TV drama
Adam Sweeting
“Everybody lies," says property developer Tony to his PA and secret lover Natalie. “Even your mum probably.” And of course he’s not wrong.Sarah Williams’s drama, showing over four consecutive nights on ITV, is an easy-to-digest and deftly-wrought piece of work, using an unspecified accident which has left somebody in hospital – Williams has bent over backwards to avoid revealing the victim’s identity until the final episode – to prise open the secrets and lies of Vivien (Francesca Annis) and her family. Vivien, who's turning 70, has been living on the Sussex coast for the past 40 years, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apparently network executives initially reacted with alarm to the premise of Hunters, Amazon’s new big-ticket series chiefly (though by no means entirely) notable for hosting Al Pacino’s first full-scale television role. Its story of Jewish Nazi-hunters tracking down Nazis living in the USA in the 1970s is told with cartoon-ish brio, treating borderline-taboo subject matter with throwaway insouciance. Comparisons with Quentin Tarantino’s buccaneering approach to good taste and historical reality have already been made, and they’re not too wide of the mark.Creator David Weil throws down the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This eight-part mystery from Netflix is based on the titular novel by American writer Harlan Coben, who has formed a production company with Rochdale’s own Nicola Schindler, the production brains behind Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax and many more. The action has been transposed from New Jersey to Manchester – the one in England, not Massachusetts – and a strong and varied British cast does the heavy lifting, but there’s something in the mix that never quite feels right. Maybe it’s that things that seem par for the course in America’s moronic inferno can look hilarious in a homely Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Netflix’s Sex Education has returned to our screens and streams. The show made waves last year for its refreshing take on the teen comedy-drama. It took on abortion, consent and female pleasure — subjects strikingly absent from our actual high school educations. The result was a show that was always bingeable, sometimes educative, and oozing with sex-positive delights. Not everyone liked it. But those of us who did — teenagers all over again — could not stop talking about it. These are high expectations for a show going into its sophomore season. But thank God and thank Laurie Nunn: this is a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The return of screenwriter Abi Morgan’s series about a largely-female London law firm is no doubt in tune with our gender and equality-conscious times, but that doesn’t mean it’s great television. Its legal storylines are counterpointed against episodes of sentimentality and self-congratulation, as if it wanted to be The Good Wife but ended up as Doctors. It’s the kind of show where a character might notice an old photo on the mantelpiece and drift off in a sentimental reverie, encouraged by insipid singer-songwriter balladry.The best news is Nicola Walker, who clothes herself in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You could sometimes begin to believe that the notion of original TV drama is dying out, replaced by an interminable stream of adaptations and remakes. Did somebody mention Dracula? Screenwriter Sarah Phelps is currently the BBC’s go-to specialist for makeovers of Agatha Christie, having adapted The Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, The ABC Murders, and Ordeal by Innocence.She’s unapologetic about the extensive changes she wreaks upon Christie’s source material (in Ordeal by Innocence, she notoriously changed the identity of the killer). “Have I changed a load of stuff? Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The L Word originally ran for six seasons between 2004 and 2009, and its then-revolutionary depiction of the lives of a group of lesbians in Los Angeles won it both a fanatical audience and acclaim for its game-changing content, exploring such topics as same-sex marriage, gay adoption and female sexuality which weren't being seen elsewhere on TV. But more than a decade later, how will this revamped version (on Sky Atlantic) fare?Whereas the prototype landed in a TV environment where viewers needed extra-sensory perception to detect a lesbian (let alone trans) character, that now feels like Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji of the Iraqi police may be set to become one of those classically dog-eared, depressed and down-at-heel detectives who have proliferated in crime fiction. He could join a lineage that includes Martin Cruz Smith’s battered Russian sleuth Arkady Renko, or Bernie Gunther, anti-hero of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy. Or he may create his own category of one.Like the aforementioned, Khafaji finds himself battling for survival against a hostile regime (or at least the chaotic and combustible remains of one, as the heavy-handed Americans impose themselves on a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s an intriguing question. If a new Messiah appeared today, what kind of reception could he (if it was a he) expect? Possibly something similar to the one which greeted Jesus, according to Netflix’s new series Messiah.Created by Michael Petroni, it stars Mehdi Debhi in the role of Al-Masih, a man who never makes explicit claims for his divine powers, but who is accompanied by a trail of miraculous phenomena as he travels around the world. Al-Masih resembles a Christ-figure as imagined by a painter from the Italian Renaissance, and radiates a charismatic aura which compels people to follow Read more ...
theartsdesk
As symbolic moments go, the arrival of Martin Scorsese's new gangster epic The Irishman on Netflix took some beating. It exemplified the adage that "TV is the new cinema", and at the same time perhaps suggested a new and less digestible adage, something like "TV and cinema are now both parts of an ever-expanding entertainment continuum". Catchy, eh?The inexorable spread of the global media giants is reflected in our artsdesk critics' choice of 2019's Best and Worst TV shows. While it's well known that Succession or Game of Thrones are HBO productions, it's less widely advertised that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you came to this expecting to be reminded of such ghosts of Scrooges past as Alastair Sim or Bill Murray, you will have been reaching either for the brandy or the defibrillator. In the hands of screenwriter Steven Peaky Blinders Knight and director Nick Murphy (from BBC One in partnership with the American FX network ), Dickens’s perennial tale of seasonal repentance has been transformed into a gruelling journey of cathartic horror.Having said that, it was frustrating that the opening episode (with the final two following on consecutive nights) is the least compelling of the three. It took Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...