Melissah Yang and Patricia Karounos share their picks of can’t-miss TV shows and movies that have them texting up a storm. Trust, you will be too.
Family is something that connects us all. Regardless of the size of yours, who they’re made up of, or the kinds of relationships you have with various members within them, families are something we all have experience with. And, for better or worse, they’re something that fundamentally shapes how we view the world. It’s no wonder, then, that many of the movies and TV shows we love deal with family — the family we’re born with, the ways in which we navigate how we feel about them, and the people we find along the way who become family. And what better time to be really thinking about this than at the start of a new year, when our hopes, dreams, and ambitions are at their highest.
That’s what Hollywood seems to be doing this month, with shows like The Brothers Sun — a Michelle Yeoh dramedy about how a Taiwanese triad family must shift after their patriarch is almost killed — Griselda, a crime drama biopic starring Sofía Vergara as a single mother who builds a drug empire. And that’s the beginning of what’s set to be a jam-packed month of TV and film watching.
The Brothers Sun
The Brothers Sun — a new Netflix series about a Taiwanese triad family starring Michelle Yeoh and created by Byron Wu and longtime Ryan Murphy collaborator Brad Falchuk — is not what you think it is. Not completely, at least. Yes, the show features the out-there violence and captivating fight scenes you’d expect from a drama about organised crime, but it’s also so much more.
Things kick off when the Sun patriarch is shot by an assassin, prompting eldest son Charles (Justin Chien) to leave for Los Angeles to protect his estranged mother (Yeoh) and brother, Bruce (Sam Song Li), who is completely in the dark about the family business. What follows is a family with vastly different backgrounds and perspectives trying to find a new way to be in each other’s lives while figuring out how to love each other in full again — while a bunch of assassins are coming after them, naturally.
Yeoh is, of course, formidable — though not in that badass martial artist way you may be thinking of — but Chien and Li impressively hold their own with the Oscar winner. The Brothers Sun is thrilling, but it’s also moving and consistently funny. I almost wish this had landed a week earlier so we all could have watched it with our families during the holidays.
Where to watch: Netflix
When: January 4
Watch if you like: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Peaky Blinders
Good Grief
Canadian multi-hyphenate Dan Levy is best known for delivering heartwarming, feel-good laughs with his Emmy-winning sitcom Schitt’s Creek. With his feature-length directorial debut, Good Grief, he’s striking a decidedly different tone. Levy also stars in the film as Marc, a quiet, recently widowed man who decides to take his best friends, Sophie and Thomas (Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel), on a restorative trip to Paris to thank them for the way they’ve looked after him.
That’s enough to have me already reaching for the Kleenex, but expect things to get even more real and emotional as the three pals are forced to confront the hard truths they’ve been trying to escape for years. I’m excited for Levy to get to flex his creative muscles outside of Schitt’s Creek, I think Negga (Preacher, Passing, Loving) can do just about anything on screen, and Patel emotionally devastated me many times in the post-apocalyptic miniseries Station Eleven, so I can’t wait to see what kind of magic the three of them cook up together.
Where to watch: Netflix
When: January 5
Watch if you like: Schitt’s Creek, P.S. I Love You
Mean Girls
On Wednesdays we still wear pink and fetch still isn’t going to happen, but that’s just about all that’s the same with Mean Girls in 2024. That’s right, one of the most iconic teen movies of the early 2000s has been remade — and this time it’s a musical.
Tina Fey is also behind the new version of the tale, which is adapted from the 2018 Broadway musical, and still follows new student Cady as she embeds herself in with the popular girls at school. We can quibble all we want about whether an already excellent 20-year-old movie really needs to be remade, but I do wonder if it can deliver on the same humor and candid (if over-the-top) POV of the high school experience for the younger social media generation the original did. Attempting to answer that question alongside Fey will be Angourie Rice (Mare of Easttown), who stars as Cady, Reneé Rapp (she also appeared in the Broadway production) as Regina George, Auli’i Cravalho (Moana) as Janis, Avantika Vandanapu (Senior Year) as Karen, Bebe Wood (Love, Victor) as Gretchen, Christopher Briney (The Summer I Turned Pretty) as Aaron Samuels, and Busy Philipps as Mrs. George.
Where to watch: Cinema
When: January 19
Watch if you like: Mean Girls (2004), The Sex Lives of College Girls
True Detective: Night Country
It’s been ages since we’ve had a show on HBO that was so worth obsessing over it felt like everyone was watching it at the same time. (Sorry, The Gilded Age, fans; maybe your time will come.) I’m hopeful that the return of True Detective— which we last saw for season three in 2019 starring Mahershala Ali — will succeed in bringing all TV fans together (from the comfort of our own couches) again.
For its fourth outing, the crime anthology series is being referred to as True Detective: Night Country. Written and directed by Issa López (with acclaimed filmmaker Barry Jenkins producing), it’s also the first season without creator Nic Pizzolatto as the main driving force behind the scenes. We also have a moody new setting on our hands for this mystery, which follows two detectives (played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) as they dig into the disappearance of eight men from a research station in Alaska. If Night Country is anything like its predecessors, prepare to travel into the deepest, darkest corners of despair and human behavior.
Where to watch: Sky Atlantic & NOW
When: January 15
Watch if you like: True Detective, Fargo
Griselda
The Narcos franchise has long played a role in Netflix’s massive portfolio, and its latest spinoff is a solid addition that continues that legacy. Starring Sofia Vergara, Griselda is inspired by the real-life Griselda Blanco, a Colombian drug lord whose business savvy and brutal tactics led to her moniker “The Godmother.” In the six-episode limited series, Griselda holds nothing back as she navigates her ambition to own the Miami market in the 1970s and 1980s with the realities of being a mother in a dangerous trade.
Best known to audiences as the bubbly and loud Gloria Delgado-Pritchett in the comedy Modern Family, Vergara takes a major turn as the infamously brutal Blanco. It’s refreshing to see Vergara in a different kind of role, where sexuality takes a backseat and instead centers one of the few women who made their mark in the drug trade (and left a mass of bodies in her wake). Yes, Griselda Blanco is not one to root for — she is believed to have been connected to hundreds of deaths during the height of Miami’s crime spree — but that earnestness to carve her own path in a male-dominated industry is something we can all relate to.
Where to watch: Netflix
When: January 25
Watch if you like: Narcos, Narcos: Mexico
Expats
From the moment the 2019 family drama The Farewell accomplished the rare feat of making me ugly cry in public, I knew I would be a fan of filmmaker Lulu Wang for life. And after a lengthy wait, she’s finally back with a sweeping six-episode limited series called Expats.
Adapted from Janice Y. K. Lee’s best-selling novel The Expatriates, the drama is set in Hong Kong in 2014 and focuses on three American women (played by Nicole Kidman, Sarayu Blue, and Ji-young Yoo) whose lives become entwined after some kind of tragedy. The show explores that tragedy and these women’s lives while also examining grief, privilege, connection, and so much more. If The Farewell proved anything, it’s that Wang is a talented filmmaker with a knack for crafting authentic and intimate everyday stories that grapple with what it means to be a human being, and that she now gets to do that on a larger scale is wonderful news. I can’t wait to see the result — and everything more that’s still to come.
Where to watch: Prime Video
When: January 26
Watch if you like: The Farewell, The Undoing
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