Daniel Radcliffe as Weird Al and Hitchcock’s Cary Grant lead ARD Plus into October

ARD Plus occupies an unusual position in the German streaming landscape — a premium service run by the commercial subsidiary of the public broadcaster, offering content that has cycled out of the free ARD Mediathek alongside a growing slate of licensed international acquisitions. The platform’s appeal is essentially curatorial: what it acquires, and in what combination, says something about who it imagines its audience to be. The October additions, reading across five titles, sketch that audience as someone equally comfortable with a 1941 Alfred Hitchcock psychological thriller and with Daniel Radcliffe playing “Weird Al” Yankovic at full, accordion-swinging pitch.

The centrepiece is “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” (2022), a film that applies parody to the parody musician’s own life — a move that sounds like a double negative but plays instead as a sustained act of affectionate deconstruction. Yankovic and director Eric Appel co-wrote the screenplay, which gives the material an unusual quality of authorial complicity: the film knows exactly what genre it inhabits and has built the genre’s collapse into its structure from the opening frame. Daniel Radcliffe commits fully to the role — glasses, curls, accordion — while Evan Rachel Wood plays Madonna as the gravitational pull around which the story orbits. The film premiered on the Roku Channel in the United States and runs under two hours.

Scene from Obituary: a woman leans into a car window to speak to another woman in the Irish dark comedy series — Image: Telepool / RTÉ

The quieter find is “Obituary,” an Irish dark comedy that RTÉ broadcast across two seasons in 2023 and 2025. Siobhán Cullen plays a young woman in a small Irish town who becomes obsessed with death, takes a job writing obituaries for the local newspaper, and — finding the local mortality rate insufficiently interesting — begins quietly improving it. Creator Ray Lawlor plays the premise toward genuine darkness rather than broad comedy, and the series earned sustained critical attention in Ireland and internationally. Both seasons arrive on ARD Plus from October 15.

Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) — Image: RKO Radio Pictures

The catalog rounds out with two family dramas and an anchor from the Hitchcock canon. “As They Made Us” (2022), starring Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen, follows a divorced woman attempting to heal her fractured family as her father’s health declines; it arrives October 22. “Reinas” (2024), a Peruvian film set in Lima during the summer of 1992, follows a mother preparing to emigrate to the United States with her daughters amid political and social upheaval — quiet and precise in its portrait work. It reaches the platform from October 29. And from October 8, alongside “Weird,” Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion” (1941) joins the catalog: Joan Fontaine’s Academy Award-winning performance as a woman who comes to suspect her charming husband (Cary Grant) of planning to murder her, the film that gave Grant his most permanently unresolved screen presence.

ARD Plus is available at €4.99 per month via web, mobile, Magenta TV, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and as a YouTube Primetime Channel.

Tags: Alfred Hitchcock, obituary, streaming services, ARD Plus, Daniel Radcliffe, Siobhán Cullen