TV
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5’ s decision to remake James Herriot’s much-loved Yorkshire vet stories was an inspired one, and this second series has effortlessly carried on the mood of gentle observation, nostalgia and slapstick comedy amid scintillating Yorkshire Dales scenery. A teeming cast of dogs, cats, horses, cows and chickens is permanently on call to provide fuel for the adventures of Herriot and the Farnon veterinary dynasty.Much of the time, the second series has merely rung a few changes on the formula perfected last time around, but fans of the show (and of Herriot’s original books) won’t mind. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Korean-made show suddenly became Netflix’s all-time greatest hit, demonstrating once again the irresistible allure of a game show which ruthlessly massacres its contestants. Squid Game has some fairly obvious antecedents – for instance The Hunger Games, the Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man and the Japanese TV show Battle Royale – and also carries echoes of the 1960s cult mystery The Prisoner and perhaps a soupçon of Lord of the Flies. The fact that it has come out of South Korea undoubtedly sprays on an added miasma of strangeness (avoid the dubbed English dialogue option, because Read more ...
David Nice
Neo-Nazis held a Trafalgar Square rally under the banner "Free Britain from Jewish Control" in the year of my birth; I had no idea until I watched Ridley Road. Most of us know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, but, until now, next to nothing about the Jewish resistance against fascist Colin Jordan and his gang of thugs, some of them cynically recruited from borstals and children’s homes, 17 years after the end of the Second World War.Sarah Solemani's adaptation of Jo Bloom’s novel plays with the chronology a bit – arsonists did kill a boy in a Jewish theological college, but after Read more ...
graham.rickson
This weighty box set contains all 52 episodes of the BBC’s take on George Simenon's Maigret, four seasons of which were made and broadcast between 1960 and 1963. Given how much vintage BBC material has been wiped, that this series can now be watched on Blu-ray is little short of miraculous.Decently restored from the monochrome originals, the majority of the instalments stand up pretty well, despite the spartan sets and bewildering range of accents on display. The amount of Parisian location footage is a surprise, adding to the series’ authenticity. Studio sequences were shot live, leading to Read more ...
Harriet Thompson
Born in 1840, Thomas Hardy lived a life of in-betweens. Modern yet traditional, the son of a builder who went on to become a famous novelist, he belonged both to Dorset and London. When he died, his ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried separately alongside his first wife in the village of Stinsford in Dorset.In a lifetime that spanned the early Victorian period and the aftermath of the First World War, Hardy witnessed huge changes: the mechanisation of farming, the rapid growth of cities, the transformation of transport and communications. Claire Tomalin Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Michael Schumacher’s skiing accident in December 2013, which left the seven-times Formula One world champion with a severe brain injury, added a shocking postscript to one of the greatest stories in motor racing. Having survived a decades-long driving career which included numerous accidents (including a motorcycle smash in 2009 which was apparently far more serious than the Schumi camp would admit), he was near-fatally stricken on a family Christmas holiday in Méribel.His wife Corinna is one of the main contributors to Netflix’s new bio-doc, and while she sheds some light on their life Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s perhaps unfortunate that The North Water arrives on BBC Two only a few months after The Terror, since it’s impossible to avoid the parallels between them. They’re set only a few years apart (1859 for The North Water, 1845 for The Terror), both involve doomed voyages into Arctic waters, and each of them gets darker and bloodier as it depicts man’s inhumanity to man (and not just man) and the encroaching horror of a heart of darkness.But there are differences, too. The North Water is based on Ian McGuire’s novel, but this five-part series is indelibly stamped with the mark of screenwriter Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
In Klem (meaning "clamp"’), we find ourselves in the calm, ordered and ordinary world of Amsterdam-Zuid. There are parents’ evenings to be attended, school plays to be watched. The area’s many pretty parks are just perfect for the early morning jog. Tall green bins stand in neat rows. Evenings are for helping children with their homework, or for going to choir practice, at which a widowed, serious, bespectacled tax official in the tenors might notice a romantic gaze coming in his direction from a hospital doctor in the sopranos, to the strains of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei...Except that these Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems Covid-19 may not be the only plague threatening mankind. The virus is nowhere to be seen in Netflix’s grippingly twisty mystery Clickbait, but it’s the use and abuse of social media that drives its tale of malice, murder and deception.The journey of one of the central characters, Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier), mirrors the switchback ride of the narrative as it jumps between viewpoints and keeps throwing a new light on aspects of the story. Nick is a physical therapist at a school athletics department, apparently a popular guy with a perfect wife and two kids. Imagine everybody’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Submarines have delivered some memorable on-screen performances, from Run Silent, Run Deep to The Hunt for Red October. On the other hand, we must not overlook the treasurably idiotic BBC series The Deep, which featured a submarine with a “moon pool” in it (this was a big vent permanently open to the ocean). Handy for reaching the sea-bed in a hurry perhaps, but not helpful for getting back up again.Vigil isn’t quite as absurd as that, and in fact takes itself extremely seriously, even though the underwater shots look distinctly creaky. It's made by World Productions, home of Line of Duty and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As we saw recently in M Night Shyamalan’s Old, a visit to a holiday resort in a tropical location can have ghastly consequences. In Mike White’s expertly-wrought six-parter The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), the title refers to a pricey but tacky beach hotel in Hawaii, where a group of characters find that what was supposed to be a vacation ends up more like an exhaustive psychological examination.Happily, White is able to put his characters through the wringer with wit and panache, and everything that befalls them is a way of prising them open a little more to explore what makes them tick. For Read more ...