TV
Helen Hawkins
The return of Mike White’s hit series can be celebrated for one major reason: its extraordinary music. That may sound like a minor reason, but this third iteration of the show confirms that the show's sound world is key to its success.Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer has, in each season, created uniquely bewitching sounds that are variously sinister, playful and melodramatic. Inventively using pan pipes and flutes plus a menagerie of feral noises and vocals, fleshed out with synthesizers, this audio backdrop mirror the location, its fauna as well as its musical traditions. Over the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition.Constructed on the fraught and frequently hostile relationship between septuagenarian superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her young and ambitious scriptwriter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), Hacks is a forensic examination of the showbiz life and the showbiz business. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous actors, though its gung-ho depiction of the heroics of American special forces during the appalling Somalian civil war always felt a little uncomfortable.A quarter of a century later, Netflix’s three-part series Surviving Black Hawk Down, directed by Jack Macinnes and produced by Ridley Scott Associates, attempts to paint a more even-handed picture. It’s a documentary-style account of events, told by some of the real participants, interspersed with action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been 50 years since the USA bowed to the inevitable and pulled out of Vietnam, in the midst of harrowing scenes of anguish and chaos. Apple’s new six-part documentary series doesn’t bring any astounding new revelations about America’s traumatic South-East Asian adventure, but by picking out individual stories to illustrate different phases of the conflict between March 1965 and April 1975, it brings some human insight into what lay behind the hideous casualty figures and TV footage of helicopters, firefights, terrorised civilians and aircraft dropping napalm.Constructed from a mass of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest from the This Is Us creator, Dan Fogelman, is a futuristic take on relationships among survivors once Earth has suffered an extinction event, a popular concept in these troubled times. Except that it starts out by following an equally popular narrative track, the classic locked-door whodunit. Where is this heading? After watching the first three episodes released so far by Disney+, I honestly can’t tell.We are in what seems to be a fairly upscale American suburb. An athletic Black man (Sterling K Brown) we have watched wake up, get dressed and go running checks in with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The thesis underlying this two-part drama is that Brian Walden’s 1989 TV interview with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher marked the end of the long-form, forensic political interview, while also being a catalyst for Thatcher’s resignation a year later. Stephen Frears directs, and James Graham wrote it, basing it on the book Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying To Me? by Rob Burley, a producer of a string of political programmes for ITV and the BBC.At least it’s not yet another rehash of the Maitlis-Prince Andrew interview, though one suspects that’s probably what triggered its creation. But this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An opening sequence of a drone flying over a busy street in Baghdad, followed by a huge explosion that leaves many casualties and a gaping hole where a row of buildings used to be, suggests that Prime Target is going to be another special forces, war-on-terror type of drama. Refreshingly, that first impression is quickly dispelled as the action abruptly detours to bucolic Cambridge, where we meet brilliant PhD student Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall), who lets off steam outside the groves of academe with a blast of power-rowing on the Cam.But his real mission in life (we will learn) is his fascination Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If nothing else, ITV’s new thriller Out There is a fabulous advertisement for the Welsh countryside. Many scenes were shot in Brecon and the Black Mountains, amid acres of wild, rambling moorland and majestic hillsides. But it’s not always a happy place. Here, farmer Nathan Williams (Martin Clunes) is trying to hang on to his family business, but profits are low, overheads are high, and the recently widowed Nathan isn’t as young as he used to be.The dire state of the rural economy is rammed home when his friend and neighbour, Owen Thomas, succumbs to depression, locks himself in his barn and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the late Eighties and Nineties, Tony Slattery became one of the most ubiquitous faces on television, appearing regularly on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and Have I Got News For You while popping up in quizzes and sitcoms all over the place (as well as in the movies Peter’s Friends and The Crying Game). He even became a film critic for a while, hosting Saturday Night at the Movies.It was probably inevitable that Slattery’s exhausting hyperactivity and somewhat self-admiring persona would begin to pall, but nobody would have predicted the scale of the calamity that befell him. Having become Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems The Osmonds may not have been the worst outrage perpetrated on an unsuspecting public by the Mormons. American Primeval is set in the 1850s, and is based around the real-life massacre of settlers travelling from Arkansas to California by the Mormon militia known as as the Nauvoo Legion. This took place at Mountain Meadows, Utah, apparently triggered by rising tensions between the US federal government and Mormon leader Brigham Young.Directed by Peter Berg (Deepwater Horizon, Lone Survivor etc) and created by screenwriter Mark L Smith (Twisters, The Revenant), American Primeval uses Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 was one of the ghastliest events in what would become known as the War on Terror, and 36 years later it’s still shrouded in mystery and ambiguity.Lockerbie: A Search for Truth has been adapted from the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, and leads the viewer through Swire’s tortuous quest to winkle out the real facts behind the bombing which killed his daughter Flora, along with 258 other passengers and crew as well as 11 people on the ground.The depiction of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having carved a swathe of terror and destruction through the Axis forces in North Africa, the SAS return for a second series (again written by Steven Knight, and with another rockin’ soundtrack featuring the likes of The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” and Magazine’s very apt “Shot by Both Sides”).With the SAS’s founding father, David Stirling, a prisoner of war in the medieval pile of Forte di Gavi, command of the unit has passed to Paddy Mayne, played with a kind of barely-controlled madness by Jack O’Connell. Now the unit is tasked with being the point of the Read more ...