Sky1
Adam Sweeting
Welcome to Commonworld, in the year 2143. It’s been built above the ruins of the old world, and the opening sequence of Sky One’s new interstellar thriller showed us the crumbling remains of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral mouldering beneath glittering futuristic super-scrapers and sweeping skyways. Thanks to rising water levels, London has become an island.It looks good, and while there’s nothing here that’s going to out-imagine Blade Runner or the new generation of Star Treks, it’s only fairly recently that you’d find such advanced CGI in a TV show. Whizzing through this exciting Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I get to see all these beautiful places and look passengers right in the eye and say the word trash.” Meet Cassie Bowden (the excellent Kaley Cuoco), flight attendant on Imperial Atlantic Airways. In firm denial about her alcohol problem, she knocks back myriads of vodka miniatures onboard, parties hard in cities the world over, has one-night stands after black-out benders (“Thank you for the effort. Good job,” she says to one man, unclear as to who he is or what he’s doing in bed in her New York apartment) but still makes the JFK to Bangkok flight by the skin of her teeth, looking fresh as Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the world’s most famous children’s authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life. Dahl has made headlines in recent weeks with his estate apologising for his antisemitic views, most famously, "there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity”. The family have quietly expressed regret on their website. Like it or not, it casts a shadow over David Kerr’s drama which sees Dahl as a young boy (Harry Tayler) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Famous dystopian novels are reliably popular with TV adapters, so it’s strange that this is the first time Aldous Huxley’s treatise on a society controlled by technology and psychological manipulation has been turned into a TV series. Of course, these days you need a pretty good fictional dystopia to surpass the one already running amok outside your window. Still, this is written and produced by David Wiener, one of the masterminds of Fear the Walking Dead, so you might at least hope for a generous helping of horror and massed blood-letting.But last week’s first episode of Brave New World ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We knew that Michael Sheen was a skilful and versatile actor, but lately he’s been getting dangerously good. Last year he roared into the third season of The Good Fight as the outrageous drug-fuelled lawyer Roland Blum, like an explosive fusion of his fellow-Welshmen Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Now, after wickedly impersonating Chris Tarrant in ITV’s Quiz and indulging in some comical actor-baiting in the BBC’s Staged, he arrives in Sky 1’s new US import Prodigal Son as the brilliant Dr Martin Whitly.But behind his suave and charming exterior, Dr Whitly is a profoundly deranged serial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The odd-couple comedy duo is a time-tested concept, and Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan have discovered a chemistry that works. Rob is the giggling excitable one, while Romesh, aided by a sleepy right eye which conveys a sense of harsh judgmentalism, adds a blast of deadpan scepticism.Previously, the pair have squared up to such topics as Usain Bolt, fashion and country music, but they started this second series (Sky 1) with a leap off a very high cliff. They decided they were going to perform in a ballet, and persuaded Birmingham Royal Ballet to let them have a go at appearing in Swan Read more ...
The Trip to Greece, Series Finale, Sky 1 review - bittersweet swansong for the cantankerous comrades
Adam Sweeting
Could this mock-mythic journey, emulating the trek homewards to Ithaca of Homer’s hero Odysseus, really be the final series of The Trip (Sky 1)? Or will Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon see sense, and realise that they’ll never have as many free lunches as this again?This concluding episode continued the bantering, competitive tone of its predecessors, but director Michael Winterbottom had added some additional portentous wrapping. The opening depicted Coogan voyaging (in Ingmar Bergman-esque monochrome) through a cavern with a mysterious boatman – Charon, the ferryman of Hades, perhaps. Then Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This divertingly daft sequel to the Cinderella story (Sky 1) was the brainchild of David Walliams, who introduced it as himself, sitting smugly by a roaring fire in his authorial smoking jacket. What, he wondered, happened after Cinderella and Prince Charming were married and lived “happily ever after”?Well they weren’t happy at all, as Cinderella (Sian Gibson) rapidly discovered. Charming (Walliams) was a braying, posh twit infatuated with his own reflection and obsessed with his hair. At their wedding celebration, he ignored poor Cinders and spent hours doing cringetastic hip hop Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“What is wrong with us? What are we doing here?” Liam Payne asked the camera, as we neared the end of his jaunt round picturesque Namibia with his quizmaster Ant Middleton. The short answer would be “it’s for the publicity, you idiot,” but of course he knows that full well. He’d just leapt off a cliff face and swung in wide circles on a rope above the russet-coloured desert far below. It looked quite fun actually.The formula here was Bear Grylls Lite, as special forces veteran Middleton took a “journey of a lifetime” across Namibia by road and rail with X Factor and One Direction veteran Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Dust off the record player: Idris Elba’s Eighties comedy In the Long Run (Sky 1) has returned for a second series. Loosely based on Elba’s childhood, the show brings us into the day-to-day life of a West African couple, their British-born son, and the community in their Leyton council estate.Tonight’s episode picked up right where the last series left us. Amidst rumours of job cuts, Walter Easmon (Elba) has stepped up as union representative for his colleagues at the factory. His brother Valentine (Jimmy Akingbola) has moved into a bachelor pad — the junk-filled flat above their local pub. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At first, the opening episode of Sky 1’s enticing new drama Temple looked like it was going to be mostly concerned with a heist gone wrong. A gang of bandits were busily stealing an enormous mountain of money when they were inadvertently locked inside the building they were robbing by their half-witted getaway driver. The sound of approaching police sirens indicated the way events were heading.This had been intercut with shots of Dr Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) making a furtive-looking late night visit to a hospital, ostensibly to retrieve his missing diary. In fact he was nicking a bag-full Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been nearly a decade since the sixth and final series of Lost, JJ Abrams’s baffling odyssey of time-travelling air crash survivors, but judging by Manifest, its influence still hovers over TV-land. Produced by (among others) film director Robert Zemeckis, Manifest is another mystical thriller that might make you think twice about boarding that holiday flight.This first episode began with vacationers gathering at the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica for their flight home to New York. We zoomed in on the Stone family, comprising Ben, his wife Grace and two children, his sister Michaela and Read more ...