. Here they are obstetricians, planning the perfect birthing centre. Elliot is the brash twin and Beverly the reserved sister, but they have deranged personalities and a severe lack of medical ethics in common. Alice Birch, a playwright and co-writer of the hit adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People (ha! not so much here), created the series, which comes with elements of a psychosexual thriller, body horror, and of course the always incomparable Weisz. “There is quite a lot of blood,” she dryly told Entertainment Weekly.

Dead Ringers premieres 21 April on Prime Video internationally

8. Dear Mama

Subtitled The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur, this five-part documentary from filmmaker Allen Hughes (Dead Presidents) examines the lives and interconnected politics of the late hip-hop legend and his mother, juxtaposing the Black Power movement of the 1960’s and ’70’s with the hip hop revolution of the ’90’s. Afeni Shakur, who died in 2016, was a member of the Black Panther Party. Tupac, of course, remained famous as a musician with a political voice long after his death in 1996. The year before, he released one of his biggest hits, Dear Mama, an ode to Afeni. (“Even as a crack fiend, Mama, you always was a black queen.”) Hughes blends contemporary interviews with archival video, which includes Tupac as a smiling young man who says, “I’m most like my mom because I’m arrogant”.

Dear Mama premieres 21 April on Hulu in the US

9. Love and Death

Some true crime stories have a long grip on the public imagination, including the case of Candy Montgomery, which gives a whole new meaning to the word frenemy. In 1980 Montgomery, a church-going wife from suburban Texas, killed her lover’s wife, who happened to be her friend, with an axe. The story was told in the 2022 series Candy with Jessica Biel, but the high-powered cast and creators of this one make it worth another look. Elizabeth Olsen plays Candy, with Jesse Plemons as the man she kills for and Lily Rabe as his doomed wife. David E. Kelley (Big Little Lies) wrote the series and Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland) directs.

Love and Death premieres 27 April on HBO Max in the US

10. Citadel

In this splashy, extremely expensive series, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden play former spies for the heroic global security agency Citadel, who had their memories wiped when the villainous syndicate Manticore destroyed it. Reminded of their pasts, the agents resume their world-saving duties. Anthony and Joseph Russo, directors of Avengers: Endgame and other Marvel movies, are among the executive producers, and the ambitious plan is to position this series as the international mothership, with spinoffs centring on supporting characters in various countries and languages. Changes in the creative team and reshoots reportedly sent the budget soaring to over $200 million dollars, but production issues aside, Amazon obviously has some faith in the show, as it has already been renewed for a second season.

Citadel premieres 28 April on Prime Video

11. Fatal Attraction

This month’s second film-to-series adaptation is based on the 1987 Michael Douglas-Glenn Close thriller about a rejected mistress who won’t be ignored, even if she has to boil a bunny to get attention. Joshua Jackson is Dan, the married man who has an affair with Alex, the lover turned stalker played here by Lizzy Caplan. Amanda Peet plays Dan’s at-first unsuspecting wife, Beth. Unlike the film, the series ranges into the future to show the long-term fallout of the affair, and there are other major differences. According to Jackson, the movie depicted Dan as a victim, which wouldn’t hold up today. “We’re in a better cultural conversation now,” he has said. But sex, infidelity and obsession never go away.

Fatal Attraction premieres 30 April in the US and 1 May in the UK on Paramount+

12. Tom Jones

If ever a novel were ready-made for a series, it’s Henry Fielding’s mammoth, picaresque 1749 story of a foundling taken in by a wealthy country squire. Tom (Solly McLeod) falls in love with Sophia (Sophie Wilde), the rich girl next door, but circumstances force him to London, where he gets involved in many mishaps and adventures. The famous 1963 film starring Albert Finney leaned into the novel’s bawdiness. The series takes a different approach, with its writer, Gwyneth Hughes, calling Fielding’s work “the mother of all romcoms.” This version stays in the 18th century, though, with all its colourful period trappings, and has a terrific supporting cast, including Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham (pictured above) as the aristocratic and vicious Lady Bellaston, Alun Armstrong as Sophia’s doting grandfather, Squire Weston, and James Fleet as Tom’s adoptive father, the wonderfully named Squire Allworthy.

Tom Jones premieres 30 April on PBS in the US and 11 May on ITVX in the UK

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