Must Watch reviews: ‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’, ‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Small Prophets’

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week, Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan join Naga Munchetty to review ‘How to Get to Heaven from Belfast’, ‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Small Prophets.

’What do the Must Watch reviewers make of them?

Both Scott and Hayley thought Small Prophets was a must watch.

Small Prophets is a comedy series that follows the life of lonely man, Michael Sleep, as he uncovers mysterious supernatural creatures in his shed.

Hayley says, “I really like this. It’s small and human, funny, gentle, weird, but it has a kind of deep, horrifying sadness at the middle of it, which is that this guy’s girlfriend disappeared seven years ago and was never found - they found her car on the bridge, but she was gone."

“It’s funny, but it’s also about loneliness. It’s about extraordinary things happening in ordinary places to ordinary people.”

Hayley argues that “it’s one of those where if you read the plot, you’ll probably roll your eyes and think it’s some kind of magical realism whimsy, which it kind of is, but I think this kind of stuff has to be written by someone who is capable of darkness, otherwise it just floats around like fluff.”

She adds, “Mackenzie Crook is good at darkness, because he’s a weirdo and I say that in a complimentary way. If it looks like he’s doing something that’s all quite lovely and nice and gentle, it’s all on this bed of melancholy. And I think what he does gets called ‘gentle’ just because it’s not cynical or cruel.”

Scott says, “I love this, I thought it was fantastic.”

He says, “you can always tell when you’re watching a Mackenzie Crook programme because there’s not just the humour, but it’s got a pacing that requires your patience to get into.”

He adds that he has “always found it fascinating” because “there is a confidence in his work,” as well as “so many layers.”
He says Crook is “fantastic at building not only a really original plot, you won’t see anything like this on TV this year, but also having humour that gets funnier every time it gets mentioned.”

Scott points to “a recurring moment where Crook’s character simply asks if someone is going for a break,” adding that, “it becomes a running joke” that “each time it happens, you just laugh more, because somehow the mention or harking back to an earlier moment is funnier with every time that it happens.”

Scott says the series has “so many sight gags,” highlighting “a scene” where “somebody goes, ‘do you have any buckets?’ And all you see is just them surrounded by buckets.”

He also says “it doesn’t have its own philosophy very clearly. It’s there for you to make your own conclusion. It doesn’t over‑egg itself. It allows you to have interpretation.”

Scott thinks the series is about “being hopeful, even if times get really hard.”

He ends by saying “there is such humanity to all of the people who are written in this and who appear in this that even if they might not be likeable to start off with, even the neighbour, you end up seeing it from their perspective over time.”

All episodes of Small Prophets are available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

How to get to heaven from Belfast is a crime comedy series created by Lisa McGee, who is also known for writing and creating Derry Girls.

The series follows three friends who reunite after the death of their old classmate, which sets them on a quest to find out what happened.

Hayley said How to Get to Heaven from Belfast was a must watch.

Scott was unable to review the series due to his cameo appearance in the second episode(!)

Hayley called this series “a must‑watch” and said she “thought this was fun.”

She described it as having “a 90s teen slasher thing, like an I Know What You Did Last Summer vibe,” but with “38‑year‑old women being dragged out of their adult lives to deal with something that happened 20 years ago, because one of them is now dead.”

When discussing writer‑creator Lisa McGee, Hayley said, “what I love about Lisa McGee’s writing is the dialogue.”

And praised how “brutal it can be in that really casual Irish way where someone can say something completely devastating, but it’s also hilarious, so they get away with it.”

She also talked about the relationship between the characters: “I could watch hours of these women just talking to each other and not care about the plot, which is kind of good, because it moves incredibly fast and gets sillier as it goes, but not in a bad way.”

Hayley says, “the plot isn’t as important as these women interacting with each other.”

And ends by saying, “I’ll definitely be watching the rest.”

“It’s fun but with the right amount of emotional undercurrent to make it meaningful.”

All episodes of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, are available to stream on Netflix now.

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model is a three-part series on Netflix about the renowned reality show that started in the early 2000s.

The documentary takes a look at how the show began and goes behind the scenes.

Both Scott and Hayley thought Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model was a must watch.

Hayley thought this “is a must‑watch.”

She says, “I watched Top Model when it came out.”

“I loved it, and I loved it because it was awful.”

“And I always kind of wondered what happened to the girls after the show ended because this was before social media, when most reality TV stars would just disappear.”

She explains that “the whole idea of this show was that the girls would go on to become a top model, so it always felt like their absence was more obvious.”

“Because where were their billboards? Where were their campaigns?”

According to Hayley, “this documentary answers all of that and obviously the answer is quite bleak.”

Hayley says the documentary looks at “all the big controversies of the show, like the filming of what looks like sexual assault, although nobody calls it that in this documentary.”

She adds that the series looks into, “whether or not producers should have stopped what was happening, because they were trying to do this new kind of reality thing, where they were treating it like a nature documentary.”

“It was ‘don't get involved, don't try and save the seal’ or whatever.”

But, she says, “they weren’t thinking about the safety of these teenagers or the emotional stability of these teenagers.”

“That just wasn’t part of the equation.”

Hayley ends by saying, “this isn’t a perfect documentary. It’s from Netflix, so I think some of the seriousness is lost to kind of Netflix‑y nonsense. And I’m not sure how much you can legitimately blame it on being a different time when we were all aware of its awfulness at the time.”

Scott says, “I also think this show is fascinating.”

He says it sits “at the heart of the initial rise of reality TV, around the same time when Big Brother was very popular in the UK, where it is a little bit of trying everything and really causing problems along the way.”

He also adds that it “sets the path to where we are with reality TV, which is fundamentally a lot safer.”

He explains that “the whole premise of this show was this idea of rallying against what has been referred to as quote unquote, ‘heroin chic’ at the time, trying to show that other women and eventually men are allowed to be models, and that they were trying to sort of lower the barriers of entry.”

He says this becomes “quite questionable by how judgemental they ended up being on the people who participated in the show.”

According to Scott, “this was a reality show where at the end of it, somebody would end up getting a modelling contract.”

“But as the show went on, and I think this is why it became sort of fascinating, but problematic, as they went to extreme lengths to just get viewers.”

Scott adds, “I felt that in episode three, they sort of talk about, oh, you know, members of the team didn’t like each other in terms of a judging panel.”

“I didn’t care about that because I didn’t watch it.”

“I think if you didn’t watch America’s Next Top Model back then I think you will find it fascinating, because it gives you an idea of what TV and society and fashion was like at that time. So you don’t have to see yourself as a fan of it.”

He concludes by saying it is “the first Netflix documentary series I’ve seen in a long time that I wish was longer.”

All episodes of Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model are available to stream on Netflix now.

Listen to the full reviews of all three programmes on BBC Sounds.

Why not contact Scott and Hayley with the shows you’ve been loving, loathing or both on mustwatch@bbc.co.uk.

We used AI to transcribe and summarise our Must Watch feature.

This article was then written and reviewed by a BBC journalist.

More on how the BBC uses AI.