FEATURES
What to Watch on Streaming: Week of February 22nd, 2019
From food porn to mumblecore to frightening docs about the global economy, we tell you what to watch on streaming this weekend.
February 18, 2019

Welcome back to Love Streams, The Spool’s weekly streaming recommendation column! In the ever-thickening mass of online streaming content, we’re here to pick three to five major recommendations among the major streaming services to help you narrow down your binge-watching choices. Let’s get streaming!

Chef’s Table Season 6 (Netflix)

Chef's Table Season 6 (Netflix)
Chef’s Table Season 6 (Netflix)

We’re in a golden age of food porn, kicked off by docs like Jiro Dreams of Sushi and innovated with Netflix’s long-running series Chef’s Table, elegantly-presented profiles of prominent chefs who’ve overcome struggles from all kinds of backgrounds to find success, solace and identity in food.

For the sixth season of the show, the series will seemingly dive even deeper into the chef’s personal issues and causes celebre – Indian chef Asma Khan’s struggle to elevate female chefs, Italy’s Dario Cecchini fighting factory farming, Sean Brock’s struggle with sobriety, and Mashama Bailey’s work to highlight the specter of Jim Crow racism in her restaurant (converted from a formerly segregated bus station). It’s gripping stuff, and the tears will likely flow as readily as the sumptuously-presented haute cuisine dishes plated in slow motion.

Chef’s Table Season 6 Trailer

Paddleton (Netflix)

Paddleton (Netflix)
Mark Duplass, Ray Romano in Paddleton (Netflix)

No, this isn’t an Asylum knock-off of Paddington, but if you’re into mumblecore this might still be one to catch. From a script by indie darling Mark Duplass and director Alex Lehmann, Paddleton follows Duplass and Ray Romano as misfit neighbors who while away their free time playing a made-up game called Paddleton and form an unexpected bromance. But when Duplass’ character contracts terminal cancer, the two bond in even deeper ways as they go on a road trip to help Duplass cherish the days he has left. The trailer looks slight but charming, and Romano and Duplass have a lovely, subdued chemistry together; this one might be worth a lazy afternoon’s watch.

Paddleton Trailer

The Sisters Brothers (Hulu)

The Sisters Brothers
The Sisters Brothers

We raved about last year’s slept-on Western The Sisters Brothers, and now it’s coming to Hulu this weekend. A darkly comic old-West caper about a pair of aptly-named sibling bounty hunters (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly), Jacques Audiard’s subversive anti-Western is a lovely showcase for its main leads, as well as Riz Ahmed as the Sisters brothers’ latest mark and Jake Gyllenhaal as a scout with tenuous links to the brothers’ client. Now, you can check it out for free and wonder why it was robbed of nominations at the Oscars – surely it could have taken some of Bohemian Rhapsody‘s stolen valor.

The Sisters Brothers Trailer

This Giant Beast That Is The Global Economy (Amazon Prime)

Kal Penn in That Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy (Amazon Prime Video)

What is the global economy? How does it work? And how much can Amazon dumb it down to make us understand it? With their upcoming eight-part docuseries from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, actor, comedian and former Obama associate director of public engagement Kal Penn will take the Big Short/Vice route of making capitalist critique big, noisy and as entertaining as possible. From discussions about money laundering to Penn discussing the dangers of artificial intelligence in a giant mech suit, Giant Beast looks to be a thorough Late-Capitalism-for-Dummies primer on why we’re all fucked unless we get this Green New Deal thing going toot de suite.

The Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy Trailer