As Jack Thorne continues defending disability rights through drama, Charlie Brooker conjures more technological nightmares.
Best Interests
Monday
BBC One, 9.00pm
Jack Thorne continues spotlighting disability rights with another thought-challenging drama. Based on high-profile, real-life cases, Best Interests stars Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen as a couple divided by the impossible decision of whether to allow their suffering daughter to die.
Nicci (Horgan) and Andrew's (Sheen) daughter Katie (Alison Oliver) already has a rare form of congenital muscular dystrophy when she's taken in for late night emergency treatment for a chest infection. The medical staff decide that it's too invasive, painful and permanently damaging for them to continue, but tensions boil when her parents resolve to fight for her right to life.
The Full Monty
Wednesday
Disney+
Disney reboots the original Magic Mike, i.e. The Full Monty, the heart-warming story of Sheffield steelworkers who, in 1997, are forced to strip for a living when they are made redundant.
This new comedy drama returns to Sheffield 26 years later to follow the same lives, played by the same actors. Robert Carlyle is back as the rogue ringleader Gaz, who's now working as a porter in a struggling local hospital—just one side of the austerity-stricken stage set for the new series. Mark Addy's Dave is now a caretaker in an academy where pupils are going hungry, while Leslie Sharp plays his wife and now morally-conflicted headteacher.
Count Abdulla
Thursday
ITVX
Arian Nik stars in this new comedy as a Muslim junior doctor who's already stuck in an identity crisis, caught between his religious mother and his secular friends, when he's bitten by a halal-hunting vampire (Jaime Winston).
But far from condemning him to life as an undead, Abdulla Khan (Nik) soon learns of his newfound freedoms.
Black Mirror
Thursday
Netflix
A timely return for the prophet of technological doom. Charlie Brooker has been expanding the definition of his dystopian anthology series, Black Mirror, with each season that comes. And this sixth is no different, with the likes of Aaron Paul, Annie Murphy, Anjana Vasan, Himesh Patel, Kate Mara, Michael Cera, Rob Delaney, Salma Hayek and Zazie Beetz all starring across five wildly different films.
No plot descriptions here, though. Black Mirror is best delved into blindly, like a lucky—or unlucky—dip.
Check out our interview with Charlie Brooker in this month's Television magazine.