What a view | What to stream this week: Fishbowl Wives and Professor T – for desperate housewives in Japan and an arrogant but brilliant criminologist
- Fishbowl Wives on Netflix is by turns coy and eye-popping, as six women unhappy with their husbands enter affairs but are unsure if it is love or just a fling
- In BBC series Professor T, Ben Miller is a crime-busting professor with no friends who barks at the dog paintings of his mother (Frances de la Tour)
“Let’s tryst again …” could be the clarion call for Tokyo’s desperate housewives (and career wives) as they indulge in some horizontal dirty dancing thanks to relationships gone wrong in Fishbowl Wives, an eight-part Netflix series that alternates the coy with the eye-popping.
Scenes of naked flesh worthy of parental warnings take us behind the bedroom door – and into the bathroom, the beauty salon after hours and other locations handy for physical frolics.
To raise the tension and stoke the sometimes febrile atmosphere further, the six women on whom the show concentrates all live in the same high-end tower block, with partners who either don’t deserve them or who have been rejected by those women, who have turned sullen and unpredictable.
Ryoko Shinohara plays Sakura, the wife of a physically abusive Lothario (Masanobu Ando) whom she cannot escape because of their successful salon business. She does, however, take shelter in the premises of her doting potential saviour (Takanori Iwata) – premises that happen to be a goldfish shop, just to ladle on some extra-thick imagery.
Sakura’s story is that around which the rest loosely revolve, each woman unsure whether her extracurricular fun is love or just a fling. Some wives find their way to ecstasy (or despair) via the bento box, jogging or drinking.
When the path to apparent enlightenment isn’t clear, there’s always the nosy neighbourhood female fortune-teller ready to advise gleefully on possible courses of infidelity for those women who haven’t yet sampled its delights and dangers.