Your guide to streaming, including a new Blade Runner series and season two of Keira Knightley’s Black Doves

Black Doves: Ambika Mod and Keira Knightley. Photograph: Matthew Towers/Netflix

Black Doves: Ambika Mod and Keira Knightley. Photograph: Matthew Towers/Netflix

Kevin Courtney's picture

Sun Nov 01 2026 - 05:11 • 6 MIN READ

The Greatest

From Wednesday, November 4th, Prime Video

No need to ask who is the subject of this eight-part biographical drama. Only one man retains the title the Greatest, and it’s not Hulk Hogan. Jaalen Best stars as the idealistic young boxer Cassius Clay as he makes his name in the sporting world, and metamorphoses into Muhammad Ali, the undisputed Goat. The series is also a chronicle of a changing United States, as the civil rights movement takes root and Ali (who died in 2016, at the age of 74) fights moral and political battles outside the ring, including the notorious court case about his refusal to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Starring alongside Best are Omari Hardwick as Ali’s father, Cassius Clay snr, Dana Gourrier as his mother, Odessa Clay, Amin Joseph as Sonny Liston and Giovanni Ribisi as Angelo Dundee, the boxing trainer who was Ali’s cornerman through most of his career.

Stick

From Wednesday, November 4th, Apple TV

Pryce Cahill, aka Stick, once had the golfing world at his feet, but a very public meltdown put the kibosh on his professional career and his marriage. In the first series of this sports comedy starring Owen Wilson, Cahill found his way out of the rough by taking on a young prodigy named Santi, helping his young charge become the golfer Stick never managed to be. This time he’s taking a new golfer under his wing: himself, with the daunting task of becoming the oldest golfer to win the US Open and so finally fulfilling the potential he threw away all those years ago. Timothy Olyphant returns as his former rival Clark Ross, who encourages him to make his unlikely comeback, with Marc Maron back in action as Cahill’s loyal caddie, Mitts, and Rhea Seehorn as Cahill’s dynamic new golf coach, Amanda.

Black Doves

From Thursday, November 5th, Netflix

Keira Knightley electrified the first series of this spy caper with wit and energy, helped by her co-stars Ben Whishaw, Sarah Lancashire and Andrew Buchan. The second season featuring the quartet involves more danger, more intrigue and more targets getting bumped off at long range. Knightley is Helen Webb, a stay-at-home mum married to an ambitious politician, Wallace Webb. But behind the mumsy facade is a deadly assassin working for a secret organisation known as the Black Doves. As the new series opens, he’s preparing to become prime minister, while Helen continues to pass sensitive government information on to her organisation. When Helen’s handler, Mrs Reed, mysteriously disappears, Helen is left alone in the field and has to reconnect with her best friend (Whishaw), one of the Black Doves’ top triggermen. Can she keep him out of Soho dives long enough to survive this new threat?

The Assassin

From Friday, November 6th, Prime Video

It’s a busy week for women with guns: alongside the return of Keira Knightley in Black Doves, Keeley Hawes is back in business in the second series of The Assassin, the crime thriller in which she plays Julie Green, the titular hit woman, who just can’t seem to get out of the assassination business. Freddie Highmore is her estranged son Edward, a journalist whose search for the truth about his parents’ past could get him killed. In the first series mum and son reluctantly teamed up to avoid getting whacked; in season two they’re thrown together once more by a new threat. Edward has married his fiancee, Kayla, and of course Julie wasn’t invited. But when Kayla is kidnapped during the couple’s honeymoon, Edward is forced to recruit Mum to help him get his beloved back in one piece. Can Julie and Edward mend fences while toppling the entire Spanish underworld?

