For October, we have compiled a list of the best international series streaming on Showmax, including Hacks, the winner of this year’s Emmy for Best Comedy; the sixth season of All American; and exciting weekly episodes of The Penguin and the season finale of Industry Season 3, which has just been renewed for a fourth season.
HACKS S3 | First On Showmax | Binge from Friday, 11 October
Winner of this year’s Emmy for Best Comedy, Hacks S3 picks up with Deborah Vance riding high off the success of her standup special while Ava pursues new opportunities back in Los Angeles.
As Deborah Vance, Jean Smart has won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy for all three seasons. HBO’s comedy about comedians also takes home Best Writing this year, for the second time, bringing its Emmy count to nine wins overall. As Ava, Hanna Einbeinder has been nominated every season.
S3 is at #8 on Rotten Tomatoes’ Best TV Shows of 2024 (So Far) list, with a 98% critics’ rating. Look out for Emmy-nominated cameos from Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future’s Doc Brown) and Kaitlin Olson (Dee Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), as well as appearances from the likes of Oscar winners Helen Hunt and Whoopi Goldberg.
Hacks has already been renewed for a fourth season, expected in 2025.
THE PENGUIN S1 | Mondays until 11 November
Following the events of The Batman, Oz Cobb, AKA the Penguin, makes a play to seize the reins of Gotham’s crime world.
Directed by Emmy nominee Craig Zobel (Mare of Easttown), The Penguin co-stars an unrecognisable Colin Farrell as The Penguin, with Critics Choice Super Award winner Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs, Made for Love, Fargo) as Sofia Falcone.
Executive produced by The Batman director Matt Reeves, The Penguin is at #2 on IMDb’s most popular TV chart, with an 8.8/10 rating – the highest of the top 8. The HBO show also has a 94% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Guardian giving it five stars and saying, “Colin Farrell deserves all the awards… The Irish actor is a revelation in a series that’s so twisty it leaves you breathless.”
INDUSTRY S3 | First On Showmax | Mondays until 14 October
HBO has renewed Industry for a fourth season, after S3 tracked nearly 40% ahead of S2, with an average of 1.6m viewers per episode – a figure that’s still growing.
An insider’s view of high finance, Industry follows a group of young bankers as they forge their identities within the pressure cooker environment and sex- and drug-fueled blitz of international bank Pierpoint & Co’s London office.
New cast members this season include Emmy nominees Kit Harington (Jon Snow in Game of Thrones) and Sarah Goldberg (Sally Reed in Barry) as the CEO of a green tech energy company and a portfolio manager respectively.
Season 3 has been hailed by TIME as “the must watch show of the summer”; by GQ as “the best show on TV”; by The New York Times as “appointment viewing”; by Vanity Fair as “captivating, sexy, and breathlessly entertaining”; and by TheWrap as “bigger, better, and more ambitious than ever.”
JULIA S2 | Thursdays from 17 October at 21:30
Based on the story of trailblazing TV chef Julia Child, Julia enters its second and final season. Julia returns from France to discover that her success has changed everything, and the kitchen has just gotten a lot bigger.
Sarah Lancashire (Happy Valley) returns in her BAFTA-nominated title role alongside Emmy winner David Hyde Pierce (Frasier’s Dr Niles Crane) as her husband.
Emmy winner Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) joins the cast this season, with Emmy nominee Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) among the guest appearances.
Julia is created by Emmy nominee Daniel Goldfarb (The Marvelous Mrs Maisel), who was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for the show, which also picked up a nomination for Best Television Series: Drama at the Satellite Awards.
The series has an 8.3/10 score on IMDb, and on Rotten Tomatoes, Season 2 has a rare 100% critics’ rating, with the critics’ consensus calling it “a delectable trifle that viewers will savour.”
TRUE DETECTIVE: NIGHT COUNTRY | Binge now
Two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster picked up her first Emmy this year for her performance as Detective Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country.
When the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Danvers and her fellow detective Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.
Four seasons in, True Detective remains one of IMDb’s Top 50 highest-rated series of all time, but Night Country is the most-watched, best-reviewed, and most Emmy-nominated series of the anthology yet. HBO has already ordered a fifth season.
Binge all four seasons on Showmax.
FARGO S5 | Binge now
Lamorne Morris (Winston in New Girl) won Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series at this year’s Emmys, as North Dakota Deputy Witt Farr.
Juno Temple (Ted Lasso) stars as Dot, a Midwestern housewife who finds herself in hot water with the authorities and plunged back into a life she thought she had left behind, with Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as the sheriff who has been searching for her for a long time. Both actors are up for Emmys for their lead roles.
Season 5 has a 93% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus says, “A back-to-basics caper populated by the likes of a mesmerising Juno Temple and a thick slice of Hamm, Fargo’s fifth season is a superb return to peak form.”
Binge all five seasons on Showmax.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT | Binge now
At the International Emmys, BBC One’s The Sixth Commandment is up for Best TV Movie / Mini-Series and Best Actor (Timothy Spall) – both categories the true-crime drama won at the BAFTAs. The four-part mini-series also took home Best Limited Series at this year’s Royal Television Society Awards.
