TV drama
Jasper Rees
How good was Howards End (BBC One)? Practically flawless. Even if it broke into a bit of an action-packed sprint towards the dénouement, it’s been a triumphant reaffirmation of EM Forster, a canonical favourite back in the 1980s courtesy of Merchant Ivory and David Lean who has since fallen out of favour with dramatists.It began with the casting. As the capable, questing Schlegel sisters Hayley Atwell and Philippa Coulthard (pictured below) rejoiced in a physical similarity which made it extraordinarily easy to believe in their mutual loyalty and intellectual compatibility – though of course Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A thankless task, perhaps, to find oneself following in the footsteps of the berserk Spanish melodrama I Know Who You Are (theartsdesk passim). However, BBC Four’s new Saturday night import, whose first series was shown on Channel 4 a couple of years ago, is a French cop show which knows what it’s talking about and does the simple stuff right.Eschewing the bright lights of Paris or the sumptuous sleaze of the Côte d'Azur, Witnesses – or Les Témoins, if you will – is set in northern France, where the skies tend to be grey and the air is cool and damp. There were sweeping shots Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s a storm heading to La Belle, the small forgotten town in the heart of the American West. As black clouds flash above the prairie, the injured body of Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) falls at the door of widowed rancher Alice Fletcher (Michelle Dockery). After adding one more wound to his collection, she takes in the stranger and helps him heal. Alice isn’t the only widow; everyone in town carries the weight of loss. Sheriff McNue is one of the only men not killed in a mining accident, but he passes like a ghost through the town, mourning his wife and failing sight. With news that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So, if you’re reading this you probably trudged all the weary way to the very end of I Know Who You Are. Or you didn’t but still want to find out what the hell happened. After 20-plus hours of twisting, turning, overblown drama, long-service medals are in order for all who flopped over the line. We are probably all feeling as drained and battered as half the cast: black-and-blue Santi Mur, anaemic Ana, slapped-up Pol, smashed-to-smithereens Heredia.The bloated brace of concluding episodes took up three and a quarter hours of BBC Four’s Saturday night schedule. There was so much crime-solving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development. This is the new drama from Kay Mellor, who set Band of Gold in a sorority of sex workers and Fat Friends among people mustering at Weightwatchers. With her long-established nose for a good yarn, she now moves in on that boiling cauldron of drama, Leeds city hall.It’s quite a shrewd concept. All human life is here: birth, marriage and alas death, all of them neatly packaged up into the opening episode's Read more ...
Owen Richards
BBC Two’s flagship crime drama Peaky Blinders returns for another guilty dose of slo-mo walking, flying sparks and anachronistic soundtracks. In the opening episode “The Noose”, we’re served a familiar course of family disputes, sinister threats and violent outbursts – but when the delivery is this exciting, who cares if it’s not anything new?We pick up where the last series left off: the Shelby clan imprisoned and facing the rope. Of course, family patriarch Tommy always finds a last-minute reprieve, but that close call has taken its toll and there’s only one man to blame. A year later Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can it really be a quarter-century since that finest of all Merchant-Ivory film adaptations, Howards End, was first released? So it is, astonishingly, which surely means the time is ripe for a fresh celluloid take on EM Forster's enduring 1910 novel about morality, love and loss in Edwardian-era England. The current outing grants the creators of this collaboration between the BBC and the American channel Starz four Sunday nights to capture what the glorious Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson film conveyed in half that time. The verdict so far: compelling stuff that doesn't as yet fully Read more ...
Ralph Moore
Like a lot of people, I came late to Peaky Blinders, bingeing on the first two brutal, but undeniably brilliant, series like the proverbial box-set sensation it quickly became. With its focus on the turmoil and fortunes of a particularly unruly Birmingham criminal family, its cast, led by Cillian Murphy, Paul Anderson and Helen McCrory, has explored the lives of the Shelby clan over three incendiary series so far – with the fourth starting on 15 November.It’s also a show that’s not afraid to pull out the big guns for the odd, even-more-evil, nemesis. "I don't want to die!" said Sam Neill when Read more ...
Saskia Baron
At its weakest The A Word is just Emmerdale with a twist of autism, especially when the drama swivels away from the little boy to focus on adult infidelities, a grumpy patriarch, sibling rivalries and comedy Poles wisecracking in subtitles. But at its best it captures accurately, if depressingly, the difficult feelings some parents go through when they’re coming to terms with the knowledge that their child is not standard issue.With huge viewing figures (seven million in the UK on BBC One for the first series) and mainly excellent reviews, The A Word is bound to be enormously influential on Read more ...
Owen Richards
Sky Atlantic’s German import is an intoxicating mix of intrigue and betrayal, set in the excessive days of the Weimar Republic. Gripping stories and extravagant production meet in the opening two episodes of this brilliantly promising Euro-noir.Babylon Berlin lays its cards on the table from the opening moments – a montage in reverse of gun fights, riots and war, no doubt all to come in the show’s upcoming eight episodes. It’s tense, engaging, and a serious marker that Germany is ready to carve its place in the television landscape.Inspector Gereon Rath is a recent transfer from Cologne, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Here we go again then. The “first series”, as the BBC are calling it after the fact, of I Know Who You Are slammed the brakes on and juddered to a bewildering halt back in the middle of August. Almost everyone who’d sat through the plot dodgems of those 10 episodes will have had the same reaction: eh? With no information to indicate otherwise, it looked as if the hatchet-faced procedural melodrama featuring the Elias-Castro axis of evil had chosen to commit hara-kiri in the middle of an uncompleted plotline. It was like Schubert’s Unfinished or Edwin Drood all over again, only less so.In the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Laughable though it frequently – oh go on then, always – is, Strike Back is obviously a target-rich environment for those of a thespian persuasion. The likes of Richard Armitage, Andrew Lincoln, Robson Green and Michelle Yeoh have passed through the show’s bullet-spattered portals over its previous five series, and for series six Warren Brown gets the gig as the special forces maverick out for retribution.The source of these vengeful sentiments was revealed in the opening set-piece, stylishly shot in panoramic high-def. A Black Hawk helicopter thudded purposefully across the hot, sandy wastes Read more ...