Beldina Odenyo was on the verge of stardom when she took her own life in 2021. In this beautiful documentary, her grief-stricken sister Leah attempts to finish her album – and her journey will make you cry again and again

In 2021, the Kenyan-Scottish singer-songwriter Beldina Odenyo was on the brink of major stardom. That October, aged 31, she headlined a gig at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, delivering an instantly legendary performance; barefoot, cloaked and bone-shaking in its intensity. Everyone in that concert hall knew they were witnessing something extraordinary that night. Two weeks later, Odenyo took her own life.

This tender and grief-stricken documentary, which opens a year after her death, is directed with remarkable care by Louise Lockwood. What emerges is a sensitively drawn portrait of a visionary artist haunted by trauma, formed through her teenage video diaries, the words of those who loved her, the handful of exquisite songs she left behind – kept in a folder on her hard drive named “passable demos” – and the determination of her older sister, Leah McAleer, to keep her astonishing voice alive. A deeply painful venture that she understands is itself a product of her insurmountable grief.

They were once the hottest shows on television – gripping, sexy, hilarious, zeitgeisty. But for our writers, the likes of America’s Next Top Model, House of Cards and The Office are now part of their viewing history they feel tainted by

When I think of the summer holidays when I was a teenager, I think of watching America’s Next Top Model for hours on end, critiquing each contestant with my sister. The makeover episode was always my favourite: girls sobbing as their hair was cropped short, or even shaved off. At the time, Tyra Banks seemed like a big sister, giving the contestants the tough love they’d need to succeed in a ferociously competitive industry. Now I feel differently. I hadn’t watched America’s Next Top Model since I was young, but like many, I recently watched Netflix’s excellent series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. It was the strangest sensation, rewatching episodes I hadn’t seen in more than two decades. At times I felt almost teleported back. How could I not find these scenes of models collapsing with hunger utterly abhorrent? I wondered what influence watching a show that celebrated eating disorders had on my own brain. I think it had an impact. I think the residual taint of it is still there. I can’t watch America’s Next Top Model any more, nor do I want to. Ironically, it’s all too ugly. Sirin Kale

Poignant, hilarious, loaded with a super-sharp script … the second outing for this midlife comedy is even more fantastic than the first

Middle age is a brutal time of life. As those of us mired in it know, it’s perfectly suited to being mined for laughs (the unhinged type of laughs that are bound up with tears, crisis, and, inevitably, death.) But still too few comedy series take this pressured segment of time and squeeze it for all its acidic worth. Enter middle-aged joke machine Tina Fey, who with The Four Seasons – her zippy 2020s update of the 1980s film of the same name, co-created and written with Tracey Wigfield and Lang Fisher – has triumphed once again. The second season of her midlife comedy drama is even more perspicacious, poignant and hilarious than the first.

Again there are four fancy holidays split across the seasons, each one given two gag-packed episodes – a rigid but neat structural device that allows the big moments to happen off-screen. Meanwhile we get the aftermath soundtracked by an avalanche of Vivaldi and bracing jokes about sad lonely donkeys, secret vapes mistaken for thumb drives, and the tragicomedy of being an angry, unravelling fiftysomething man in a T-shirt printed with “Keep Calm and Fuhgeddaboutit”.

This affecting anti-hagiography traces the ascent of a bona fide superstar, featuring interviews with Nick Cave, Dannii, Jason Donovan – and the icon herself making a shocking cancer revelation

• News: Kylie Minogue announces she had second cancer diagnosis in 2021

Beyond the sequins, feathers and gold hotpants, the stories of the most enduring pop megastars tend to be ones of jaw-dropping grit and undimmable power. Especially when they’re women. So it is with Kylie: pint-sized seller of over 80m records, singer of two of the greatest pop bangers of all time (Can’t Get You Out of My Head and Padam Padam, obviously), and the reticent subject of this increasingly intimate and, finally, profoundly moving three-part Netflix documentary. What starts as a bog-standard run-through of Kylie’s ascent to superstardom – an excess of Pete Waterman, Neighbours clips and virulent 1990s sexism – ends with a disclosure that moves me to tears.

It comes in the final 10 minutes. It’s 2023: a euphoric high point in Kylie’s career. Padam Padam, the first single from Kylie’s 16th album, Tension, has just been released. Then the words “One More Thing” flash across a black screen. Cut to present-day Kylie arriving at the studio, singing songs from Tension with her longstanding team of British songwriters. “There’s a song called Story … ” she says to director Michael Harte (also the editor of Netflix’s Beckham), who shot the documentary over two years. Kylie, who is notoriously private, falters. Her songwriting partner of more than 25 years, Richard “Biff” Stannard, takes her hand. She starts to cry as she divulges what Story is really about: her second cancer diagnosis, in early 2021.

The star’s fame, reckoning and resurrection are examined in this nuanced three-parter. It speaks to those who were closest to Jackson but can a story of such wild extremes really be told from the middle ground?

