TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Whatever the Waitrose and Morrisons commercials are telling you, as far as TV schedulers are concerned ‘tis the season for murder. Thus a Christmas Maigret has become an instant tradition, with Rowan Atkinson reprising his performance as Georges Simenon’s dolorous detective.He’s certainly better at it than he was when this new Maigret made his debut 18 months ago, and the production as a whole is getting the hang of finding the balance between the introspective and almost Jesuitical detective and the ugly violence and sleaze through which he moves. In the debut story, called simply Maigret, Read more ...
Owen Richards
Luca Changretta got his just desserts, Alfie Solomons made a last gasp for the quiet life, and Thomas Shelby revealed his true enemy – Peaky Blinders wrapped up another exciting series in a high-octane and neat finale.Tommy always has a way out; four series in and we still fall for it. In tonight’s final episode, it looked like his reckoning had finally arrived; Arthur’s death snapped Tommy into a violent rage in scenes reminiscent of last series’ capture of Vincente Changretta. It’s in these moments we witness the real Tommy; a terrifying and dangerous man who drags his family down with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Crooked House is being released as a film in various territories, but has already been shown on television in America and has now surfaced as a drama on Channel 5 bearing the title Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. It duly falls in with a recent televisual tradition for serving up the Queen of Crime as a Christmas treat. See also A Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None (which would have been joined by Ordeal by Innocence on Boxing Day until the BBC pulled it on learning that its star Ed Westwick was accused of rape and sexual assault).Adapted from the novel published in 1949 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s remarkable how pervasive the Scandi-noir formula has become, with its penchant for weird and perverted killers, labyrinthine plotting and intriguingly flawed protagonists. The French-made Witnesses: A Frozen Death was another fragment chipped off that Nordic iceberg, though it developed its own particular character thanks to strength in depth in the casting and a strong visual signature which fully exploited moody, melancholy locations in northern France.Absorbing as it was, A Frozen Death did little to promote optimism about human nature. There are plenty of miserable real-life stories Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For the third and allegedly final time, we hasten back to the Kent coast for another outbreak of cross-Channel crime. Not all that surprisingly, this new series of the Franglais cop show focuses on a people-smuggling racket bringing bedraggled Syrian refugees over to Britain from the French coast, though it might have been a bit more fun if we’d had a mackerel war between French and British fishermen, or were plunged into the unfolding crisis as a Eurostar-load of Brussels bureaucrats were forced to drink Kentish sparkling wine.Anyway, it’s bonjour all over again to dogged British detective Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week we were all meant to be gripped by a bunch of ancient geezers nicking diamonds in Hatton Gardens. The postponement of ITV’s nightly four-part drama – the second of four (four!!) different versions of the infamous burglary – is a bit of a mystery. Now you see it on the cover of the Radio Times. Now it’s in mothballs. The beneficiary of this hasty swerve was Bancroft. Originally made for ITV Encore, a channel which is about to become an ex-channel, it has suddenly come in from the cold.What does it say about a drama that was to have been launched in a graveyard where thousands not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Beneath the creamy overlay of gowns, crystal chandeliers, palaces, uniformed flunkies and a sumptuous (albeit CGI-enhanced) Royal Yacht, a steely pulse of realpolitik fuels The Crown, returning to Netflix for its much-anticipated second series. Vaulting straight back on the horse, creator Peter Morgan pitches us into a royal marriage heading for the rocks, a weak and wobbly Prime Minister getting sucked into a disastrous escapade in the Middle East, and the story of the Queen’s troubled younger sister trying to a find a place in the world away from the flotsam of European royalty offered up Read more ...
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 ...