[Always Be Streaming] ABW: Sydney

Your weekly guide on what to stream over the weekend

Some wild TV waters this week with a lot on offer with some choppy seas, but also some pretty smooth sailing. Thankfully your ol’ pal Cap'n Dan Barrett is here to guide you through it all.

• The big show of the week is the debut of NCIS: Sydney. We get it today in Australia a few days before the US (this coming Monday), which is as it should be. I’m not a huge fan of NCIS generally, but I didn’t mind this one. It is very NCIS formulaic (not a criticism - the show is what it is), but it also feels uniquely Australian. The attitudes are more relaxed and the show does a great job with the shooting locations. Also, top points to whoever decided the first episode of the Aussie NCIS should have a scene set in Marrickville’s Bob Hawke Leisure Centre. Struth, it’s a bloody good NCIS.

• I flagged this in the ABW newsletter midweek, but you should make sure you check out The Buccaneers on Apple TV+. It’s a delightfully bright and bubbly corset drama. It’s Sense & Sensibility by way of Taylor Swift and if that sounds like your jam, I’m incredibly certain you’ll be into it.

• Brian Cox says the reason he agreed to 007: Road To a Million is he thought he was signing up for a Bind movie. Unfortunately, he’s stuck in this really dire, over-dramatised Amazing Race wannabe reality game show. Everything is over-produced and overly scripted. At no point is it even clear who or what Brian Cox is doing in the show. He narrates the show and delivers instructions via a microphone before delivering very purple monologues. Beyond the use of the theme song and trips to Europe, can anyone explain how this is connected to James Bond?
  
  Ask me to make you a James Bond reality show and I’m delivering you a show about training people to become spies: how to engage in spycraft, how to drive fast cars, how to play card games, how to dress for casinos and underground volcano lairs, how to meet women with names like Xenia Onnatop, and how to use cool gadgets. 007: Road To a Million should be the most fun, coolest show on TV.
  
  What they made just sucks, so, so hard.

• On a far more cheery note. I wanted to throw out a quick recommendation to check out family animated show My Adventures With Superman. It’s a breezy, fun, and (as it goes along) delightfully romantic cartoon about a young Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen getting started at the Daily Planet as fresh-faced, idealistic journalists. It is styled like an anime cartoon and it feels far less stodgy than a Superman cartoon could be. Before the halfway mark in the first 10-ep season, the show completely upends the characters in the most obvious, but unexpected of ways. A delight!
  
  It debuted in the US a few months back (stream it via Max), but we’re only just getting it here in Australia by way of streamer Binge.