Netflix's Squid Game, Foxtel's Succession and David Lynch's Dune our top streaming shows

While we may have some outdoor liberties reinstated, we are still weak and vulnerable and it would be ill-advised to eschew TV for exercise and socialisation just yet. There's plenty more streaming potential on that dank, fusty COVID-bum-dented lounge.

So, get back inside, real life can wait.

It's times like these, when I do feel the urge to turn my back on TV, I remember all it's taught me. For example, I remember formative experiences like watching 1980's Brubaker (Morgan Freeman's other jail flick). It helped form an opinion there's no such thing as a bad prison movie.

A fairly watertight cinematic maxim, too, until you factor in the unholy existence of Big Stan (Netflix, not Stan, strangely enough).

There must always be an exception to the rule, which is exactly what God said when he created Rob Schneider.

Jail boils humanity and storytelling down the fundamentals: it's tribal, it's survival.

As Netflix prepares to reportedly reap up to $900 million in revenue from its South Korean juggernaut, Squid Game, it's worth considering the series is, at its heart, a prison tale; sort of a candy-coloured Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, just more violent.

The pop culture phenomenon (Netflix's most popular show across 90 countries) has driven experts to parse everything about the series; from its none-too-subtle messages about capitalism, to its fashions (just in time for Halloween), to its M.C. Escher architecture, to its food, but, for me, it's been watching what happens when humans are incarcerated where the true story lies.

The masks are good, too.

Unlike the jail genre, sci-fi is a vast galaxy of stinkers, space junk everywhere.

We can go back to something like 1959's Plan 9 from Outer Space (Amazon Prime) to find awful science fiction, but the camp classic (see Ed Wood, Disney+) has been refiled in the "so bad, it's good" category, so it no longer really counts.

By today's MCU (Disney+) standards, Georges Melies' seminal Le Voyage Dans La Lun (A Trip to the Moon) is a bit crap, too, even if the 1902 black-and-white short is groundbreaking and stunning and beautiful.

Still, no Thanos.

The lowest base for the past couple of decades has been Battlefield Earth (Stan, again, geez Stan), John Travolta's ill-advised passion project to bring one of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's books to the big screen.

It's true, it's terrible and generated (justified) scorn towards white people with dreadlocks.

Before Battlefield Earth (and Jar Jar Binks - didn't he have dreadlocks?), one of Hollywood's biggest sci-fi disasters was 1984's Dune (Stan), the unwieldy epic based on Frank Herbert's revered 1965 novel centring on a (white) planetary messiah with spooky powers and a rodeo rider's aptitude for wrangling giant, desert-dwelling worms.

Famously, director David Lynch disowned the movie after he was forced to butcher his project at the behest of producers Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis. My own DVD copy credits the director as "Alan Smithee", the pseudonym cooked up by the Directors Guild of America (not to be confused with the Spice-addled Guild Navigators of Dune) when one of their number had been coerced into creating an abomination unrecognisable from their original vision.

Many of us still love Lynch's Dune. In so many ways it represents brave, extraordinary filmmaking with lots of pop culture quirks (Sting is in it, Toto did the soundtrack, Brian Eno dips in, too) but, ultimately, it stands as a half-baked lesson in missed opportunities.

Even less-baked than Lynch's commendable effort is the conceptual version of Dune hatched by Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. Despite the fact his movie was never actually made, people still like it better than the Alan Smithee cut. (see Jodorowsky's Dune, Apple TV+).

With all this in mind, October 21 marks VD Day (Villeneuve's Dune: Part One), a day when all the wrongs of bringing Herbert's saga to the screen will, allegedly, be righted at the hands of Denis Villeneuve, the director who pulled off the science fiction impossible by making a sequel to Ridley Scott's unimpeachable Blade Runner (Netflix) that came frighteningly close to eclipsing the original.

Sadly, unless you possess a VPN and the IT abilities of the Kwisatz Haderach, you won't be watching the new Dune (the "part one" bit should sound alarm bells, too) in Australia this week because it's on HBO Max. We can't even see it in cinemas until December.

So, while you reacquaint yourself with the old Dune, from Friday, you can also catch Apple TV's slick-looking new sci-fi series Invasion.

Hot on the heels of the same streaming platform's spectacular Foundation (based on the Isaac Asimov novels), Invasion is the story of an alien incursion on Earth seen "through the eyes of five ordinary people across the globe as they struggle to make sense of the chaos unfolding around them".

Star Sam Neill says Invasion is "much more than simple sci-fi". Sam's always right, but there's nothing wrong with simple sci-fi. You couldn't get any simpler than a race of lizard people invading Earth to fill their spaceship freezers with human meat. That was the premise of V, which, like Lynch's Dune, also screened way back in 1984, and it was choice.

Also screening way back in 1984 was Dynasty and Dallas, Falcon Crest and The Dukes of Hazzard; classic TV series about the machinations of formidable families forever on the precipice of scandal or self-implosion (OK, maybe not so much them good ol' Duke boys, but Boss Hogg did make life very difficult for them).

The new-millennium successor to this style of upstairs-downstairs voyeurism, albeit far, far slicker, Succession has kicked of its latest season (Foxtel, BINGE).

The story begins where we left things a couple of years ago, the head of Waystar Royco, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), under siege from his ambitious son, Kendall (Jeremy Strong).

The snappy scripts, the edgy, staccato performances, the gun-metal cinematography; it's all soap opera on (undetectable) performance-enhancing, hormone-mimicking stimulants and even shares its DNA with the space opera of Dune, which, at the end of the day, is all about the mega-rich, the rise and fall of great houses, the swathe power cuts through the lives of the ordinary and the burden of legacy.

So, imagine just how good Succession will be if Logan Roy goes to jail?

Or space.

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