This counts as one of our favorite underrated shows of the year. Based on true events, The Good Mothers chronicles the efforts by Italian prosecutors to bring down a mob in Calabria, with embattled women—the actor Gaia Girace, playing the daughter of a forbidding mob, and Valentina Bellè as the wife of an imprisoned mobster—central to the effort. “The Good Mothers,” Antrim wrote, “is transporting in its Calabrian locations and has an air of lived-in authenticity that recalls that cult-hit Italian crime saga Gomorrah (though it has little of Gomorrah’s horrific violence). An absorbing and richly complex story of truth and consequences.” After winning an award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the show was snapped up by Disney and can now be seen on Hulu.
Jury Duty is easy to miss—it streams, after all, on Amazon Freevee—but fans of the faux-doc stylings of Christopher Guest and The Office (for which Jury Duty co-creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky both served as writers, directors, and executive producers) would do well to seek it out. The series’s basic premise is that Ronald, a (very tall) solar contractor from San Diego, has been summoned to jury duty—only the whole thing is actually fake, and, unbeknownst to him, the other jurors, and the judge, and the defendants, et cetera, are all actors. (These include Emmy nominee James Marsden, playing a spectacularly annoying version of himself, whom Ronald eventually recognizes from X-Men.) It’s very stupid—for one thing, the “civil trial” involves a man who passed out and urinated in a pile of T-shirts—but sweet Ronald, so perfectly patient with his fellow jurors, including the weird guy obsessed with cybernetics (for whom Ronald screens A Bug’s Life to make him feel more seen; could you weep?) and the one trying to determine if his girlfriend is cheating on him in Mexico (“I wouldn’t trip,” is Ronald’s sage advice), all but steals the show.—Marley Marius