TV drama
Adam Sweeting
We knew that Michael Sheen was a skilful and versatile actor, but lately he’s been getting dangerously good. Last year he roared into the third season of The Good Fight as the outrageous drug-fuelled lawyer Roland Blum, like an explosive fusion of his fellow-Welshmen Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Now, after wickedly impersonating Chris Tarrant in ITV’s Quiz and indulging in some comical actor-baiting in the BBC’s Staged, he arrives in Sky 1’s new US import Prodigal Son as the brilliant Dr Martin Whitly.But behind his suave and charming exterior, Dr Whitly is a profoundly deranged serial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, The Plot Against America flashes back to the global turbulence of the 1940s to depict a counterfactual America that turns to the dark side. Instead of the re-election of Franklin D Roosevelt for a third term in 1940, the aviation pioneer and wildly popular celebrity Charles Lindbergh is elected President, on a platform of keeping America out of the new war in Europe.The real Lindbergh had lived in Europe during the 1930s and was suspected of Nazi sympathies – he was awarded the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, which the Hitler regime gave Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the midst of our increasingly confrontational politics of race and gender, it was a timely move to make this series (on BBC Two) about Seventies radical feminism and the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the USA, even if some of the minutiae are liable to sound abstract or alien to British viewers. Cate Blanchett storms brilliantly to the fore as Phyllis Schlafly, a proud Republican housewife and champion of traditional family values, and staunch opponent of the Amendment.Schlafly is that bewildering paradox, a conservative revolutionary, which apparently is what lured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
American history of the 1930s and ‘40s suddenly seems to be all the rage on TV, cropping up in the reborn Perry Mason, Das Boot and now this new incarnation of Penny Dreadful (Sky Atlantic). The original was a blowsy Gothic mash-up of Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde and anything vaguely related that could be made to fit.But this new one, again created and written by John Logan, leaps forward to Los Angeles in 1938. The city looks alluring under beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine, but there is unease in the air. Rumours of the coming European war are percolating, California’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The second series of Das Boot (Sky Atlantic) began strongly, and by the time we reached this last pair of episodes it was almost too agonising to watch. You could argue that it sometimes overreached by stretching the scope of the narrative to breaking point, but at its core it’s a study of human values under impossible pressure. Many have been found wanting, but others have discovered something fine within themselves.As it sped towards a conclusion – although not one so conclusive that it didn’t leave plenty of potential for series 3 – the horror of total war continued to exert crushing force Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.For the purposes of this entertaining, if slight, new US drama series (on ITV2), the object was a flying saucer, and unknown to the locals, unearthly survivors from the crash have been living among them ever since. The secrets of the past begin to unravel when Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to this “sleepy cowboy town” and starts re-establishing contact with her old Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).The original Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner told readers next to nothing about Mason’s history and background, so creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones had a huge canvas to splash about on when they devised their new show. Read more ...
Davide Abbatescianni
After the success of the sci-fi crime drama 1983 (2018), another Polish original series has landed at Netflix. The Woods, directed by Leszek Dawid and Bartosz Konopka, is a six-part mystery thriller adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel, set in two main time spans: 1994 and 2019. The story centres on the Warsaw prosecutor Paweł Kopiński (Grzegorz Damięcki), who is still grieving the loss of his sister Kamila (Martyna Byczkowska) 25 years earlier, when she walked into the woods at a summer camp and was never seen again.In 2019, the discovery of a homicide victim – presumably Artur Perkowski, a boy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal with the nerve agent novichok in 2018 was one of the more bizarre episodes in recent memory, a kind of delayed-action echo of the Cold War. Sergei, a former Russian military intelligence officer who acted as a double agent for Britain’s MI6 in the 1990s and early 2000s, had relocated to the UK in 2010 under a spy exchange agreement and was living in Salisbury, but evidently never felt entirely safe. As he was quoted as saying in this BBC One dramatisation of the affair, “Putin’s gonna get me”.Typically of the goings-on in the worlds of espionage and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Das Boot made an impressive debut early last year with its entwined narratives of war by land and sea. This second instalment (Sky Atlantic) looks set to be better still, exploring the strata of life under Nazi occupation in the German-run port of La Rochelle while also developing the American connection which we saw glimpses of last time around.It opened with a bang, or a series of bangs, as we joined Johannes von Reinhartz (Clemens Schick), skippering his submarine U-822 in an attack on a merchant ship on a dark and turbulent Atlantic. As the ship sank, von Reinhartz was horrified to see Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Reese Witherspoon has evolved into a growth industry on the new frontier of Big Television. Her production company Hello Sunshine has a heap of projects on the go with a range of networks, and following her success with Big Little Lies (for HBO), Little Fires Everywhere comes to you courtesy of Hulu (in the US) and Amazon Prime.Varied as her plans may be, Reese the performer knows exactly who she is. It’s not too difficult to trace her character in Little Fires Everywhere, Elena Richardson, back to the ferociously focused and determined Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, while Elena could be a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This short series of new dramas (on BBC Four) by a group of leading playwrights was commissioned by Headlong and Century Films, a week before the virus lockdown was announced on 23 March, and represents an artistic first response to a situation nobody can fully comprehend. As the introductory caption said, “it changed our society in a way that is… Unprecedented.”Three separate pieces had been squeezed into this opening half-hour slot, each finding its own angle on the crisis and each featuring actors delivering their performances via the pandemic lifeline of video conferencing. James Graham’s Read more ...