What to watch on TV this week: 14th - 20th June

On the drama front, Mitford sisters series Outrageous is set to air on U&Drama, while We Were Liars arrives on Prime Video and Rosie Jones leads a new comedy on Channel 4 called Pushers.

Period drama The Buccaneers is also returning for a second season on Apple TV+, and hard-hitting documentary Grenfell: Uncovered is coming to Netflix.

Here, you'll find our top picks for this week – read on for our full choice of what to watch.

Soccer Aid for UNICEF 2025

Release date: Sunday 15th June, 6pm, ITV1

While the high watermark of charity football matches remains Diego Maradona taking a penalty against Jamie Theakston (and scoring, of course), Soccer Aid continues to fly the flag with aplomb, mixing recently retired pros and celebrities of varying levels of ability.

Prowling the touchline at Old Trafford this afternoon will be Wayne Rooney and Tyson Fury (for England) and Peter Schmeichel (for the Rest of the World). Mo Farah, Sam Quek and James Nelson-Joyce join Jill Scott, Gary Neville, Steph Houghton and others for the home team, while Richard Gadd, Gorka Márquez and Martin Compston will join Carlos Tevez, Edwin van der Sar and Leonardo Bonucci on a star-studded opposition boasting household names both on and off the pitch.

Expect showboating aplenty and no shortage of friendly rivalries to be aired; to misquote Robbie Williams, who founded the event: let them entertain you.

Gabriel Tate

The Traitors NZ season 2

Release date: Monday 16th June, 8pm, BBC Three

Odd casting made the first Kiwi-populated series of The Traitors a different, but not necessarily less appealing, beast from its British, American and Australian counterparts, notably because several of the contestants already knew each other. Host Paul Henry, perhaps surprisingly for a notorious controversialist prone to wilfully unpleasant pronouncements, also erred towards the bland. Even so, the format remains more or less bulletproof.

This second run, airing from Monday to Thursday this week, gets off to a sound start with the return of a familiar face posing an immediate ethical dilemma and a macabre task involving scouring the grounds of Claremont Manor for body parts. Of a doll, admittedly, but with this show you can never be entirely sure.

Gabriel Tate

The Buccaneers season 2

Release date: Wednesday 18th June, Apple TV+

This effervescent costume drama got steadily better in its first year, and it returns with a spring in its heels. It's the 1870s, and the gang of young American women who came to England looking for husbands have largely found them: at the centre of the group is Nan (Kristine Froseth), who last time we saw her had chosen duty over love and, via a contrived but exciting set of circumstances, married a man she likes instead of the one she loves, in order to save her sister from an abusive marriage.

Never mind how much sense that made because we're straight back into it from where we left off, and the question of who is Nan's real mother is resolved as new characters are introduced. Look past the transatlantic gimmick and the modern pop soundtrack and it's a textbook Austen/Bronte/Downton/Bridgerton saga, executed with style and a good dose of dry wit.

Jack Seale

We Were Liars

Release date: Wednesday 18th June, Prime Video

A dramatisation of the popular young adult novel by E Lockhart that's a cut above your average "rich kids in America go off the rails" drama. We begin on a private island near the posh summer retreat of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts - an impossible idyll where the extended Sinclair clan, including 16-year-old Cadence (Emily Alyn Lind), gather annually to swim, sunbathe and generally enjoy the comfort of wealth.

This summer, however, Cadence is destined to fall in love - the intensity and uncertainty of a first infatuation is tenderly evoked - but then suffer a near-death experience that will leave her with memory loss. What happened? And why are her former best pals so off with her when the gang reconvenes on the island? The series takes its time to sketch out a network of secrets and regrets, making every character and every family unit believably flawed.

Jack Seale

America's Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders season 2

Release date: Wednesday 18th June, Netflix

At first glance this sports doc seems like it will be all surface and no substance. We follow young women auditioning to become cheerleaders for the Dallas Cowboys American football team, many of whom are trying to follow in the footsteps of their mothers who were in the squad a decade or two ago. So what?

Put simply, the series is gripping because the bar for entry to the team is set so high: miss one moment of a physically punishing, minutely choreographed high-kick routine and that's it, you're not good enough. So this is a story of young people pushing themselves to do something very difficult, very well: why they would want to subject themselves to that is the source of engrossing personal back stories.

Jack Seale

Outrageous

Release date: Thursday 19th June, 9pm, U&Drama

The six Mitford sisters are an absolute gift for a drama. Coming from an aristocratic family in the 1930s, their lives were all glamour, champagne, country estates and deliciously racy behaviour, but these Bright Young Things also scandalised society.

The cast (which includes Anna Chancellor and James Purefoy as 'Muv' and 'Farve') look like they’re having lots of fun as headstrong Diana (Joanna Vanderham) becomes the most hated woman in Britain for her cataclysmic involvement with the fascist leader Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse being charmingly predatory).

Meanwhile Jessica (Zoe Brough) uncovers a passion for Communism and the other sisters “go off the rails” in their own way. Although past attempts to televise their lives have been slightly lacklustre, Sarah Williams’s version is gloriously entertaining.

Jane Rackham

Pushers

Release date: Thursday 19th June, 10pm, Channel 4

Rosie Jones has become such a staple on our screens it’s hard to believe she’s only now starring in her own six-part sitcom. Her Channel 4 comedy short from 2022 called Disability Benefits (still available to stream on C4) proves the genesis for this series about Emily (Jones), who turns to dealing drugs after her benefits are cut. Before we flash back to three months prior, the opening scene has Emily in not too dissimilar situation to the fate that befell Walter White.

That’s where any comparison to Breaking Bad starts and ends, though. The strong set-up flounders under a patchy script, and while some of the pilot episode’s sharper edges have been knocked off, there’s a sense, occasionally, of shocking for shock’s sake.

Frances Taylor

Grenfell: Uncovered

Release date: Friday 20th June, Netflix

Questions quickly emerged in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. How had a small fire, which started as an electrical blaze in a fourth-floor kitchen, spread so rapidly? Why hadn’t previous concerns from residents about fire safety been acted upon? And ultimately, if action had been taken, could the deaths of 72 people have been prevented?

This feature-length documentary seeks answers. Survivors, relatives and firefighters recount the horrifying events of that night in June 2017, while fire experts and a journalist, who’s covered the story from day one, explain the corruption and incompetence from businesses and the government that led to such catastrophe.

As well as hearing some of the stupefying testimony given at the Grenfell Towe Inquiry (a special dishonourable mention must go to Eric Pickles), there are jaw-dropping internal emails regarding the cladding. The material used is chillingly compared to sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of the tower. Yet what’s almost as shocking is that even today, hundreds of thousands of people are still living in buildings clad with unsafe material. It’s a national scandal.

Frances Taylor

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