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

From Wednesday, November 11th, Prime Video

Prime Video’s tent-pole production, based on the epic writings of JRR Tolkien, has proven to be a bloated, unwieldy exercise buckling under its own weightiness. But try telling that to hard-core Lord of The Rings fans who’ll be eagerly tuning into this third series of the most expensive TV show of all time. Just to get your bearings: we’re in the Second Age of Middle-earth, five years after the fall of Eregion, and Middle-earth’s free peoples are desperately trying to defend themselves from the Dark Lord’s marauding armies. Sauron’s mission to rule them all is going according to plan, but he needs one special weapon that will guarantee him total dominance. While he’s working away in his tower in Mordor, forging the One Ring, the dwarves are digging themselves deeper into their fortress beneath the Misty Mountains and the elves are putting strong magic around their realms of Rivendell and Lindon. Sauron wants to “restore order to this broken world”. Can the producers restore some coherence to this convoluted series?

The Body

From Wednesday, November 11th, Netflix

You’ve gagged over the recent reboot of Stephen King’s Carrie; are you ready for another camp high-school horror series, this one with a dollop of Catholic guilt and early-noughties raunch? The Lions are an ambitious dance troupe who will go to any lengths to win big competitions, even summoning up the Devil to help them. To that end they take a new recruit, Grace (Sofia Wylie), and perform a macabre, drug-fuelled ritual. It’s not long before all hell breaks loose and the Lions are desperately trying to cover their tracks while dealing with some terrifying goings-on at their buttoned-up Catholic high school.

12 12 12

From Friday, November 13th, Apple TV

What does it take to pull off Europe’s biggest bank robbery? This high-octane crime thriller starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan has done the maths. According to Mackie’s FBI agent, Jack Strickland, a high-value heist should take 12 months to plan, then 12 hours to carry out. If the thief hasn’t been caught within 12 days of the robbery, then the chance of catching him goes down to zero. So after an elaborate, carefully planned break-in at a big bank in Zurich, Strickland finds himself pursuing Donan’s criminal mastermind, Paul Galvin, across Europe. The story, which is peppered with shootings, explosions, car chases and people jumping out of high-rise buildings, is told through the three different timelines, so you might want to keep a clock and calendar to hand.

The Altruists

From Thursday, November 19th, Netflix

When Sam Bankman-Fried met Caroline Ellison it was a match made in geek heaven – then ended in a jail cell, as the techie power couple were convicted for what US district court judge Lewis A Kaplan said could be the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country”. The pair, who set up the cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, believed they could change the world for the better through “effective altruism”, in their case by donating some of the huge sums of money they were raking in to help solve the world’s biggest problems. But their whole edifice was built on sand – plus a few little fibs that soon became big lies – and when it finally collapsed they found themselves down an $8 billion rabbit hole. Anthony Boyle and Julia Garner play the real-life crypto pioneers who became notorious as a modern Bonnie and Clyde.

Blade Runner 2099

From Wednesday, November 25th, Prime Video

Ridley Scott is in the executive producer’s chair for this new series, a follow-up to his 1982 movie and its 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049. In the original film, Harrison Ford played the titular blade runner, pounding the futuristic streets of LA on the hunt for replicants posing as humans, with only his instincts and the Voight-Kampff test to help him. In this new series, replicants have become the kingpins of the city, and humans have to bow to their new bioengineered masters. Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a fugitive human who is passing herself off as a replicant. She teams up with replicant blade runner Olwen (Michelle Yeoh), who is very close to the end of her preprogrammed lifespan. Together they set off on the trail of a rogue replicant who hides a deadly secret that could bring down the entire city.

The Hunting Wives

From Thursday, November 26th, Netflix

If you thought Texas was an ultraconservative state, you might have another thing coming. Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow return as Margo and Sophie in the second series of the sexy crime drama. In series one, Sophie moved from Boston and fell in with manipulative Margo and her coven of wily women. Soon Sophie was in a situationship with Margo and caught up in a murder mystery. There’s more debauchery and death in store in season two as the heat cranks up and the hunting wives become the hunted wives. Sophie and Margo have fallen out, but it’s not long before they’re sharing a bubble bath and plotting more wicked games.


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Source: The Irish Times · Kevin Courtney

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