In celebration of all things TV and film the Golden Globe nominees, as voted for by The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, were announced this week.
Here are six nominees you can binge now on Showmax if you have not watched them already.
The Undoing
Nominations: Best Limited Series or TV Movie, Best Actress (Nicole Kidman), Best Actor (Hugh Grant), and Best Supporting Actor (Donald Sutherland)
The Undoing stars Oscar winner Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies, Moulin Rouge) as therapist Grace Fraser, whose idyllic existence is shattered by a violent death and a very public scandal. With her husband Jonathan (Golden Globe winner Hugh Grant from A Very English Scandal) missing, Grace must face a chain of terrible revelations and try to build a new life for herself and her son (Critics’ Choice nominee Noah Jupe from Ford v Ferrari, and A Quiet Place).
In their five-star review, BBC hails the series as “a supremely gripping marriage thriller… a twisty delight.”
Based on the book You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Undoing is created by multiple-Emmy winner David E Kelley, the man behind Big Little Lies, Picket Fences and all your favourite legal dramas, from L.A. Law to Ally McBeal, The Practice to Boston Legal. Emmy winner Susanne Bier (The Night Manager, In A Better World) directs, with Academy Award Honorary winner and Golden Globe winner Donald Sutherland (Trust, The Hunger Games), Golden Globe nominee Edgar Ramírez (American Crime Story, The Girl on the Train) and Eswatini-born Noma Dumezweni (Black Earth Rising, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind) co-starring.
The Undoing’s four Golden Globe nominations build on its three Critics’ Choice nominations last month, for Best Limited Series, Best Actor (Grant), and Best Supporting Actor (Sutherland).
Lovecraft Country S1
Nominations: Best Drama Series
In the 1950s, Atticus, a young African-American, sets out on a road trip with his friend and uncle to find his missing father. This catapults the three into a struggle for survival against the dual terrors of Jim Crow-era America and terrifying monsters that could be ripped from a paperback written by pulpy horror author HP Lovecraft.
Lovecraft Country has an 88% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As Newsday put it, “To call Lovecraft Country ‘wildly original’ seems almost a quaint understatement. But it is wild. And original. Little doubt about that.”
The fantastic cast includes Black Reel nominee Jonathan Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods), Teen Choice nominee Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Birds of Prey, Friday Night Lights), four-time Emmy nominee Michael Kenneth Williams (When They See Us, The Night Of), Golden Globe nominee Courtney B Vance (The People Vs OJ Simpson, Law & Order), Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Neon Demon), and Nigerian BAFTA winner Wunmi Mosaku (Luther, The End of the F*ing World).
Lovecraft Country’s Best Drama nomination builds on its five Critics’ Choice nominations last month, for Best Drama, Best Actor (Majors), Best Actress (Smollett), Best Supporting Actor (Williams), and Best Supporting Actress (Mosaku). Lovecraft Country also won Best Horror series and Best Actress (Jurnee Smollett) at the 2021 Critics’ Choice Super Awards, given to genre content, where it was nominated for Best Actor (Majors and Williams), Best Actress (Mosaku) and Best Villain (Lee).
The Comey Rule
Nominations: Best Actor: Limited Series or TV Movie (Jeff Daniels) & Best Supporting Actor (Brendan Gleeson)
Emmy winners Jeff Daniels ((The Newsroom) and Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges) star as former FBI director James Comey and former president Donald J. Trump in this four-part series about two powerful men, whose strikingly different ethics and loyalties put them on a collision course. Also look out for Oscar winner Holly Hunter (Succession) as acting attorney general Sally Yates.
AV Club says it’s “damned compelling… with a real-life tale that still beggars belief and a fantastic group of actors to tell it.”
Based on Comey’s autobiography A Higher Loyalty, The Comey Rule is written and directed by Billy Ray, who was nominated for an Oscar for his script for Captain Phillips and also wrote the box office phenomenon The Hunger Games.
I know this much is true
Nominations: Best Actor: Limited Series or TV Movie (Mark Ruffalo)
Three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight, Avengers) won his first acting Emmy: Best Actor in a Limited Series for his dual role in HBO’s I Know This Much is True, beating off the likes of Hugh Jackman in Bad Education and Jeremy Irons in Watchmen. Last month, Ruffalo was also nominated for Best Actor at the 2021 Critics’ Choice Awards.
Based on the Wally Lamb bestseller about how you don’t just give up on the people you love, I Know this Much is True follows the parallel lives of identical twin brothers Dominick Birdsey and his brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic – both played by Mark, who lost 20 pounds to play Dominic, then gained that back and put another 20 pounds on to play Thomas.
As The Times UK wrote, “I know this much about I Know This Much Is True: it won’t cheer you up. However, its unrelenting misery did not stop it being almost exhilarating to watch, mainly due to beautiful, near-perfect performances by Mark Ruffalo.”
I Know This Much Is True, which has an 8.2/10 rating on IMDb, also stars Oscar winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Emmy winner Rosie O’Donnell (SMILF), Emmy nominees Kathryn Hahn (Mrs Fletcher, Transparent) and Rob Huebel (Transparent), Golden Globe nominee Archie Panjabi (Run, The Good Wife), and Oscar nominee Juliette Lewis (Natural Born Killers).
Black Monday S2
Nominations: Best Actor: Musical or Comedy Series (Don Cheadle)
Set in 1987, Black Monday is a comedy about a motley crew of ambitious underdogs who cause the worst stock market crash in Wall Street history.
Wall Street Journal calls Black Monday “very funny, very clever about incorporating 1980s cultural references, and very vulgar.”
Cheadle’s nomination for his performance as the high-rolling Mo builds on 2019 and 2020 Emmy nominations and two Black Reel Awards. Regina Hall (Girls Trip, The Hate You Give) was also nominated for two Black Reel Awards, while Andrew Rannells was nominated as Best Supporting Actor: Comedy by The Critics’ Choice Awards last month.
Emmy nominees Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (The Boys) executive produce (alongside Cheadle) and also directed the pilot. The comedy has been renewed for a third season.
Ramy S2
Nominations: Best Actor: Musical or Comedy Series (Ramy Youssef)
Ramy Hassan (stand up comedian Ramy Youssef) is a first generation Egyptian-American millennial in suburban New Jersey grappling with how to be a good Muslim in the Tinder era.
His Golden Globe nomination builds on his win at the awards last year, as well as a 2021 Critics Choice nomination and a 2020 Emmy nod. Ramy was also nominated for the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Comedy last month, and for a Best Director Emmy last year.
Two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, True Detective) also earned a 2020 Emmy nomination last year as Sheikh Malik. Hiam Abbass (Succession, Blade Runner 2049) co-stars as his mother.
Recently renewed for a third season, Ramy won the Audience Award at SXSW 2019 and a Peabody Award in 2020, where the jurors praised the series as a “touching, thoughtful, and very funny sitcom… The ground-breaking series is masterful in its weaponization of the tension between faith and secularism, East and West, and men and women.”
As Rolling Stone put it, “There is no other show quite like Ramy, because there is no other character quite like Ramy… Superb.”
Snubs
Spare a thought for all the amazing shows snubbed by The Golden Globes, with Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You perhaps “the most puzzling omission,” to quote The New York Times. Other notable snubs that have people talking include Bad Education, Fargo, Insecure, P-Valley, and What We Do In The Shadows.
The awards will be hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler when they take place on Sunday, 28 February 2021.
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