Netflix
Adam Sweeting
Conceived and written by Matt Charman, whose CV includes an Oscar nomination for his work on Steven Spielberg’s film Bridge of Spies, Hostage is a rather puzzling mix of political thriller and domestic drama which can never decide whether it’s serious or not.In the lead role of British Prime Minister Abigail Dalton, Suranne Jones is called upon to do political battle with the French president Vivienne Toussaint (a cold and frosty Julie Delpy), and their fraught power-women exchanges give the show some of its best moments. Especially the bit where Toussaint bounces Dalton into a policy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t really want to belong to the Buckley family, a star-crossed dynasty who run their fishing business out of Havenport, North Carolina. As Bree Buckley (daughter of Harlan and Belle) tells recently-discovered family member Shawn, “I wouldn’t wish us on anybody.”The family members all have their problems. For instance, Bree (Melissa Benoist, pictured below) is a recovering (with difficulty) addict, and she’s stricken by the memory of how she inadvertently burned down her home with her young child in it.As it happens, the family fishing operation is struggling to survive, and in order Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr Darcy at his gorgeous country pile tries to reset her life post-breakup with a grown-up new job in London. Welcome to Bridget Jones country as seen through the lens of New Yorker Lena Dunham. The 10-part Netflix series that Dunham and her English musician husband Luis Felber have created, Too Much, is just that: a welter of verbiage, weird characters and relentless squelchy sex – though the sex scenes are virtually the only occasions our heroine stops Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Death can be a powerful driver for comedy, as countless stand-ups and sitcom writers will affirm, but it has to be sensitively handled. Dark humour can be, forgive the pun, life-affirming, and an excuse for the tears, whether of pain or pleasure, to flow.There’s nothing really dark in Sarah Silverman latest stand-up show PostMortem, her Netflix Special recorded at the Beacon Theatre in New York, and far removed from some of the more shock-value comedy she was once known for.It’s about the deaths, just nine days apart, of her beloved father, Donald (known as Schleppy) and her stepmother Janice Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck.But Morck not only doesn’t have a very English name, but is far from your ideal English gentleman with a Lady Mary on his arm. The series opens with a brutal incident in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The trunk in the title is a luxury item, worth 50 million won – just north of £27,000 – shown sinking in deep water in the opening credits. It weaves through one of the classiest recent collaborations between Netflix and Korean TV, a haunting psychological drama that’s balm to the soul after the mob-handed violence on offer here at home. Slugging it out in The Trunk are two alpha females, in a setup that on paper sounds like something out of Black Mirror. The motor of the plot is futuristic: NM, a clandestine contract marriage service, socially a no-no for high-status people. In essence Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the Korean romcoms section. This is a recommendation for romcom fans, a warm indulgent bubble bath of a watch. It's like turning the clock back to more innocent times, while full of contemporary pizzazz. The latest series to drop, a Netflix coproduction, is the most accessible yet, and the funniest. Having said that, The Potato Lab sounds as if it comes from the People’s Republic in the north. It’s a variant of the workplace comedy that’s been in TV’s DNA since The Rag Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous 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 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 ...