TV
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A sun-baked island resort; Keeley Hawes taking a leisurely dip in an infinity pool as we hear her in voiceover musing on how events happen unchosen, with you in them; then we are up in her room, where she is texting somebody. The sounds of gunshots and mass panic jolt her into action. She rushes for her trainers – not flipflops, she admonishes herself, you are going to need to run.Then flashback to her among a busload of excited tourists, arriving at the hotel, unaware of their fate, naturally. More musing on life, choices, fate etc. You sense that writer Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard) is Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
[Here be spoilers.] If you have been glued to the second season of The Capture, just ended, does it bother you that its content is borderline science fiction? Probably not. Writer Ben Chanan’s depiction of artificial intelligence may outstrip the reality of what it can currently achieve, but he can sure spin a gripping TV series around AI's potential for creating chaos in the wrong hands. But which are the right hands? In season two, Chanan upgraded the AI he mapped out in season one, which pitted DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) against her own intelligence service, appalled Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A black box with a red blinking light is being stashed in a cabinet under the seating of the Olympic stadium in Munich. Then a hoodie-ed man is seen in silhouette, the stadium in the background. We are about to be plunged into the darker corners of the prosperous Bavarian city where, 50 years earlier, as the footage in the opening credits recalls, the infamous massacre of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by PLO gunmen took place.Different games are in the offing now, notably a special anniversary one between the local football team and one from Tel Aviv. This, various characters Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When the first series of The Capture arrived three years ago, theartsdesk liked it so much that we reviewed it three times. Writer-director Ben Chanan had successfully, and addictively, tapped into a secret dystopia of blanket digital surveillance and so-called “correction”, in which anyone might be manipulated by shadowy state agencies to serve their own hidden agendas.That sense of an apparently “real” world subsumed by a malign virtual facsimile which can be rewritten and modified at will again underpins this second series. As we saw in a chilling opening scene, the technology could even Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite the jarring effect of having British actors speaking colloquial English while purporting to be Dutch policemen working in Amsterdam, the second series of ITV’s Van der Valk arrived at its third and final episode feeling as if it had reached its comfort zone. The culture-crossover works less jarringly than it did in ITV’s recent Murder in Provence, and by keeping the show securely locked within the streets, docks, canals and familiar landmarks of Amsterdam, it brews up a persuasively Dutch flavour. The fact that the Dutch are famously fluent English speakers (probably because Dutch is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was the end of an era, as Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s bittersweet epic of the brilliantly devious Saul Goodman wound to a close. Hints of redemption were in the air, signalled by Saul reverting at last to his real name, James McGill. A closing shot of Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and his estranged soulmate Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) gazing at each other wordlessly through the wire of ADX Montrose prison (aka “The Alcatraz of the Rockies”) might even have brought a tear to a blackmailer’s eye.Still, it wasn’t enough to lead you to conclude that Saul was really a good guy at heart. These final Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The gifted writer-director Stefan Golaszewski (Him and Her, Mum) has surpassed himself with his latest drama series, Marriage. Given hour-long episodes to play with, rather than the usual half-hour, he has created an unfeasibly rich four-parter out of the simplest of means.We are in Golaszewski’s usual world of bedded-in domestic routine, where characters often hide their feelings and assume it’s just what you do. It looks like a comedy of modern manners, but it’s a minefield. Tonally, it’s in gradations of beige, pale grey and watery green, both visually and emotionally; then, much like the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The last couple of series of Shetland (BBC One) brought the previously much-loved series alarmingly close to shark-jumping territory, converting the remote and thinly-populated Shetland archipelago into a war zone teeming with people-trafficking gangs, murderers and drug dealers. Can Series 7 restore some sanity?This opening episode slithered down the ramp for a promising start. Series 6 left the career of DI Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall, here making his last appearance in the role) hanging in the balance, in the aftermath of the death of Donna Killick and her attempt to implicate him in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connoisseurs of the Britbox streaming service may already have caught up with this three-part series, which has evidently been pressed into service on ITV to pad out TV’s annual summer slump. They could have called it Midsomer Murders Goes to the Côte d’Azur, as it details the adventures of Investigating Judge Antoine Verlaque (Roger Allam) and his partner Marine Bonnet, a criminal psychologist played by Nancy Carroll.Based on the novels by Canadian author ML Longworth, the show poses as an old-fashioned detective series, but is really a shamelessly sybaritic wallow in the glorious scenery, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Period drama from Australia is something of a rarity on our televisions, so The Newsreader scores for novelty alone. It’s not startlingly innovative in form, but it does what it sets out to do in a highly satisfying way. Which is to tell a tale of everyday misogyny, racism, homophobia and backstabbing in the Aussie television industry of the mid-1980s.Running throughout are regular datelines, starting with the weekend of the Challenger disaster in February 1986 and progressing through to Chernobyl the following April. This timeline isn’t just adding handy topical references: these are the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The BBC publicity department doesn’t want reviewers to reveal too much about this three-parter in advance, so the description of its content here may seem skimpy. If you watch this mini-series, you will sort of understand why – its plot relies on coincidences (or are they?) and unexpected twists (or just implausible ones?), flashbacks to past traumas (are these reliable?) and nightmarish scenes (real or imagined?)What can be said is that we are following what happens to Gabriel (Iain De Caestecker), an ambulance dispatcher in Glasgow, one of the junior operatives in the control room, who has Read more ...