TV
Adam Sweeting
This fourth season of Prime’s reworking of Tom Clancy’s fictional CIA man is supposedly the last (to avoid any confusion they’ve dubbed it The Final Mission). It maintains its tradition of deluxe production values, globe-hopping locations and the kind of labyrinthine plotting liable to prompt frequent recourse to the rewind button.Clancy’s novels have fuelled a string of movies starring Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Alec Baldwin and Chris Pine, but the TV show’s creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland (veterans of such small-screen hits as Lost, Fringe and Prison Break) wanted to create a Ryan- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Probably because it’s a secret fear shared by many a flyer, aircraft hijacking has become its own screen mini-genre. We’ve already had not only Hijack but also Hijacked, not to mention the Wesley Snipes vehicle Passenger 57, Jodie Foster in Flightplan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 7500. In Air Force One, the President himself (played by Harrison Ford) was hijacked. And then there’s Liam Neeson in Non-Stop.In Apple TV’s new seven-parter Hijack, it’s Idris Elba’s turn to be the cool, unflusterable one who finds himself in the eye of the in-flight storm, as a gang of oafish thugs take over the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not to be confused with the matchless French policier Spiral, Spiral of Lies (or J’ai Menti in its native tongue) is a twisty tale of murder, guilt and deceit, playing out over a 16-year time period. Camille Lou pulls off the quite impressive feat of playing the main protagonist, Audrey Barreyre, as both a reckless 19-year-old and a lawyer in her mid-thirties, who finds herself forced to confront the fallout from the mistakes made by her younger self.The series doesn’t score too highly on the plausible-ometer, being somewhat reliant on the kindness of strangers who might overlook some of its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When we consider the storied history of Portuguese television, we naturally think of… er… well, perhaps we'll get back to you on that. But in the meantime there’s Turn of the Tide (or Rabo de Peixe to give it its original title), Augusto Fraga’s surprising and captivating story of a tiny community in the Azores which suddenly finds itself awash with cocaine. It’s set in the titular village of Rabo de Peixe, and centres on four friends who are eking out their uneventful and unpromising lives in the picturesque but remote archipelago (the islands are about 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic from Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Young women who were riveted by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones columns in the 1990s are now probably of the age where the menopause is, or has recently been, a bigger concern than landing your own Mr Darcy. Which is why Bridget Christie’s The Change (Channel 4) has arrived with ideal timing.I don’t mean Christie’s series is “the new Bridget Jones”. About the only significant crossover between the two – a prickly stance towards misogyny and lesser male infringements aside – is their obsession with keeping tabs on their daily round. Fielding sent up her own love of logging calorie counts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is possibly not ideal viewing for a spell of sunny weather in June, but Jack Thorne’s drama about a family trying to cope with a terminally ill child is as compelling as it’s painful. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen star as parents Andrew and Nicci, and Best Interests probes their private agony in piercingly intimate detail, but the focus also pulls out to encompass prickly issues of ethics, morality and the labyrinthine innards of the NHS.It might have ended up as a preachy, finger-pointing litany of sclerotic bureaucracy and entrenched attitudes, but Thorne’s writing and an excellent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hey-hey! Alright! The standard greeting of Kendall Roy will be much missed, along with all the other regular joys of Succession. It wasn’t always 100% perfect, thank goodness, it was all too human: changeable, moody, ultimately self-serving, just like its characters, especially as it powered to a climax.But its finale was television writing at its best, daring to slow down, even veer towards sentimentality, before hustling its audience to the finish line with a series of bruising twists and satisfying emotional contortions (a few spoilers lie ahead). Inside Waystar's glass palace the action Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The thought of yet another primetime true-crime series might weary the soul, even if it has been created by Ed Whitmore (Manhunt: Martin Clunes heading two cases as DI Colin Sutton), directed by Marc Evans (Hinterland: Wales’s contribution to modern noir) and stars Philip Glenister. More rapes and murders of young women from the archives? More cops with typewriters and a drinking habit being poorly led by myopic superiors?Steeltown Murders inevitably has some of this stock material, as it’s (partly) an account of the investigation into the rape and murder of two teenage girls in Llandarcy Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby had a memorable lockdown; it was when the Tasmanian comic got together with producer Jenney Shamash. And it's their courtship that forms the basis for Something Special, the wonderful new show by Gadsby which is now a Netflix special, recorded at the Sydney Opera House.Gadsby, whose previous shows have dealt with some pretty serious subjects, including rape, homophobia and misogyny, tells us drily at the top of the hour: “This is going to be a feelgood show. I feel I owe you one.”And yes, it is indeed a feelgood show (based on the previously toured Body of Work). Essentially, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Ten Pound Pom programme (or to use its official title, the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme) was devised to encourage British emigrants to Australia after World War Two. The idea was that the volunteers could escape from drab, rationing-battered Britain to the sun, sea and wide-open spaces of the Great Southern Land, while also helping to boost the Australian economy. Adults paid 10 quid and children travelled free.Notable participants in the project were future Prime Ministers of Australia Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard and Angus and Malcolm Young, later to become hard rock heroes with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When young Morse went speeding off in his Jag at the end of the Endeavour finale earlier this year, the road was left open for another, zootier Jag to zoom in, the racing green E-type belonging to DCI Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. Channel 5 launched the latest incarnation of P D James’s brooding detective-poet in 2021, basing season one on three books (Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, A Taste for Death) in two one-hour episodes each. Now a further three books have been adapted: Death of an Expert Witness, A Certain Justice, and The Murder Room. Behind the adaptations is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As Australia's greatest comedic export exits the stage, strewing gladioli, a promising contender for that title makes an entrance, trailing a dog on wheels. The dog is the titular Colin from Accounts, for the few who still haven’t tried this exceptional, refreshingly mature comedy. Why has this eight-parter from a husband and wife team seemingly overnight occupied a place in British hearts that even Canada’s Schitt’s Creek didn’t manage until its last year of transmission? And that show had lockdown blues to speed it along. They aren’t unalike: both have a core of geniality cut with Read more ...