Five of the best things to watch on Netflix this weekend

Staying in this weekend and stuck for something to watch? Jennifer McShane recommends the series and films to get stuck into.  

FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened  

This one is an exclusive behind the scenes look at the infamous unravelling of the Fyre music festival. Remember the drama? Created by Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, Fyre was promoted as a luxury music festival on a private island in the Bahamas featuring bikini-clad supermodels, A-List musical performances and posh amenities. Guests arrived to discover the reality was far from the what was promised. Prepare for a first-hand look into the disastrous crash of Fyre as told by the organisers themselves. You couldn’t make this stuff up. A must watch.

Sex Education

This one is pure brilliance. We meet Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) – an inexperienced, socially awkward high school student who lives with his mother (the utterly superb Gillian Anderson), a sex therapist. Surrounded by manuals, videos and tediously open conversations about sex, Otis is a reluctant expert on the subject. When his home life is revealed at school, Otis realises that he can use his specialist knowledge to gain status. He teams up with Maeve, a whip-smart bad-girl, and together they set up an underground sex therapy clinic to deal with their fellow students’ weird and wonderful problems. This artfully combines traditional teen comedy tropes with warmth and a lot of raunch but it’s the right balance; here we have a genuine portrait of how young people deal with sex and consent today. The best Netflix series I’ve seen in a long time.

Grace and Frankie

In the return of this Emmy winning comedy, two friends Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) launch a scheme to get their old lives back. Things have changed and not for the better, so the ever brilliant duo have to think fast. Season five has lost none of its charm and Fonda and Tomlin steal every scene.

Loving

Richard and Mildred Loving were an interracial couple whose marriage was declared illegal in Virginia, where interracial coupling was considered a felony at the time. The couple took a case to the US Supreme Court after years of struggling to get their marriage recognised. They won the case in 1967 and the judgment of Loving vs. Virginia became one of the most iconic decisions of the court. At the time, interracial marriage was known as miscegenation, and many states had laws against it. The Loving case effectively made it impossible for states to pass and uphold such laws, as the court found them to be unconstitutional. It’s a beautiful, beautiful movie for which Irish actress Ruth Negga was nominated for an Academy Award.

Mary Shelly  

Mary Wollstonecraft (played by an alluring Elle Fanning)’s family disapproves when she and poet Percy Shelley announce their love for each other. The family is horrified when it finds that the couple has eloped, accompanied by Mary’s half-sister, Claire. While staying in the home of Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, the guests are challenged to write a ghost story, which leads Mary to conceive her novel “Frankenstein.” This gothic historical drama will leave you yearning to know more about the brilliant creative behind the infamous novel, but Fanning is wonderful in conveying her life in the chapters that are revealed.