What to stream this week: A drama as good as Broadchurch, plus five more picks

Top picks this week include an exquisite crime drama set in Wales, a documentary about British boy band Take That, and re-runs of hit shows Matlock, Bones and Patriot.

Under Salt Marsh ★★★★½ (Binge)

There are too many British crime dramas. I know it, you know it, and almost certainly the people who keep on commissioning them know it. But if there’s an unending flow of six-part series about grim discoveries, dogged investigators and what they uncover about troubled communities, that also means the best entries can’t help but stand out. That’s what Under Salt Marsh does. Set in rural north Wales and made with exquisite care, the show is exceptional. Put it alongside season one of Broadchurch.

Created and lead-directed by British filmmaker Claire Oakley, Under Salt Marsh captures harsh, striking beauty: the storm-racked ocean off the isolated town of Morfa Halen, cloud-covered valleys and the face of Kelly Reilly. The Yellowstone star plays Jackie Ellis, a school teacher whose pale skin and red hair stand out on her nocturnal travails like a beacon – whether it’s help or a warning is unclear. When she discovers the body of a student in a ditch, her suffering is amplified. Something similar happened three years prior.

As a mystery, the show is measured and sombre. Information about the case and those involved, including Jackie, is parcelled out carefully. You will see the reaction before discovering the cause, as is apparent when Jackie discovers that the district police have dispatched Eric Bull (Rafe Spall) as the lead detective. Their history is fractious, but their familiarity is obvious. Close proximity, whether as colleagues, friends or family, is always a double-edged sword here.

There is a great deal of threads tangled together, but the show can hold them all because it delivers a palpable sense of community, geographically and socially. I can’t remember a British show that looked this evocative – colours carry a deep resonance, while the landscape has a panoramic heft. The traditional folk instruments in Ben Salisbury and Suvi-Eeva Äikäs’ score bestow a suitable menace to a locale where outsiders are treated with suspicion and the town elder, Soloman Bevan (Jonathan Pryce), marshals the residents.

Even as they’re torn apart by the child’s death, Morfa Halen is preparing for a destructive storm crossing the Atlantic. The town’s hope, despite expert advice, is that an under-construction seawall will protect them. It’s a telling reflection of the barriers individual characters put up, whether to hide from the truth or intimacy.

Reilly and Spall give lived-in performances that are opposed but complementary: Jackie is an exposed nerve, Eric tamped down. Getting the answers they need might destroy them. Those are gripping dramatic stakes.

Take That ★★★½ (Netflix)

Director David Soutar deserves genuine credit. In this era of sanitised music documentaries, he’s given the authorised tale of Take That, Britain’s defining boy – and then man – band, a narrative energy, discreet commentary and an aesthetic that captures the contradictions of pop music: the ephemeral and the ecstatic, the silly and the sublime. This three-part series – which is essentially rise, fall and redemption – understands the group’s long journey.

Soutar uses reams of era-specific archival footage and voiceover interviews solely from the members and their manager who assembled them, Nigel Martin-Smith. The interviews from current members Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard Donald are new, while the departed Robbie Williams and Jason Orange are vintage. You get camaraderie, ego crises and the enduring ambitions of songwriter Barlow, whose youthful reminiscences are summed up when he says: “I always dreamt of a copyright.”

Part of the documentary’s appeal is that it captures a long-gone age in popular music, one less studied for the stars and swathed in celebrity mechanisms; Donald was working as a vehicle painter when he went to the first audition in 1990. Alongside early photo shoots that capture the band’s audience pivot from gay clubs to teen girls, their fascination with the singles chart and making it to Top of the Pops speaks to their origins as lads from Britain’s north-west.

Matlock ★★★★ (Stan*)

With Paramount+ taking a mid-season break on the current second season, Stan has picked up the rights to the first season of what is one of the best recent reboots.

Anchored by an authoritative Kathy Bates performance, this legal drama works on two levels – it’s a weekly procedural, as Bates’ Madeline Matlock returns to the law as a retirement-age junior associate at a prestigious New York firm, shadowed by an overall arc following Matlock’s efforts to discover historic malpractice by her new friends and colleagues. The storytelling economy of each episode is quite impressive.

Bones ★★★ (Netflix)

Netflix has enjoyed serious viewing success by licensing The Rookie, the American network procedural starring Nathan Fillion as the LAPD’s first 40-something uniformed academy graduate. Looking to duplicate that binge-friendly formula, they’ve now acquired all 12 seasons of this drama following the weekly cases of forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and FBI agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz). The show debuted in 2005, so it’s more of a time capsule than The Rookie, but if the underlying romantic friction between the lead characters appeals, there are 246 episodes available.

Sheriff Country ★★½ (Paramount+)

Actress Morena Baccarin has long been a positive for any project she’s a part of, whether it’s the early seasons of Homeland or the Deadpool movies. It’s good to see Baccarin get top billing on her own show, a spin-off of the action-drama Fire Country where she plays a sheriff in northern California, but I wish it pushed a little harder at the conventions dictating the storylines and performances. Baccarin’s Mickey Fox has to solve the usual rural scrapes, some involving her shady ex-husband, but the show desperately lacks a sense of place.

Patriot ★★★½ (Amazon Prime Video)

Last week HBO Max dropped a trailer for the March release of DTF St Louis, starring Jason Bateman and David Harbour. The tone was dry black comedy, with trace elements of the wistful and perverse. That’s the signature of the show’s creator, Steven Conrad, and if you’re intrigued I heartily recommend his 2015 take on the espionage thriller, with the terrific Australian actor Michael Dorman playing a CIA agent whose undercover mission becomes a Sisyphean task. One of the best rarely mentioned shows of the previous decade, it’s a flinty, idiosyncratic comedy.

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

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