It’s the Princess Diana season of The Crown but Margaret Thatcher steals the show

Once any of them opens their mouth it all comes tumbling out: exposition, context, feelings, the four-day forecast, the whole bit. Even the old Duke of Edinburgh, even though he’s played by Tobias Menzies – a man born to play the emotionally cauterised. Get him talking to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) about his regret that Charles was closer to old Dickie Mountbatten (Charles Dance) and he’ll just keep going.

Across the early episodes of the season almost everything that might have been expressed with a look or gesture is instead doggedly spelled out in dialogue. For most of one episode there’s a wounded stag limping around Balmoral like a mercifully mute metaphor. But once the beast has finally had the bullet, Charles does it the post-mortem indignity of spelling out the whole bloody analogy over the phone to Camilla Parker-Bowles (Emerald Fennell).

One imagines that if The Crown had been made for, say, the BBC, it would be a good deal more elliptical, trusting its audience’s background knowledge and ability to pick up on things.

In any case, it’s going to be another enormously eventful decade. The young Diana (Emma Corrin) makes a suitably sylph-like entrance, coyly engineering an encounter with Charles while in costume for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Initially, though, it’s Gillian Anderson’s Thatcher who is the more compelling figure and – surprisingly – the more sympathetic one as she and husband Denis (the very droll Stephen Boxer) endure some childish snobbery that doesn’t paint our monarch or her family in a great light. Anderson’s transformation is mesmerising, not least the feeble, raspy voice that belies the strength and ruthlessness with which Thatcher sets about her business.

The episode about Charles and Diana’s particularly rocky tour of Australia is one to look out for too.

Spontaneous
Google Play, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video

High school and first loves are notoriously tricky things. Try navigating them when, as in this mildly diverting movie, your classmates are randomly exploding in great welters of gore and you know that you or your sweetheart could be next.

Estimable Australian Katherine Langford (13 Reasons Why) is fun and feisty as American schoolgirl Mara, and she has a great, tender chemistry with Charlie Plummer, who plays her sweet-natured boyfriend. It’s mostly smart and savvy, but ends up floundering to the finish line.

The Reagans
Stan*

On the off chance that there are viewers out there not yet utterly exhausted by American politics, this revealing Showtime documentary series provides plenty of fascinating insights into how the Republican Party – and by extension the entire United States – has come to be how it is today.

Ron Reagan, son of former US president Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy, is among those well placed to explain his father’s transition from being a politically liberal union leader to being a prime mover of the radical Right.

Maxxx
Stan

What happens if you need to get the old band back together, but nobody in the old band wants to get back together with you? Well, if you’re washed-up British boy-band type Maxxx (O-T Fagbenle), the only way seems to be further down into a spiral of humiliating delusion. Series creator Fagbenle (The Handmaid’s Tale) is a hoot, and the series benefits hugely from the bowling-ball energy of Helen Monks (Raised by Wolves) and the unhinged commitment of Christoper Meloni as a hedonistic svengali.

The Mandalorian
Disney+

The live-action Star Wars series better known as The Baby Yoda Show continues to knock most of the recent movies sideways into a stormtrooper’s codpiece. Series creator Jon Favreau (Iron Man) knows the sweet spots for lovers of the original trilogy – one being smack-dab in the desert of Tatooine – and he keeps fans on a fast dopamine drip of nostalgia hits while keeping the visual spectacle big and knowing when to tuck tongue into cheek.

For a generation that grew up captivated by those scant few seconds of banthas and Sand People in the very first film, the opportunity to sit with them now for minutes at a time is incredibly luxurious. But, everything being meta these days, Favreau also pays homage and fromage to spaghetti Westerns, blockbusters like Jaws and Terminator 2, and plenty more besides.

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This new season couldn’t have started better than it did with Timothy Olyphant playing a variation of the laconic gunslinger he did in both Deadwood and Justified. Pedro Pascal would be wasted beneath the helmet were he not able to bring such a lithe physicality to his role.

Barbarians
Netflix

It always begins with an eagle – whenever a Roman legion loses its standard there will be blood. The warring Germanic tribes of Barbarians are about to learn this the hard way. But there’s a historical twist: a Roman officer by the name of Arminius (Laurence Rupp) is himself a barbarian, having been taken to Rome as a child hostage years earlier. Will he slaughter his own people or lead them to war against Rome? This handsome, bloody German drama series is quickly engrossing telly.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.