THE REMOTE IS our weekly look at upcoming TV highlights.

Across TV and streaming services, we bring you some suggestions for your week’s viewing, based on quality, intrigue, and the simple likelihood that something might end up sparking an interesting discussion. Here’s what you should watch out for this week. 

It has been noted that not for many years has RTÉ produced a drama of this quality, suspense and intrigue. There is unlikely to be anything on any streaming service of TV station this week that will match the thrill of RTÉ executives answering questions by (hopefully) well-prepared TDs and Senators.

Though Oireachtas Committee start times are often subject to change, the Joint Committee on Media, Arts and Culture will commence on Wednesday. 

On the invite list is Dee Forbes, who resigned her post as Director General this morning, as well as Rory Coveney, RTÉ’s director of strategy Geraldine O’Leary, chief financial officer Richard Collins, content director Jim Jennings, and chair of the RTÉ board Siún Ní Raghallaigh. Whether they all turn up will be one of the sources of suspense. 

Thursday will see RTÉ executives answer to the Public Accounts Committee, though the invite list for this session is yet to be finalised. These meetings will be streamable via Oirechtas TV.

But if joint Oireachtas committees aren’t your thing…

The Witcher returns to Netflix for the first instalment of its third season (side-note: what have streaming services done to our understanding of the word ‘season’?). This season will be the final one to feature Henry Cavill as video game hero Geralt of Rivia before he’s replaced by Liam Hemsworth. It lands on Thursday, 29 June.

In an incredibly funny turn of events, the theme of the trailer appears to be ‘neutrality and its consequences’. 

Disney’s latest instalment of the sorely flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe has kicked off and its second episode is out this week. It sees the 74-year-old Samuel L Jackson reprising the Nick Fury role he’s held since 2008, in a gritty fight against shape-shifting aliens. Interest in the MCU is demonstrably at an all-time low, but the show boasts an incredibly prestige cast of Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman, Ben Mendelsohn and Kingsley Ben-Adir.

It’s a dice-roll that Disney desperately need to pay off, and it got off to a slow start. Whether it can regain some momentum in favour of the behemoth franchise remains to be seen.

Over on NOW TV, The Idol continues apace – because you can’t very well stop a show halfway through its run just because everybody is making fun of it on social media.

The performance of Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye as a horny, raunchy, aggressive, weird pop music mogul has come in for particular public humiliation. He has been truly awful, and the show’s fourth episode promises to be just as ‘so bad it’s good’. The third episode is out today.

the funniest part of the idol is that the weeknd’s acting makes him seem that he’s in a completely different show than the rest of the cast pic.twitter.com/QT1EfIWAC5

— alex (@alex_abads) June 19, 2023