Spall plays Peter Farquhar, an inspirational teacher whose meeting with a charismatic student (Éanna Hardwicke in a BAFTA-nominated and Royal Television Society-winning performance), sets the stage for one of the most complex and confounding criminal cases in recent memory.
Anne Reid was nominated for a Leading Actress BAFTA as Ann Moore-Martin, Farquhar’s deeply religious neighbour, and fellow murder victim.
The Sixth Commandment has a 90% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the Irish Independent calling it, “Not just a great true-crime drama – one of the best of the year in any genre.”
Winners will be announced in New York City on Monday, 25 November 2024.
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ | Wednesdays until 2 October
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the bestselling novel by Heather Morris, inspired by the real-life love story of Jewish Holocaust survivors Lali and Gita Sokolov.
Arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) meets Gita (Anna Próchniak) while tattooing her prisoner number on her arm. Under the constant guard of volatile Nazi SS officers, Lali and Gita fall in love and become determined to keep each other alive.
Sixty years later, the recently widowed Lali (Oscar nominee Harvey Keitel), now in his 80s, meets novice writer Heather Morris (Emmy nominee Melanie Lynskey) and finds the courage to share his story about falling in love in the most horrific of places.
Double Oscar winner Hans Zimmer and Kara Talve were nominated for two Emmys for their score, while Radio Times hailed the moving series as “a masterpiece.”
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW | Mondays until 21 October
An adaptation of Amor Towles’ best-selling novel, A Gentleman In Moscow follows Count Alexander Rostov, played by Emmy winner Ewan McGregor who, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, finds that his gilded past has placed him on the wrong side of history.
Spared immediate execution, he is banished by a Soviet tribunal to an attic room in a grand Moscow hotel and threatened with death if he ever sets foot outside again. As the years pass and some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history unfold outside the hotel’s doors, Rostov’s reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery. As he builds a new life within the walls of the hotel, he discovers the true value of friendship, family and love.
Recently nominated for a Venice TV Award for Best TV Series, A Gentleman In Moscow has a 92% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Empire hailing it as ”heart-warming, old-fashioned storytelling — anchored by Ewan McGregor’s finest performance in years.”
EXTENDED FAMILY | Mondays from 14 October
Following an amicable divorce, Jim and Julia decide to continue to raise their kids at the family home while taking turns to stay with them. Navigating the waters of divorce and child-sharing gets more complicated for Jim when Trey, the owner of the Boston Celtics, enters the picture and wins Julia’s heart.
Emmy winner Jon Cryer (Two and a Half Men), Teen Choice nominee Donald Faison (Scrubs), and Critics Choice nominee Abigail Spencer (Rectify) co-star.
Wall Street Journal calls Extended Family “genuinely funny” and a “subversive split from sitcom tropes.”
Extended Family is created by Emmy-nominated and Teen Choice-winning Glee and Heels actor Mike O’Malley, who created Survivor’s Remorse, and wrote on Heels and Shameless.
BELGRAVIA: THE NEXT CHAPTER | Binge from Monday, 14 October
The Victorian period drama Belgravia: The Next Chapter picks up in 1871, three decades after the events of the 2020 limited series by Julian Fellowes (Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age).
Belgravia: The Next Chapter tells the love story of Frederick Trenchard (Benjamin Wainwright), the third Lord Trenchard, and Clara Dunn (Harriet Slater from Pennyworth), a newcomer to London society.
ALL AMERICAN S6 | Binge from Friday, 18 October
In All American, two worlds collide when a star high school football player from South LA is recruited to play for Beverly Hills High.
Inspired by the life of pro footballer Spencer Paysinger, All American was nominated as Outstanding Drama Series at both the Black Reel and Image Awards. As Spencer, Daniel Ezra earned an Image Award nomination, while Karimah Westbrook was nominated for a Black Reel Award as his mother, Grace. Also, look out for Critics Choice winner Taye Diggs (the Best Man movie).
All American reaches its 100th episode this season (in episode 9, directed by Ezra). The show’s already launched a spinoff, All American: Homecoming, and has been renewed for a seventh season.
Everything on Showmax this October:
Showmax has another bumper lineup this October, including:
• The Big Brother Naija S9 finale
• Showmax Original music doccie Brasse Vannie Kaap, fresh from a standing ovation at Silwerskerm
• Blockbuster Halloween options like Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Five Nights At Freddy’s, The Nun II, SAW X, and The Exorcist: The Believer
• Award-winning Showmax Original sci-fi The Fix, fresh from opening MIPAfrica and selling to the US
• Hit action movie Monkey Man, winner of the 2024 SXSW Audience Award
• Seven more 2024 SAFTA nominees, including Lioness S2
• The BAFTA-nominated The Hitman: Ricky Hatton, winner of a Venice TV Award for Best Documentary and a Broadcast Sports Award for Sports Documentary of the Year
