Streaming TV highlights Aug 5-11

A wannabe influencer fakes having been involved in a terrorist attack in Paris to gain followers and live the celebrity lifestyle.

That's the basic premise of Not Okay.

Zoey Deutch (Set It Up) stars as the pretty awful human at the centre of this tale, Danni Sanders.

After using her photoshopping skills to make it appear she attended a writer's retreat in Paris - with the sole purpose of impressing her somewhat-influencer colleague Colin (a brilliantly douchey, blonde Dylan O'Brien) - Danni carries on with her deception. She realises people start paying attention to her and doing nice things when they think she has survived a traumatic situation. But things get more serious when she befriends a teen gun safety activist at a trauma survivors group, and still doesn't come clean. That's where the film starts to get a little uneven. It was fun to hate on Danni's terrible decisions at the start, but school shooting survivor Rowan (Mia Isaac, better than the film warranted) has some really serious things to say, and this on point social commentary just doesn't really mesh that well with the comedy of the film's opening.

Netflix

If Lost and The Flight Attendant had a little TV baby, and it inherited none of the sci-fi or the humour of its parents, that baby would grow up to be Keep Breathing. The new limited series from Netflix features six relatively short episodes (roughly around 35 minutes each) and can be knocked over in a day or two.

It follows Liv, a career-obsessed lawyer who needs to unpack some long-held trauma and abandonment issues, as she's forced to survive alone in the wilderness following a plane crash.

The first couple of episodes are really engaging as we watch Liv (played by Melissa Barrera from In the Heights and the latest Scream film) use all the tools at her disposal to survive.

She's pretty resourceful, and simply watching her figure out how to start and maintain her fire, determine which berries are safe to eat, etc, is really enjoyable. The scenery itself is absolutely stunning. But the show struggles when it pulls the old Lost trick of flashbacks into Liv's past, paired with The Flight Attendant-like hallucinations of current and past events. Those flashbacks become grating really quickly, and, unfortunately for viewers, are used more and more as the series progresses.

Purple Hearts is far more enjoyable than it has any right to be - and that's largely due to the committed, moving performance of leading man Nicholas Galitzine. The film follows Cassie (Sofia Carson), a liberal musician working at the bar of a military town in California. She suffers from diabetes and can barely afford the medicine that keeps her alive. Enter Luke (Galitzine), a confident, conservative Marine who owes money to a drug dealer. The pair hate each other immediately, but concoct a plan to marry, meaning Luke gets a pay rise and Cassie gets access to his health insurance. The only trouble is all eyes will be on them, so they've got the make the relationship seem plausible. Purple Hearts starts off very cringey, but, somehow against the odds, it manages to turn things around the draw the viewer in. And the songs are actually pretty catchy, if perhaps a tad overused.