Wayward premieres 25 September on Netflix internationally
Apple TV+11. The Savant
Jessica Chastain stars in this timely thriller as Jodie, whose intuitive skills make her excellent at her top-secret job: tracing white supremacists and other hate groups on-line in order to prevent any violent attacks. She should be safely infiltrating the groups from her desk, interacting with them using a false persona, but her work becomes more immediate than she expected. The show reveals its strain on her home life, which includes two children and a husband in the military. And along with glimpses of the chilling videos the hate groups post, some scenes take us deep into the off-line world of one particular terror group Jodie is tracking. She is certain they are planning something major, and we know before she does that she is right. In a surreal touch, Jeremy Bobb plays the man Jodie pretends to be, and we sometimes see him at a computer instead of her. The ambitious series was created by Melissa James Gibson, a writer on The Americans. And it is not just a fictional idea. Jodie is based on a real person profiled in a 2019 article in Cosmopolitan headlined, “Is It Possible to Stop a Mass Shooting Before it Happens?”
The Savant premieres 26 September on Apple TV+ internationally
Disney+12. Chad Powers
Glen Powell has plenty of big film options, especially after last year’s summer blockbuster hit Twisters, but here he is in this goofy, warm-hearted series. He plays Russ Holliday, a college football player banned for losing his temper in a way so awful it became a viral video. Eight years later, he puts on a wig and tries out for a different college team, pretending to be a genial guy named Chad Powers. The show is based on an episode of famous football star Eli Manning’s ESPN series Eli’s Places, in which he disguised himself as the fictional Chad Powers and tried out for a college team. Powell has said that viewers knowing it was Manning in disguise all along was a key inspiration in making the series, which he created with Michael Waldron (Loki). He describes their thinking as, “Let’s use the lie at the centre of this thing, which creates inherent fun conflict.” Or, as he put it: “We’re going to Tootsie this thing. Let’s Mrs. Doubtfire it.” It looks like they Ted Lasso’d it too. That warm-hearted sports comedy was based on an even less likely source, a character in a television promo.
Chad Powers premieres 30 September on Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally
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