Natalie Portman’s small screen debut and a sexy medieval romp – what you should see and read this week
Our expert picks of the best TV shows, sporting events and books to enjoy this week.
This article was first published in our email newsletter Something Good, which every fortnight brings you a summary of the best things to watch, visit and read, as recommended and analysed by academic experts. Click here to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox.
So often, in crime dramas, the victim is silent. Instead, the show focuses on the killer, piecing together the puzzle of why and how they did what they did. Not so in the new Apple TV drama, Lady in the Lake, which is narrated by Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) – the dead woman herself. Johnson is directly addressing Maddie Morgenstern (Natalie Portman), the writer and amateur investigator looking into her death.
Set in the 1960s, it’s a drama about female agency, the ties of family and community and the glittering temptations of Baltimore’s underbelly. The mood of the time – anxious and fractured – is conjured through an evocative jazz and soul soundtrack. And civil rights tensions course through the show. Morgenstern is a bored, wealthy Jewish housewife. Johnson is an African American mother with several jobs and a work-shy husband. The women’s unequal powers and privileges shape the drama, and their perceptions of one another.
For our reviewer, television expert Helen Piper, it’s a must watch, with “impressive scale” to the recreation of Baltimore and “visually ingenious and keenly paced” storytelling. Unlike most streaming series, episodes are being released weekly, giving you time to tick over the twists and turns as you count down to the next instalment.
Troublemakers and torchbearers
But if it’s binge-ability you’re after, The Decameron should scratch that itch. All eight episodes are ready to watch on Netflix, and if you view them in one sitting, you’re in for a hell of a ride. Adapted from the novel by Giovanni Boccaccio, written in 1353, it follows ten nobles quarantining together in a villa in the Italian countryside. They have fled Florence where the deadly Black Death is raging.
Netflix has turned the book into a dark, soapy comedy – a “wine-soaked sex romp” that soon descends into a race for survival. I spent the COVID lockdowns playing a lot of Scrabble and catching up on my reading. The wealthy inhabitants of the Decameron villa, however, spend their pandemic accusing one another of witchcraft, and rolling around in satin sheets.
Read more: The Decameron: Netflix's raunchy, raucous re-imagining of a medieval plague masterpiece
August 2 marks the centenary of American novelist and social critic James Baldwin’s birth, so it’s fitting that a quote from one of his essays has inspired the title of a new exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery – There Is Light Somewhere. The exhibition, by conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, features collage, paintings, sculptures, light displays and even an encyclopaedia, exploring the way biases and silences shape our collective stories about the past.
For our reviewer, professor of social injustice Pragya Agarwal, visiting the exhibition was an emotional experience. It left her feeling like she had “donned armour against the insidious racial biases that can chip away at our fragile sense of belonging”.
Read more: There is Light Somewhere at the Hayward Gallery: an emotional exploration of history and belonging
A sense of belonging will also surely be a central theme at tonight’s Olympic opening ceremony, as Paris gears up to host the games for the third time. I always love watching the opening ceremonies, and vividly remember running home from a last-minute snack-run to catch the start of London 2012. And what a spectacle it was.
These flashy events aim to tell fresh stories about the host city and country and set new creative standards for live mega-events. However, as historian Catherine Barker explains in this history of the opening ceremony, it took decades for the events to reach this scale. At the first modern Olympics in 1896, athletes simply entered the stadium to hear speeches and a specially composed hymn.
Read more: The colourful history of the Olympic opening ceremony
I moved into a new home at the end of last year and have been eyeing two rather unwieldy trees in the garden with suspicion ever since. But my impulse to lop them into submission was quickly curtailed in the spring when they began to grow apples – hundreds of them. Now I’m counting down the days until I can harvest them for crumbles, pies and salads. And as this piece by historian Serin Quinn has taught me, I’m lucky to have apple trees of this age and size at all.
In the late 19th century, there were nearly 1,500 varieties of apple growing in England. Today, you will find just seven to choose between on our supermarket shelves. Quinn is reviewing The Apple by Sally Coulthard, a delicious history of the fruit that will leave you with “plenty of food for thought”.
Read more: A delicious history of the apple – from the Tian Sian mountains to supermarket shelves
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