What a view | Unlike British reality show Love Island, Japan’s Terrace House: Opening New Doors is a happy, wholesome experience
- Plus, contract killer with a conscience comedy-drama Barry returns to HBO
- Cricket Fever: Mumbai Indians offers an access-all-areas look at India’s favourite sport
The internet has made voyeurs of us all. That’s surely why the masses’ opium of televisual choice often proves to be British dating reality show Love Island, where all obstacles to copulation, including garments, are removed as an essential part of the programme’s premise. Controversy surrounds the series, on screen and off, most recently when former contestant Mike Thalassitis was found dead in London park, the second Love Island alumni to have met an untimely end after former Miss Great Britain Sophie Gradon, who died in 2018.
If voyeurism does have an acceptable face, perhaps it’s the one we wear when pressing our noses up against the windows of Japanese show Terrace House: Opening New Doors , on Netflix, back for its sixth series. After the eight instalments we’ll know if the slow-burning fuse of romance is still quietly fizzing and if the relationships we see blossoming will survive post-filming.
Most residents of the designer house in the woods near mountain resort town Karuizawa have returned from the previous series, and now they’re joined by musician Masao Wada. Patience is required to find out if music indeed be the food of love, but in the meantime these well mannered, freshly scrubbed young people are sure to remain neither coarse nor obscene – regardless of what we believe to be their ultimate goal. Perhaps it’s a respect thing. Perhaps it’s a Japanese thing.
HBO series Barry is back with a second season about a contract killer with a conscience
Having a conscience must really put a dent in your job satisfaction if you’re a hitman. Nevertheless, that’s the yoke under which Bill Hader must toil as the eponymous killer in Barry, on HBO and HBO Go.
Depressed ex-soldier Barry wants to leave behind his more recent, bill-paying assassin’s past. But as eight-episode series two begins – at 10am tomorrow, with an 11pm encore – Barry, permanently creased of brow, is finding that with contract killing, breaking up is hard to do, not least when your boss considers you an exemplary employee. While in Los Angeles on another dirty job, however, Barry seizes on acting as his method of escape, joining a class of wannabes taught by the gently egotistical Gene Cousineau.
And that’s just the start of all the dark, deadpan comedy-drama. As our moribund hero wonders if he’ll ever understand why his trigger finger was so itchy anyway, he faces plenty of stiff, scene-stealing competition from love interest and accidentally irritating acting classmate Sally (Sarah Goldberg); solicitous, goggle-eyed, bone-domed Chechen mob boss NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan); and, playing Cousineau, an eminent, white-haired Henry Winkler, leather jacketless these last few years, but, hey! Happy days indeed.