The long-form political interview feels like an increasingly rare spectacle in an era where attention spans are getting shorter by the day, says streaming columnist NICK OVERALL.

Some films, such as Frost/Nixon and more recently Scoop, show just how powerful and influential the long-form political interview can be.

Now a new mini-series on Max is examining another of the most controversial interviews of the last century.

It’s called Brian and Maggie, and it centres on journalist Brian Walden’s television interview with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1990, a dialogue that many say marked the beginning of the end of the Iron Lady’s leadership.

What adds a whole new layer to the story is the friendship the two shared.

Walden and Thatcher built rapport over a series of interviews through the 1980s, which the PM came to view as tough but fair.

When the ultimate sit down happened in October 1989 though, Thatcher was at her most vulnerable.

She was losing grip on her leadership after the introduction of the poll tax. Her own party was closing in and Walden honed in on the cracks, relentlessly questioning Thatcher on the controversies that surrounded her.

It would end up being Thatcher’s final long-form interview before her resignation more than a year later.

Their friendship wouldn’t survive the fallout.

Steve Coogan and Harriet Walter do an incredible job here portraying Brian and Maggie, selling not just the characters they’re portraying but the intriguing bond that formed between them that would eventually break.

Like with other films and shows focusing on big interviews, it is well worth checking out the real-life recordings, which can be found on YouTube.

Both the real interview and its dramatised version shed fascinating new light on one another.

NOTHING races to the top of Netflix’s charts like a disturbing documentary premise.

How’s this for a title to catch the eyes of bored scrollers: Unknown Number: The High School Catfish.

It’s hit the top of the platform’s viewing pops this month with a real-life cyberbullying horror story.

It all unfolded in 2020 when a 13-year-old girl in Michigan started receiving bizarre text messages from an anonymous internet user.

Over months they became more deranged, threatening and eventually personal.

While at first it was suspected to be classmates trying to bully her, the strange and specific knowledge of the messages resulted in police taking a closer look.

Somehow this stranger from the internet was able to find out about the private life of the teen and detail it in hundreds of thousands of messages.

I won’t go any further in spoiling where the investigation led detectives but it is a shocking twist, indeed.

The doco clocks in at just over 90 minutes and makes for one hell of a haunting tale in the digital age.

IS it possible to stop a mass shooting before it happens?

That’s the title of a provocative article that appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 2019 and which has now inspired a new show soon to premiere on Apple TV+.

Oscar winner Jessica Chastain both stars in and produces this series called The Savant, broken into eight episodes that will release weekly from September 26.

Chastain plays Jodi, an undercover investigator who dives deep into the world of online extremism and tries to uncover hate before it can ignite violence.

While falling deeper and deeper into this strange world, Jodi also tries to balance her life as a mum and wife, but the dark spaces she increasingly inhabits online begin to take their toll.

It’s a fascinating premise and one that has the potential to spark new insight into these volatile fringes of society, if done correctly. The show risks merely scratching the surface and devolving into something the internet will ridicule unless it can accurately clock the sub cultures that exist in the depths of it.

Like its protagonist, in order for The Savant to succeed it needs to have done its research, however disturbing that may be.