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Judging from the two biggest new streaming dramas around, the taste these days runs towards the kitchen sink – not as in gritty northern blokes smoking Woodbines and moaning a lot; rather, as in the writers throwing in everything but. A fortnight ago, I reviewed Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast: a Netflix show that doesn’t so much combine slapstick, violence, cheery banter, mean banter, mystery, media satire and dark broodings on life, as simply shuttle between them. Now comes Young Sherlock, directed by Guy Ritchie, where again anybody searching for dramatic unity will search in vain.

I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank. It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays an implausibly elderly tank commander, and where a single Sherman successfully takes on virtually an entire SS Panzer Grenadier regiment.

‘What will it take to make Richard Ayoade laugh?’ If you find this question about as enticing as ‘Whose turn is it to deworm the cat?’ or ‘What is Keir Starmer’s favourite plant-based ready meal?’ I really don’t blame you. But still if you watch Last One Laughing (Amazon Prime), I think you might change your mind. The idea of this reality series is to confine ten comedians for six hours in a Big Brother-style enclosure and ban them, on pain of expulsion, from being amused by one another’s jokes. One misplaced smirk gets you a yellow card; the next ill-judged titter and you’re out on your ear. The winner, as per the title, is the last one laughing.

Now that The Crown has finished (for the time being, at least), production companies are scrabbling about for replacements. Perhaps inevitably, the biggest royal story of the past few years — Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on the BBC’s Newsnight program — has now been made into two separate shows this year. The Netflix offering, Scoop, focused on Sam McAlister — and was, far from coincidentally, based on McAlister’s memoir. Now Amazon Prime has entered the fray with a three-part series that follows in the wake of the peerless A Very English Scandal and the lesser A Very British Scandal. Whatever next?

Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about their most cherished classic being massacred. I had to look up who was responsible for this atrocity of a show, so I could check who to hate But massacred it has been. Just as Bridgerton drives a coach and horses – or bulldozer with flashing rave lights and klaxons, more like – through anything that might remotely have resembled Jane Austen’s England, so this Netflix ‘adaptation’ does for 14th-century Florence.

What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake? Sadly, because he died just a few days before its release, we’ll probably never hear the full story. But this comment from the show’s producer offers a hefty clue: ‘Chris [Sansom] has been enormously generous and he wants more people to read the books, and this is such a good way.’ Sounds very much like Sansom accepted this atrocity of an adaptation as a necessary evil: his books had been stuck in development hell for nearly two decades (possibly, because his labyrinthine whodunits about monastic reform and court politics in Henry VIII’s England were considered a bit niche for mass audiences) and, in the end, he simply capitulated to moronitude.

There is a magical nexus between awful and amazing on which some movies land. Sometimes it is a self-aware reach toward the awful that creates the magic, other times it is the filmmaker’s obliviousness that creates a Bob Ross happy accident that delights viewers and creates a cult classic. Amazon’s Road House is not such a movie. The 2024 film, loosely based on 1989’s Road House, mostly adheres to the Wikipedia plot summary of the Patrick Swayze classic, if you forgive them for forgetting to make the plot discernible. Jake Gyllenhaal is a former UFC fighter, rather than a professional bouncer, in this iteration. He is recruited to become a bouncer for a club experiencing a wave of violence, as was the case in the original. He is a badass, as Swayze was.

Major spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know the ending of The Princes in the Tower: The New Evidence, skip the next paragraph. Still with me? Good. The answer is no, Richard III did not order the killing of the two princes. That was just Tudor propaganda. Both boys, the sons of Edward IV, survived, and escaped to Europe. Thence, supported by their aunt Margaret of Burgundy, they made separate, ultimately unsuccessful attempts to regain the throne for the Yorkists, one under the name Lambert Simnel, the other as Perkin Warbeck. I’m telling you this not to be a spoilsport but to spare you 82 minutes of valuable life. Yes, the bare-bones story is fascinating, and researcher Philippa Langley deserves huge credit for her discoveries.

Fans of The Summer I Turned Pretty, a hit teen drama on Amazon Prime adapted from a young adult book series of the same name, are furious after discovering that one of the show's lead actors “liked” some conservative social media posts. Cockburn was first alerted to the controversy by his niece, who describes herself as the show's "biggest fan" and regularly trawls Reddit threads about the Amazon streaming series. The Summer I Turned Pretty is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl, Isabella or "Belly,” who finds herself caught in a love triangle with a pair of brothers, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. Just like with the love triangles in the Twilight and Hunger Games series, fans endlessly debate over who Belly should end up with.

Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third of ours, the smaller talent pool would make the Antipodean edition look like thin gruel. But a bit like with the cricket and the rugby, size clearly isn’t everything. UK MasterChef now resembles one of those joyless austerity dishes you cobble together from crusty leftovers you found languishing in the fridge. But the Aussie one has had my entire family addicted and yearning for more for the past fortnight. I suppose it’s partly down to the way Australia sees itself.

If you’ve ever wondered what a screenplay written by the Democratic National Committee for the Hallmark Channel might be like, I’m afraid I have your answer. Red, White & Royal Blue, a gay — excuse me, queer — romcom streaming on Amazon Prime is one of those rare films that leaves you feeling infringed. Some part of it may live in my brain forever — and that seems unjust. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of gay movies, even the corny ones. This, however, is post-gay queer chick-lit and not even in the same universe as movies written by, and for, gay men. Hell, I even thought Love, Simon was a cute movie. Red, White & Royal Blue makes sense when you look at the teen romance novel of the same name on which the film was derived.

On the 100th birthday of Federico Fellini, Martin Scorsese reflected on his love of the iconic Italian filmmaker in a cover essay he wrote for Harper's magazine. The essay begins by pushing back against a particular excess of the modern film industry, which is “content.” Following his criticism of the predominant Marvel Cinematic Universe as “theme park movies,” Scorsese aims at streaming services for relying on automated algorithms to determine what viewers want to watch. He then praises platforms that emphasize more curation. One of them is the Criterion Channel, a service that is part of the Criterion Collection, a physical media boutique that specializes in the restoration of classic and contemporary cinema.