Sunny Nights is a darkly comic crime series created by Nick Keetch and Ty Freer, pairing Will Forte and D'Arcy Carden as a mismatched pair of American siblings who relocate to Sydney, Australia, in pursuit of a fresh start. Their big idea, a spray-tan business, is meant to be a clean, sunny path to reinvention, but it quickly drags them somewhere far messier.
Forte plays Martin Marvin and Carden his sister Vicki, and as their fledgling venture stumbles they become entangled with local criminals, spending the series scrambling to stay solvent, out of jail and, ideally, alive. The show mines its comedy from the gulf between the siblings' cheerful, sun-kissed ambitions and the seedy underworld they keep tripping into, set against a vivid Australian backdrop and populated by a largely local ensemble, including a debut acting turn from former rugby league star Willie Mason.
Produced for Australia's Stan before reaching a wider audience internationally, Sunny Nights was selected for the Berlinale Series Market, signaling festival interest ahead of its premiere. A brisk, offbeat crime comedy powered by the odd-couple chemistry of its leads, Sunny Nights is streaming on Hulu.
Arguably the best medical drama in television history, House thrives on genius writing and equally brilliant acting. Set in a teaching hospital at Princeton University, the show builds its plots around complicated, complex, elusive, credulity-straining diseases and a team of diagnosticians willing to move heaven and earth to find their causes and treatments. Long-time House fans eventually demystify the show’s dramatic formula, which devotes the first third to diagnosis and discovery, the middle third to trial and which seem to lead to a cure, and then the climactic ending which undoes all the drama of the first two thirds, curing the disease by revealing The Truth. Hugh Laurie plays Dr. Gregory House to perfection, sustaining the tension and contradiction between House’s arrogance and his irresistible compulsion to save people from their illnesses and often from themselves. One Los Angeles television writer sums-up, “A vicodin-popping, wise-cracking, gimp-guy who walks with his cane on the wrong side while he demystifies illnesses so bizarre they almost defy imagining—what’s not to like?”
