From ‘This is Paris’ to ‘The Boys’: Five shows to binge-watch this weekend

Heiresses, space shuttle disasters and superheroes gone rogue ... if you plan on staying home, here’s what to watch while you sofa surf

Paris Hilton and the 1986 Challenger shuttle disaster are two great documentaries to watch, while superhero-series-with-a-twist, 'The Boys', is a fast-paced dark comedy. Amazon, Getty Images, AP

If you've got a date with your sofa this weekend, but are feeling a little overwhelmed by what to watch and on which platform, we've got you covered.

Here are our five top picks of things you can watch right now, from in-depth documentaries to dark comedies.

‘Challenger: The Final Flight’, Netflix

On January 28, 1986, the world watched in horror as the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. With all seven crew members killed instantly, the disaster has garnered a lingering international fascination due in part to the fact that one of the crew was a US school teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who had won a nationwide contest to join the crew.

This acclaimed Netflix documentary, from Star Wars director JJ Abrams's Bad Robot production company, consists of four episodes, which feature incredible interviews with the families of the crew, as well as engineers from Nasa and Thiokol. The latter is the US company which manufactured the boosters and the O-rings – small, thin strips of rubber – whose reaction to the cold weather on the day of the launch proved to be the fatal flaw.

‘The Boys’, Amazon Prime

'The Boys' turns the superhero genre on its head, making the good guys the baddies. Shutterstock

Putting a new spin on the superhero genre, The Boys follows a group of vigilantes led by man-out-for-revenge, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban with a very dubious Cockney accent), who are gunning to bring down a group of superheroes the world worships.

Based on the comic book of the same name, the show, which has two series available on Prime, follows Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) as he joins Butcher on his mission to expose the superheroes who work for the shady Vought corporation, after Campbell’s girlfriend is accidentally killed by one of them.

And the fun part is that these caped crusaders aren’t actually very heroic at all. In fact, their erstwhile leader, the all-American Homelander, is downright psychotic.

‘This is Paris’, YouTube

The heiress who defined the early aughts as much as trucker caps and Juicy Couture tracksuits lifts the lid on her so-called charmed life in this warts-and-all documentary.

Having helped invent reality TV as we know it, thanks to her show The Simple Life with then-best friend Nicole Richie, Hilton insists that the Paris we know from the tabloid headlines is simply a character she created to hide behind.

The 39-year-old socialite and DJ speaks for the first time about her months spent at “behavioural adjustment” school, the now-shuttered Provo Canyon in Utah, as well as other events from her past.

'Defending Jacob', Apple TV+

Spanning an eight-episode story arc, Defending Jacob stars US actor Chris Evans as Andy Barber, an assistant district attorney in Massachusetts, charged with investigating the death of a 14-year-old boy, Ben Rifkin.

After first suspecting a local man of the killing, Barber soon hears whispers on the grapevine that there was no love lost between his own son, Jacob, and the murdered boy.

And when he finds a knife that matches the description of the murder weapon in his son’s room, he does away with the evidence, while Jacob continues to claim he found Ben already dead in a local park.

Based on the 2012 book by William Landay, Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery also stars as Barber's wife, Laurie.

'Unsolved Mysteries', Netflix

Season two of this supremely bingeable show is here, with six more mysteries to keep you up at night scrolling through Reddit for groups in which to share your theories.

The new series kicks off with the murder of White House aide Jack Wheeler, whose body was found in a Washington landfill, with CCTV footage showing a series of strange events leading up to his final days.

Episode four is one for fans of the paranormal, as Japanese residents discuss the spirits they encountered following the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that tore through the region in 2011, the fourth most powerful earthquake ever recorded.

But perhaps most heartbreaking of all is the tale of 2-year-old Christopher Dansby and 1-year-old Shane Walker, who both disappeared from the same Harlem, New York, playground within three months of each other in the late ‘80s. Both were seen playing with the same pair of older children prior to their disappearance.