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Happy Thanksgiving, one and all! Whether you’re doing turkey or a honey-baked ham, gathering about a dining room table or holing up with your dearest friends, this is one holiday that calls for a little streaming material. So, what’s on this long weekend?
Here, we gather a few fresh options—from spy and detective dramas to a miniseries about Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna and a certain New York City parade. Scroll on for five new things to watch in the coming days.
The Agency
For those of us obsessed with the French espionage show The Bureau, an American remake was always going to be a tricky proposition. The very things that made the French series so deeply satisfying would also be the hardest to translate. There was the Parisian ordinariness of the cast; the banalities of office life at the intelligence agency, DGSE (how I loved watching spies eat French cafeteria food!); and the show’s contrapuntal rhythms of kinetic action and subtle tradecraft. The Bureau could be nothing but talk for long stretches, but the themes of loyalty and the way human feelings conflicted with state security kept you hooked. American TV has any number of spy shows; few reward close attention the way that The Bureau did over its five faultless seasons. Well, quelle surprise, The Agency, The Bureau’s handsome, engrossing, icily toned American version, is excellent.
Streaming on Paramount+ (via its Showtime plan) starting November 29, the series has a gold-plated cast—Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Jodie Turner-Smith, and more—and an equally prestigious writing team: playwright Jez Butterworth, working here with his brother John Henry Butterworth. The first two episodes were directed by Joe Wright (Anna Karenina, Atonement), and they don’t pander to whizz-bang American sensibilities: They are taut as a wire, moving with a stalker’s patience through a granite-shaded London. The setting is a rather grand American field station there, where an agent, code-named Merlin (Fassbender), has just returned from spending six years undercover in Ethiopia. Unbeknownst to his handler (Wright, who has secrets of his own), Merlin fell in love with a woman (Turner), an attachment he has not quite been able to leave behind.
Fassbender is the main reason these episodes work so well: his cold-blooded calm thinly masks a state of crisis. And to watch him shake the CIA’s own handlers, and interrogate a psychologist sent to evaluate him, is to watch a masterclass in leading-man antiheroics. The Agency also has B and C plots that closely mirror those of The Bureau’s first season, giving us well-choreographed action in Ukraine and the prospect of a dangerously green agent, Danny (Saura Lightfoot-Leon), going undercover to Iran. The episodes previewed to critics were far more polished and expensive-looking than their French source material, but they share The Bureau s intelligence and savoir faire. So far, so good. —Taylor Antrim
How to watch: Stream on Paramount+ (with the Showtime plan) from November 29.
Get Millie Black
You both have and have not seen anything quite like Max’s Get Millie Black before. What you have seen is a procedural with a female police lead who has a mind of her own and an array of obstacles complicating the case in front of her. (Everything from Prime Suspect to The Killing to The Fall follow this tried-and-true formula.) What you haven’t seen is a detective series like that set in Jamaica, and written by Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James with a hyper-specific sense of place. At five episodes, this is a brisk watch with a spiky central performance from Tamara Lawrance as an ex-Scotland Yard detective who has come home to Kingston. Come for the atmospherics, stay for the missing-girl mystery. —TA
How to watch: Stream on Max.
The 98th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
A cherished New York City tradition since 1924 (!), the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is set to be bigger than ever this year, with 22 giant character balloons, 34 floats, 11 marching bands, and 28 performers (including Idina Menzel, Jennifer Hudson, Kylie Minogue, Charli D’Amelio, and, delightfully, T-Pain) processing up the West Side of Manhattan. Tune on in—and, while you have NBC going, watch the 23rd annual National Dog Show as a chaser. —Marley Marius
How to watch: The parade airs live on NBC and Peacock from from 8:30 a.m. until noon ET on November 28. (The dog show starts at noon.)
The Madness
The Madness, now on Netflix, has a lot to recommend it: a leading turn from the hardest-working and best-dressed man in Hollywood, Colman Domingo; a thrilling premise (prominent Black pundit on sabatical in the Poconos stumbles upon the brutally murdered body of a notorious white supremicist and is framed for the crime); and some very compelling supporting players, including Bradley Whitford and Stephen McKinley Henderson. If your Thanksgiving table is wanting for a soupçon of racial tension and conspiracy theorizing, give this one a spin.—MM
How to watch: Stream on Netflix.
Senna
Friday Night Lights, but make it motorsport: That seems to be the thinking behind this high-octane, six-episode Netflix production debuting on Friday. The dashing Brazilian driver Aryton Senna (played here by Brazilian actor Gabriel Leone) was a godlike figure in Formula 1—both on the track and off (the latter, thanks to his relationships with a number of TV presenters and models, including Elle MacPherson); and in the late 1980s and early ’90s, before his tragic death on the track in 1993—but unless you’re one of the legions of Drive to Survive fans and you’ve done some homework, you may not have heard of him. (Lewis Hamilton, among other current drivers, has kept the flame alight; Hamilton said that driving one of Senna’s cars around the track before this year’s Brazilian Grand Prix was “the greatest honor of my life.”)
This miniseries delivers the potted story and the brutal racing battles, interspersed with narratives about Senna’s childhood, his early marriage and divorce, his emerging celebrity—and, yes, the fiery crash at Imola. This series hits all the important markers and may be just the thing to bring the jocks, the dads, the moms, and anybody else looking for a good drama and a love interest or two onto the same sofa. For those looking to go further: Asif Kapadia’s 2010 feature-length documentary, also called Senna, is still the gold standard. —Corey Seymour
How to watch: Stream on Netflix on November 29.
