What to stream (or not) this week: Gordon Ramsay’s bland doco, plus five more picks

This week’s releases include foul-mouthed British chef Gordon Ramsay’s indulgent documentary, the return of ’90s icons Beavis and Butt-Head, while a prank goes badly wrong in the Welsh drama The Pact.

Being Gordon Ramsay ★★ (Netflix)

“Let’s go,” Gordon Ramsay urges everyone around him – including himself – throughout this documentary series. The British celebrity chef is on a six-month journey to open a massive food complex with five different restaurants atop the London skyscraper 22 Bishopsgate. Between work and family there’s no time to pause, no space for contemplation. It’s the same with this show, which dashes between household and building site, media work and family events. Much happens, but this expletive-laden narrative is rarely revealing. It lacks flavour.

Directed by Dionne Bromfield and produced by Studio Ramsay Global, the six episodes are crisply made and provide a crafted window into the “real Gordon Ramsay”. That infamous temper? Mellowed apparently, and besides, it was all conveniently in the service of achieving perfection. The show takes inspiration from a previous Netflix success, 2023’s Beckham, which used carefully regulated but nonetheless amusing banter between David and Victoria to create the illusion of insight. We’re in the age of the celebrity-controlled documentary.

Ramsay’s wife of 30 years, Tana, is a thoughtful presence – mostly supportive, occasionally mocking. She, too, talks up 22 Bishopsgate as a “huge undertaking”, but frankly that narrative is over-egged given the show can’t help but also emphasise how vast Ramsay’s global restaurant and media empire is. He delivers new eating establishments and reality television shows constantly; no one setback could stop him. A frank discussion of how he got to that point is lacking here. Bromides about hard work suffice.

It’s both disappointing and unsurprising that Ramsay, a natural on the screen, has reached this point. Television gave him a profile, thanks to the still-fascinating 1999 British documentary series Boiling Point (YouTube is your best bet). That was uncut Ramsay, a compelling kitchen obsessive who still spent every night at the pass. Since then, he’s learnt to market himself and control the narrative. Being Gordon Ramsay doesn’t have a narrator and only rarely is a voice heard off-screen with a query. Ramsay does it all.

It’s watchable, whether Ramsay is taking his daughter Tilly shopping for her first chef whites or he’s pointing out flaws in the set-up of the Asian-inspired Lucky Cat, the largest of the five establishments. But the constant flow of authorised, surface-level celebrity documentaries that are shaped by their subjects is only growing, and it speaks to a broader issue of who controls the flow of information in today’s world. “The things we do for f---ing food,” remarks an exasperated Ramsay at one point. He delivers it as a joke, but perhaps that hunger for control is actually the problem.

56 Days ★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

The strategy underpinning this hot twenty-somethings-gone-wrong thriller is to reveal a huge chunk of plot upfront, but leave further truths dangling. It’s a tricky gambit and it mostly fails: by revealing so much of the plot and quickly revealing duplicitous twists, 56 Days lays bare the infrastructure that should be hidden away. The performances, from a quite good Dove Cameron and a hamstrung Avan Jogia, are secondary to the next twist. It’s spoon-feeding.

It opens with the reveal of a body decomposed beyond recognition in the bathtub of Oliver (Jogia). Jump back 56 days and he has a meet cute with Ciara (Cameron). What happened between the two events is the show’s focus, but a death isn’t surprising. This duo has more red flags than a May Day rally – false identities, weird night-time rituals, and inappropriate reactions. Halfway through their first date Oliver slips away to scream down the phone, “I think I’m doing it again!”

56 Days has been marketed as an erotic thriller, but the chemistry between the couple is awkward, and the sex scenes are cliched and performative. That could be part of the plot, but if you’re asking those questions then the story has already lost a measure of purpose. As consolation, the two police detectives, Reardon (Karla Souza) and Connolly (Dorian Missick), investigating the bathtub’s occupant, have a scrappy authenticity. I’d watch their spin-off.

Beavis and Butt-Head ★★★★ (Paramount+)

King of the Hill got plenty of praise where it was revived on Disney+ in 2025, but another celebrated animated comedy from Mike Judge has quietly added three new seasons to its 1990s legacy. Complete with their trademark vocal tics – one “uh-huh huh huh” is all you need to hear – Beavis and Butt-Head still create mayhem from the simplest beginnings. The show’s format has been updated, with the pair sometimes reacting to YouTube clips instead of music videos, but the best addition is keeping the original teenage characters while also introducing their middle-aged, but no wiser, successors.

The Pact ★★★ (BritBox)

The British-born and Australian-raised screenwriter Peter McTighe made a name for himself as the driving force behind Wentworth, the prison drama reboot that became a global success. He’s been working mostly in the UK since, and this 2022 drama is a good example of his subsequent output. Four friends who work in a Welsh brewery play a prank on their doltish boss, only for it to go badly wrong. They make a pact to never talk about it, but fraught circumstances and a dogged investigator, Detective Superintendent Holland (Rakie Ayola), test them.

Strip Law ★★★½ (Netflix)

Severance star Adam Scott gets back to his comic roots with this animated comedy, where his sadsack Las Vegas lawyer, Lincoln Gumb, decides to stop fighting the city’s excess and idiocy and instead leans into it, with the help of exuberant street magician Sheila Flambe (Abbott Elementary’s Janelle James). Created by former The Late Show with Stephen Colbert writer Cullen Crawford, the series is cheerfully absurd, delivering debased standards and stupid legal logic. The subtext to all this chaos is a whisper that this is where America is actually headed.

The Night Of ★★★★½ (HBO Max)

It is 10 years since this pungent HBO limited series debuted, and it has improved with time as the stark truths of the show – where incarceration and deprivation took many forms, both public and personal – have only grown bitterly stronger. Created by Steven Zaillian (Ripley) and novelist Richard Price (Clockers), the narrative was built around exemplary performances from Riz Ahmed and John Turturro, as respectively a young Muslim-American student accused of murder and the barrel-scraping lawyer defending him. Amazing supporting cast: Bill Camp, Jeannie Berlin, and The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams.

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