Netflix
Veronica Lee
Death can be a powerful driver for comedy, as countless stand-ups and sitcom writers will affirm, but it has to be sensitively handled. Dark humour can be, forgive the pun, life-affirming, and an excuse for the tears, whether of pain or pleasure, to flow.There’s nothing really dark in Sarah Silverman latest stand-up show PostMortem, her Netflix Special recorded at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and far removed from some of the more shock-value comedy she was once known for.It’s about the deaths, just nine days apart, of her beloved father, Donald (known as Schleppy) and her stepmother Janice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck.But Morck not only doesn’t have a very English name, but is far from your ideal English gentleman with a Lady Mary on his arm. The series opens with a brutal incident in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The trunk in the title is a luxury item, worth 50 million won – just north of £27,000 – shown sinking in deep water in the opening credits. It weaves through one of the classiest recent collaborations between Netflix and Korean TV, a haunting psychological drama that’s balm to the soul after the mob-handed violence on offer here at home. Slugging it out in The Trunk are two alpha females, in a setup that on paper sounds like something out of Black Mirror. The motor of the plot is futuristic: NM, a clandestine contract marriage service, socially a no-no for high-status people. In essence Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. The latest series to drop, a Netflix coproduction, is the most accessible yet, and the funniest. Having said that, The Potato Lab sounds as if it comes from the People’s Republic in the north. It’s a variant of the workplace comedy that’s been in TV’s DNA since The Rag Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous actors, though its gung-ho depiction of the heroics of American special forces during the appalling Somalian civil war always felt a little uncomfortable.A quarter of a century later, Netflix’s three-part series Surviving Black Hawk Down, directed by Jack Macinnes and produced by Ridley Scott Associates, attempts to paint a more even-handed picture. It’s a documentary-style account of events, told by some of the real participants, interspersed with action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set in the 1850s, and is based around the real-life massacre of settlers travelling from Arkansas to California by the Mormon militia known as as the Nauvoo Legion. This took place at Mountain Meadows, Utah, apparently triggered by rising tensions between the US federal government and Mormon leader Brigham Young.Directed by Peter Berg (Deepwater Horizon, Lone Survivor etc) and created by screenwriter Mark L Smith (Twisters, The Revenant), American Primeval uses Read more ...
theartsdesk
They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).Then we had Eddie Redmayne as the titular character in Sky Atlantic’s rather ponderous revamp of The Day of the Jackal (“The Day of the Jackal feels like a month,” as one sceptic noted), Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In April 2023 the actor and comic Jamie Foxx had a stroke and was lucky to survive. In his latest Netflix Special, What Had Happened Was... he tells us about it, and his recovery. It's fitting, he tells us, that the show was recorded in Atlanta, just 400 yards away from the hospital he was taken to by his sister, who knew something was seriously wrong.The show is a curious – and undoubtedly unique – mix of comedy, music and thanksgiving that at times feels more like a revivalist meeting as Foxx attests repeatedly that God saved him. The religiosity – and there's a lot of it – may be off- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s rare to spot Keira Knightley in a TV series, and it’s no doubt a sign of changing times that she’s starring in this six-part spies-and-guns caper, penned by Joe Barton (of Giri/Haji and The Lazarus Project fame).Set in a seasonally Christmassy London, it’s a twisty and fairly daft yarn about a dead Chinese ambassador, his missing daughter who has a heroin habit, a ruthless professional trigger man with a sentimental streak, and some murky Westminster chicanery. Then throw in the CIA and watch it all go off.Keira’s character, Helen Webb, is married to the Defence Secretary, Wallace Webb ( Read more ...