3 great shows to watch on Netflix this weekend (January 16-18)

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3 great shows to watch on Netflix this weekend (January 16-18)

Forget your “one episode, then bed,” declaration—you’re not fooling anyone. Netflix has had a good run lately with all kinds of bingable shows that you keep just clicking “Next Episode” on.

This January 16 to 18 weekend’s spread of shows is no different, so just give in now, already. First up is a chilling limited series still basking in three Golden Globe noms, second is a gorgeously animated samurai revenge story, and the third is a trippy multiverse sci-fi series that still holds up after a decade.

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The Beast in Me

When you bring together two of the folks responsible for Homeland and The X-Files, you know they’re going to get up to something good. The critical raves and the slew of award noms this psychological thriller series has garnered all tell the same story—The Beast in Me is worth your weekend. Need another indicator? The eight-episode limited series stars two actors who are not strangers to chilling, suspenseful mysteries—Homeland‘s Claire Danes and The Americans’ Matthew Rhys.

No one does intensely high-strung like Danes, who plays acclaimed author Aggie Wiggs, who is still mourning the tragic death of her young son, and is suffering from a serious bout of writer’s block. When new neighbors Nile Jarvis (Rhys) and his new wife Nina (Brittany Snow) move into Aggie’s sleepy Oyster Bay, New York, town, things get interesting. Turns out Nile’s first wife disappeared in a cloud of suspicion, all pointing at Nile, so Aggie decides he might just be the perfect subject for a book that will snap her out of her funk. And surprisingly, Nile, a billionaire real estate mogul, agrees, and the pair agree that perhaps the book might rehab his image.

What’s triggered is a web of paranoia and suspicion as Aggie investigates, sparking a psychological chess match. Danes and Rhys are brilliant together—Danes as a volatile woman who could snap at any time under the weight of her trauma, and Rhys, who can go from charming to terrifying in an instant. The Beast in Me is a thrilling watch, and its 83% Rotten Tomatoes score is well-earned (and should be higher, in my opinion).

2

Blue Eye Samurai

I’ve watched this stunning Netflix adult animation action series a couple of times now, and it keeps getting better. I often prefer animated series and movies over live-action because they can build endlessly creative worlds and visuals and, especially for fight-based shows like this, feature head-shaking acrobatics and creativity.

The Emmy-winning Blue Eye Samurai is a gorgeously vicious revenge saga set in 17th-century Edo-period Japan that follows Mizu (Maya Erskine, PEN15), a mixed-race, blue-eyed outcast who has trained her whole life to become a lethal swordfighter. Disguised as a man—and often hiding those “baby blues” behind tinted spectacles—Mizu begins hunting the four foreign men who could have fathered her, a quest that’s equal parts catharsis and self-destruction.

Blue Eye Samurai is brutal and bloody in a way that matches Hulu’s Shogun, and then some, but it’s also surprisingly soulful. The show pairs elegant samurai-sword action with rich character work, from Mizu’s stubborn would-be sidekick Ringo (Masi Oka) to proud rival Taigen (Darren Barnet) to the sinister Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh).

Critics have loved the series, and it currently sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Thankfully, a second season has been confirmed for sometime this year.

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The OA

Brit Marling has carved out a unique and intriguing niche for herself as a creator of several cool, interesting, and slightly unclassifiable sci-fi/thriller movies and shows. With her longtime collaborator, Zal Batmanglij, Marling has written and starred in such brainy and metaphysical projects as Another Earth, 2023’s A Murder at the End of the World, and the one that drew me into her work first, the dreamy and delightfully bizarre 2016 series The OA that I recently rewatched.

With two highly-bingable eight-episode seasons, The OA is more than your basic sci-fi thriller. It follows the story of Prairie Johnson (Marling), who suddenly reappears in her small Michigan town after being missing for seven years. Oh, she was also blind but can now miraculously see, and she’s now calling herself the OA (I won’t tell you what that stands for). To help OA (and the audience) unfold what happened to her, she assembles a group of five people. She begins telling them the story, in flashback, of other dimensions and alternate lives she’s lived, and her time held captive by Dr. Hap Percy (Jason Isaacs), who experiments on her and others with near-death experiences (NDEs) that are the key to opening interdimensional doors. Yeah, it’s heavy, but it’s so good.

The OA is a trip that’s part Stranger Things and part Dark, with a bit of Twin Peaks thrown in for good measure. And it’s a good thing that all episodes are already there, because I far preferred being able to go through a few at a time. However, the series was canceled after season two, and while it offers closure on many of the major characters and plots, a few questions were left unanswered. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, maybe give this one a miss. The OA was well received by critics and currently has an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Whether you’re in the mood for something epic, something tense, or something that will melt your brain, I hope this hat-trick of Netflix shows will offer up something you can sink into this weekend (or into the week).