The Audacity to Nobody Wants This: the seven best shows to stream this week

The changing mood music around tech bros makes creating fiction about them tricky. Jonathan Glatzer’s comedy oscillates between humour and horror: it centres on Billy Magnussen’s CEO Duncan Park who, in trademark Palo Alto style, is poisonous, clueless yet somehow unfeasibly rich. He inhabits a world of therapy, fraudulent stock pumping, fiendishly evil development apps and executives who won’t give their offspring smartphones (“arms dealers don’t give their kids landmines”). Glatzer wrote for Succession and The Audacity attempts a similar tone: it doesn’t quite hit those heights but in terms of atrocious people wallowing in their own moral filth, it’s comparably spicy and vicious. Phil Harrison
HBO Max, from Thursday 22 October

Gnomes

You wouldn’t want a show about killer gnomes to take itself seriously. Thankfully, this oddball Aussie six-parter really doesn’t. The crisis stems from a festival (“Gnome-a-palozza”), held in the small town of Nompton, with a view to attract tourists. But the event awakens an evil gnome queen who rallies her ceramic minions to her defence, with surprisingly bloody results. The local police force (which includes Sex Education alumnus Asa Butterfield) rivals the Hot Fuzz coppers for incompetence and things get gloriously out of hand. Weirdly irresistible. PH
Disney+, out now

Minecraft to Murder: The Killing of Breck Bednar

A precisely assembled and deeply sad case study in online grooming: this two-part documentary explores the 2014 murder of Breck Bednar, a smart but impressionable teen who 18-year-old Lewis Daynes targeted through a gaming group. Testimony from Breck’s family and friends lays out the process by which Daynes gained Breck’s trust, and lured him to his flat in Essex. The central story (an older kid influencing a younger one) feels oddly universal and therefore even more graphic as a cautionary tale. PH
Prime Video, from Tuesday 20 October

Nobody Wants This

How long can a will-they, won’t-they romcom sustain itself? While it remains effortlessly watchable thanks to the slick dialogue and chemistry between Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Noah (Adam Brody), the clock is ticking for this culture-clash confection. They are now living together but grievances are piling up. Noah is disrupting Joanne’s routines, and suspects that his lack of career progress can be explained by his non-Jewish partner. While these issues come to a head, the heavy lifting is done by the minor characters: Sasha is back in the dating game and Morgan provides eye-rolling light relief. HR
Netflix, from Thursday 22 October

Last One Laughing: Halloween

It’s the first UK LOL not to feature Bob Mortimer, making it the first real test of the formula. This four-episode Halloween special (contestants are also punished for screaming) does have the benefit of featuring second comings for Daisy May Cooper and Lou Sanders. And after a slow start, proof of concept is achieved – Jack Dee, Reece Shearsmith, Phil Wang, Harriet Dyer and Tom Allen complete the line-up, deadpanning it out in the face of unsettling experiments, visitations from old friends and an eccentric gothic poetry recital. PH
Prime Video, from Friday 23 October

Lupin

It’s been a long wait (the prison sentence he began in season three has played out in real time) but Assane Diop is back. He’s hoping for a quiet life in Senegal but even for this cheerfully credulity-stretching show, what unfolds scales new heights of absurdity. There’s a copycat on the loose, pulling off museum heists and calling himself Lupin. Assane can only save himself by catching this brilliant imposter. It’s utterly ridiculous (stunts include a plunge from the Eiffel Tower) but it commits completely to its own concept and Omar Sy remains a captivating lead. PH
Netflix, from Friday 23 October

The Narco Hack

A remarkable, emblematic story of modern crime and modern law enforcement in this three-part documentary examining the efforts of police forces in Belgium, France and the Netherlands to break into the encrypted Sky ECC app. By 2021, they’d gained access – which meant officers could look over the shoulders of organised crime gangs as they traded drugs and weapons and commissioned murders. The series gathers momentum like a thriller as the ingenuity of the police hackers is matched by the brutally high stakes on the ground. Gripping and terrifying. PH
HBO Max, from Friday 23 October