New to Lightbox in June

Fans of the sweet, low-key BBC comedy Mum will have to subscribe to Lightbox to see the second series.

Spark’s streaming service has picked it up after TVNZ 1 dropped the show because of disappointing ratings for the first series.

The six half-hour episodes will stream from June 11; if you haven’t seen the first BAFTA-winning series, it’s already up on Lightbox.

“It is all very slow and gentle and well-acted,” The Guardian said, which headlined its review a “cliched take on the maddening reality of motherhood”.

As in the first series, the major events happen off screen … a reminder that real life happens in the everyday, uncaptured moments.

“Poignant is a word that doesn’t get used much these days, but it fits Mum like a glove,” The Telegraph said.

In this spare, quiet sitcom, deep emotions aren’t so much plumbed as plucked at in a piquant, reserved, achingly sympathetic way.

Also new to Lightbox will be season three of Preacher, which will stream weekly from June 25, and the 12-part French drama, Paris Etc, which the burb says “centres on the engaging, emotional and often funny stories of five very different heroines as their lives cross over the course of a season, starting at the beginning of the school year and building to an emotional Christmas.”

It screened on SBS in Australia, where the broadcaster billed it as “the French Sex & the City you’ve been waiting for”.

To call this a romantic comedy would underplay the personal dramas at the heart of this series … but Paris Etc definitely contains its fair share of both romance and comedy … It’s a series about city life in all its complexity, and with these women as our guides, Paris has never looked better.

And before they made their names in Outrageous Fortune, Shortland Street and Go Girls, see how Antonia Prebble, Fleur Saville and Jay Ryan fared in new-millennium kidult hit The Tribe.

Here’s the full list of Lightbox premieres for June:

• The Expanse S2 (June 3)
• The Wrong Girl S2 (June 4)
• NCIS S11 (June 5)
• Deadly 60 (June 6)
• Mum S2 (June 11)
• Parts Etc (June 11)
• Wonderful World of Puppies and Kittens (June 12)
• Friday Night Dinner S4 (June 13)
• Father Brown S5 (June 18)
• Madam Secretary S1-2 (June 19)
• Preacher S3 (June 25)
• The Tribe S1-5 (June 25)
• Billionaire Boy S2 (June 27).

New movie rentals will include Game Night, Death Wish, 12 Strong and Insidious: The Last Key (from June 6), and The Ballad of Lefty Brown, Mercy and Winchester (from June 20).