TV drama
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 ...
Mark Sanderson
And now the end is near… and so Inspector George Gently faces his final case. Deemed too political to be broadcast in its original slot in May – 10 days before the General Election – Gently and the New Age was postponed until 8.30pm last night. An ignominious time for a crime show that often burst the bonds of genre to create drama of real power. At least, in more ways than one, it went out with a bang.It is December 1970 and yet the winter of discontent seems to have already begun. A scab – or, as John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) suggests, “a non-union worker” – is stabbed as he crosses Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Beware – here be spoilers, though if you can make them out through the blizzard of cliché that engulfed the last double-bill of this thunderingly underwhelming Nordic noir then you’re already ahead of me.Black Lake (BBC Four) saw a group of largely unlikable wealthy young people, led by the rude and overbearing Johan (Filip Berg, pictured below), stuck at a ski resort in the middle of nowhere with, wait for it: no phone signal, a pair of unlikely brothers (one of whom looks like a serial killer, while the other acts like one) and, best of all, a grumpy and deeply suspicious caretaker. After Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The second helping of Doctor Foster (BBC One) looked for a long time as if it would taste exactly like the first. Another plate of hell hath no fury, please, with extra bile on the side. That was essentially the plot up until the end of last week’s episode, in which Simon Foster found himself evicted for the second time. What would Lady Bracknell say? To be thrown out of your own life once may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like plotlessness.Then came this finale in which all the supporting characters had been bulldozed off screen, and it turned out to be all about the boy. Poor Tom ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Peter Moffat, author of Silk and The Village, has turned his sights on the last days of Empire for his latest series. Specifically, Moffat has mined his own memories of growing up in a British Army family in Aden in the 1960s, where his father was in the Military Police.The story begins as Captain Nick Page (Joseph Kennedy) is about to leave Aden (an unprepossessing but strategically significant port in what is now Yemen), to be replaced by the young and untried Captain Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones, pictured below with Jessie Buckley). Behind him, Page leaves a garrison Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a moment in The Deuce (Sky Atlantic) – a rare quiet one – where a working girl called Darlene is visiting a kindly old gent on her books. He has A Tale of Two Cities on his TV, the old black and white version with Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton preparing to do a far far better thing. As the final shot of the guillotine pulls back over the Paris rooftops, Darlene (played by Dominique Fishback) can’t believe what she’s just seen. She should read the book, the old fella suggests. “There’s a book?”There isn’t a book of The Deuce. There doesn’t need to be, because even after one episode of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Sky’s Head of Drama Anne Mensah puts it, her ambition is to “stay local but look global”. This might serve as a motto for television in its entirety, as technology swallows the planet and TV is increasingly shaped by coalitions of international broadcasters and production companies. Internet streaming services have abolished national boundaries far more effectively than the European Commission ever could.The roster of programmes that Mensah has supervised for Sky’s various channels is an index of this process, making her an obvious nominee for the h.100 Broadcasting award. She has brought Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are two Williams brothers – Jack and Harry – who are mainly known for two series of The Missing. No chance of the Williamses going missing. Quite the reverse. As of today – Monday 11 September – they seem to have cloned. Two new drama series by the Williams boys have started on BBC One and ITV at exactly the same minute, and they will both conclude at the same instant six episodes later. One can only imagine that the writers begged and pleaded one or both channels to separate them in the schedules, but it didn’t happen and here we are.On ITV there’s Liar. On BBC One, bid welcome to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Could handsome, successful, designer-stubbly Ioan Gruffudd really be a rapist? Yes, according to schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). No, according to Gruffudd’s character Andrew Earlham, a distinguished surgeon and widower apparently horrified to be accused of such a thing.As you may have heard, the scriptwriting Williams brothers (Harry and Jack) – famed for, among other things, The Missing – have been busy. Their six-part mystery Liar kicked off at exactly the same time as their six-part thriller Rellik on BBC One, a coincidence almost as uncanny as three hurricanes tearing up Read more ...