In what way, exactly, is Michael Jackson an “American tragedy”? Does the tragedy to which the title of this three-part BBC documentary refers concern the downfall of the most famous man on the planet into financial ruin, addiction and disgrace? Or does it belong to the children who alleged – and continue to allege – that Jackson sexually abused them? Is it about the bottomless need of a child star who craved the love of an abusive father so desperately he tried to fill the void with the adulation of millions of fans? Is it the sacrifice of a genius at the altar of the brutal music industry? Or is it an American tragedy about race?

As far as Michael Jackson: An American Tragedy is concerned, it’s all of the above, and then some. “The tragedy was that this man who got more attention than any human being was still so utterly lonely,” says Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Jackson’s former spiritual adviser. For childhood friend Michelle Breger, seeing Jackson whiten his skin in the late 1980s was “heartbreaking – Michael was trying to erase something off his face”. For prosecutor Ron Zonen, the tragedy is that the might of the Jackson machine won out over justice: “I felt it was remarkably obvious that he was molesting children.”

From a chalk-and-cheese duo obsessed with custard creams to in-laws who didn’t get on until a family death – brace yourself for another journey of big feelings

There is ice. A bear lopes across a vast white tundra, weaving footprints in the snow. Closeup of a snow leopard. Crisp crunch of boots in thick snow. Heavy breathing … Running … Screaming … Is it the latest Paul Greengrass thriller? No. The words “51 Days Earlier” appear. Volare starts playing. And now we’re in sunny Palermo, Sicily: the southern Italian city conquered more than any other in Europe. Where else could we be but at the starting line of Race Across the World?

You know when a BBC series has gone stratospheric because the opening gets suitably hysterical and starts to think it’s a Bourne spin-off. And so it comes to pass with the sixth series of the BBC flagship show, now such a powerful harbinger of spring on these small isles that it has replaced daffodils. The premise, for the stubborn percent who haven’t succumbed, is simple and brilliant; a formula that, like the cometh of spring, will never get old.

From sparks flying during The OC’s Spider-Man snog to love stories so powerful they make you weep, Guardian writers pick the television couples whose tales never fail to make hearts pound

As TV romances go, it’s not the most original. Nerdy teen boy finally gets the queen bee he’s loved since they still had baby teeth – and off we pop on a four-season cycle of dramatic breakups and grand-gesture-fuelled reunions. Yet through all of the faintly ridiculous plotlines, their romance is anchored by that most elusive of on-screen tricks: actual, palpable chemistry. There is the sarcastic sparring, the physical spark (who could ever forget that Spiderman snog?) but also a feeling of deep care and genuine friendship – one that helps both characters grow into promising mini-grownups by the end. Watching the pair navigate insecurities, battle identity crises and generally make some spectacularly poor choices, lets us all feel better about the emotional dumpster fires of our own adolescence. And the fact that they keep on choosing each other speaks to that part of our teen selves that longed to find someone who might jump on to a coffee cart and declare their love for us – or at least wait around all summer while we campaigned to save sea otters. Lucinda Everett

The snapshot was taken just months after I lost my mum, and not everyone in it is still with us. But it is an image of survival, capturing the aftermath of grief and the beforemath of future losses

I remember the moment this photo was taken: five years ago, on my partner Claire’s birthday, in a National Trust for Scotland garden six miles east of Edinburgh. We were standing on a wooden deck, an ideal spot for pond-dipping with the kids and a lesser-known viewing platform for trainspotters. This is where my autistic son, then six, loved (and still loves) to jump in tandem with the ScotRail trains toggling back and forth in the middle distance. We had just eaten a small, hasty birthday picnic of pastries and Nosecco. We wandered down through the walled garden to the wild meadow encircling a pond. We ended up where we always end up. On our deck.

Somehow I knew it was a moment worth freezing in time. I gave our dear friend Dawn – whose husband had recently died and who was slowly, informally becoming part of our family – my phone. She took two photos. In the first, two of the five subjects – dog and son – are showing their rear ends to the lens. In the second – this one – almost all of us are looking directly at the lens. Some of us even look happy. Result!

An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever

I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.

Mischievous and glorious, David Attenborough brings his lifelong sense of wonder to the city’s wildlife, from foxes to peregrine falcons, in this exquisite and endlessly moving special

The journey begins in a row of allotments lodged deep between two north London streets. It’s 8.30pm and David Attenborough – 99 years young, in customary short-sleeved blue shirt and chinos – is on the hunt for Tottenham’s most elusive resident. He gets settled on a camping chair. Waits. Emits a tiny rhapsodic gasp as the creature in question appears. It’s a … fox.

“It’s still a huge thrill to see one suddenly emerging from the bushes,” he whispers to camera of a sight so bog-standard most Londoners wouldn’t bother looking up from their phones. “A totally wild creature!” Attenborough holds out a hand. Murmurs a delighted “hello”. The fox comes within a few inches of the greatest natural historian and broadcaster this country has ever produced, then slinks off into the night. What an encounter! And if you think that’s exhilarating wait until you see his reaction to a pigeon getting on the tube.