Five things for you to watch this weekend

THE IDOL — SHOWMAX

The most talked-about series of the year arrives on Showmax on June 5. Created by Euphoria’s Sam Levinson and pop superstar sensation Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, this story of sexual exploitation is set in the high-pressure world of digital-era pop music fame.

Lily-Rose Depp stars as Jocelyn, an aspiring pop idol who suffers a nervous breakdown. She finds herself in a potentially dangerous relationship with cult leader Tedros (Tesfaye) that will either help her regain the title of “world’s sexiest pop star”, or destroy her. New episodes are added weekly on Mondays.

DE HUMANI CORPORIS FABRICA — MUBI.COM

Documentary auteurs Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s latest film takes viewers inside the “fabric of the human body”, to reveal the initially visually abstract but often hard-to-look-at details of surgery and interior inspection of patients that make up the daily routine in Paris hospitals.

Juxtaposing these inner worlds with the dedication of the doctors and health workers, the film paints a slowly revealing picture of the ways that the physical realities of human flesh connect us all.

THE DAYS — NETFLIX

A multicharacter, multiplotted dramatisation of the events and consequences of the 21st century’s Chernobyl moment when in 2011 the largest earthquake in Japan’s history triggered a tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The drama paints a devastating and hightension picture of the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

MRS DAVIS — SHOWMAX

The odd-pair teaming of The Big

Bang Theory writer Tara Hernandez and Lost, The Leftovers and The Watchmen creator Damon Lindelof results in a madcap, off-the-rails black adventure sci-fi comedy that has plenty to say about the increasingly vexing question of humanity’s relationship to artificial intelligence (AI).

Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, a nun who finds herself unable to avoid an all-powerful global domineering AI nicknamed “Mrs Davis”, who tells her that she has been chosen to find the Holy Grail.

The first two episodes are available on June 5, with new ones added weekly.

THE SHIELD — DISNEY+

For six years from 2002 to 2008 and over seven seasons, creator Shawn Ryan’s dark, LAset police procedural noir rewrote the book for the TV representation of cops. Michael Chiklis’ antihero Vic Mackey and his team of rule-breaking hard-hitting, self-enriching detectives battled on the streets of a city with a volatile history of violent, tense relations between police and citizenry using as a guide their own morally dubious but effective code.

Constantly navigating the thin blue line that separated them from the criminals they pursued, the show served as a dark, cynical but hard-hitting reminder of the realities of policing in a world where that line had become increasingly blurred since the Rodney King riots in 1992.