TV
Adam Sweeting
When the first season of Drive to Survive launched on Netflix in 2019, it was greeted with suspicion by some in the Formula One paddock. But with its sixth season now up on Netflix, just ahead of next weekend’s 2024 season-opening race in Bahrain, the show can congratulate itself for having helped to bring about a revolution within Formula One.It’s credited with bringing the sport to vast new swathes of viewers, many of whom are female, and has enabled F1’s owners, the entertainment colossus Liberty Media, to achieve the holy grail of massive success in the USA.F1 has battled for decades to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This three-part drama arrives trailing clouds of big-byline glory. Michael Sheen directed and produced it (as well as making fleeting appearances on screen), James Graham wrote it and documentary-maker Adam Curtis co-produced it.But what is it? Part social commentary, part Welsh myth and part travelogue, it tells the story of a family from Port Talbot, the Driscolls, who get caught up in a cataclysmic industrial dispute at the steelworks and end up going on the run. In an ironic and not very subtle inversion of the never-ending saga of Channel boat crossings, they flee across the Welsh border Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new arrangements with the Batuks, the Turkish family who are the source of all the local drug supplies. Snag is, the Turks want the Kinsellas to repay Cunningham’s outstanding debt to them of €70m. Oh, and another thing – they want the head of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), since he killed a senior member of the Batuk clan.Difficult decisions have to be made Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The frocks, the pearls, the chicest branding of any perfume in the world… Sorry, this is not what The New Look is about, for those who swooned at the V&A’s recent Chanel exhibition. The title promises a different focus, on the designer who in 1947 was credited with the “new look” in his first solo collection: Christian Dior. His creations were intended to make France dream again after the miseries of the four-year Nazi occupation. Corsets were resurrected, waistlines cinched-in, full skirts swirled in sumptuous fabrics. The look spoke of a romantic elegance lost during the war years Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When Colombian drug potentate Pablo Escobar made his comment that “the only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco,” he ensured that Ms Blanco would achieve immortality in the annals of crime. Netflix’s new series about Blanco, starring and produced by Sofía Vergara, claims to depict Blanco’s life “as faithfully as possible”, though that famous line “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” feels a bit nearer the mark.Blanco’s tangled biography has been considerably simplified for this Netflix version, but what emerges is a lurid, high-octane ride packed with sex, Read more ...
David Nice
Asking whether there could be an end to melody given only 12 notes to work with, Sergey Prokofiev compared the possibilities to a chess game: “for the fourth move of the White there will be about 60 million variants.”So it is with the basic formula of The Traitors, subject to the infinite variety of human foibles, ambiguities and treachery, plus superficial twists introduced by the master planners, with the wry and stylishly, sometimes outrageously, clad Claudia Winkleman as their conduit.This is one game show that shows little signs of getting tired. The contestants are knowing when they Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German fighters, and the front half of their B-17 bomber looks like an abattoir. His pilot looks ahead with a thousand-yard stare, and says “don’t tell your guys anything, they’ll figure it out.”And history does indeed repeat itself after Bucky’s compadres from 100th Bomb Group catch up with him at their airfield at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, having flown in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This fourth series of the erratic detective drama opens with an epigraph, attributed to a certain Hildred Castaigne: “For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.” It sounds dark and creepy, and is a fitting prelude to a story which mixes murder and eerie Arctic landscapes with disconcerting glimpses of the supernatural.Still, while “Hildred Castaigne” sounds like a 14th Century mystic, Wikipedia reveals that it is in fact the name of a fictional character from an 1895 short story by Robert W. Chambers, who is “a prime example of an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to find a new way to package a drama about that perennially popular topic, the dark side of policing, but Criminal Record at least gets its ducks in a row with some strong writing by Paul Rutman and a strength-in-depth cast. Peter Capaldi (pictured below) is in chilling form as the Hackney-based DCI Daniel Hegarty, a veteran detective who evidently knows where a lot of bodies are buried. When he starts getting inquiries about a decade-old murder case from the comparatively junior DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), it looks like a mild irritation he can merely brush off.Naturally that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There isn’t a troupe officially called the Worshipful Company of British Character Actors, but there probably should be, given the sterling service it does for the nation, acting in prestige TV dramas based on real events. Toby Jones and Monica Dolan regularly top the bill in this genre, as they do in ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.This level of star casting says a lot about the aims of this four-parter. It’s in the same vein as true-crime docudramas such as Appropriate Adult and The Sixth Commandment, but with its eye fixed on a wider, mass audience. The incendiary story it tells — of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV viewers can hardly complain about a lack of choice these days, though they might baulk at funding an ever-lengthening list of subscriptions.There are some who argue, for example, that it’s worth paying for Apple TV+ solely to gain access to the excellent Slow Horses, whose third series has just concluded. Others may contend that you should stump up for Disney+ to see Only Murders in the Building, a delicious flashback to old Broadway and elegant Forties-style film comedies.Despite all that, you could still have spent the year enjoying a selection of admirable dramas from good old BBC One. Read more ...