TV drama
Adam Sweeting
The fifth, and supposedly final, series depicting the adventures of the covert-action tough guys of Section 20 won't surprise anyone, but it won't disappoint its devotees either. Fast, brutal and violent, Strike Back is a slick mix of movie-like production values and infinitesimal demands on the viewer's intellect, a winning commercial formula if ever there was one.The action opened in the steamy heat of Thailand, where English girl Chloe Foster thought she was about to have a quick leg-over with a handsome local boy, but instead found herself kidnapped by a thuggish gang of bandits. Turned Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A third series for Kay Mellor’s rags-to-riches series can herald few real surprises. We know, roughly speaking, what we’ll be getting: a cautionary tale – be careful what you wish for – populated by warm, well-drawn and big-hearted characters who are believably flawed and hiding secrets of the sort that fill the time and mouths of garden fence gossips across the country. That, and the reliable, solid ensemble cast that Mellor’s track record (Band of Gold, Fat Friends, In the Club) can command.What we might not have been expecting (had we managed to avoid the pre-transmission press) was for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps only Sheridan Smith could have played the role of Lisa Lynch in The C Word [***], not just because of the no-messing directness she brought to the role, but because Lynch nominated her for the job. Lynch had attained a particular kind of celebrity as author of the blog, Alright Tit, about how she was coping with a diagnosis of breast cancer. This became the book, The C Word, and when a tv adaptation was mooted, Lynch tweeted Smith and said "only you can play me".The bitter twist in the tale was that Nicole Taylor's original C Word screenplay ended when Lynch had been declared Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For Australians and New Zealanders, the grim meat-grinder of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 was their equivalent of the Somme, albeit under brilliant Aegean skies. The Australian-made Anzac Girls is based on real-life diaries and letters from the era, and homes in on five nurses from Down Under who were sent to treat the casualties. Inevitably they found conditions far more shocking and horrific than they'd imagined.However, as the BBC discovered with its own nurses-at-war yarn The Crimson Field, this fraught and poignant environment may theoretically sound like a goldmine for drama, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives.This opener starred Jason Manford as Marty, a salesman who prided himself on his glib motormouthing skills. However, it looked like his career was heading for the ditch. No longer brimming Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. However, elsewhere Poldark displays potentially more damaging failings. The Corporation is indecently fond of bigging up its own creations, but the trailers for Poldark were better then the thing itself. It feels like a mash-up of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop UKIP setting the political agenda, bulldozing its way to centre stage to demand a place in the forthcoming televised election debates. And while the pantomime buffoonery of Farage and Godfrey Bloom has provided endless scope for ridicule, the very existence of Channel 4’s fictional documentary, set in an imagined but uncomfortably near future, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In the tradition of A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown and Staying On, Indian Summers is ambitious, a serious soap attempting to show the dying days of the Raj through a host of interwoven personal and political attachments. Passions run high in the foothills of the Himalayas, cool in the Indian summer, but X-rated for human relationships. This jumbo-sized opener (the first of 10 episodes) had a tangled web of plotlines woven round a variety of class and caste, racial, religious and sexual tensions, amid a potentially explosive political situation. It's all set in the gorgeous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finally the moment the Breaking Bad diaspora has been waiting for, with the arrival of Vince Gilligan's new show about the earlier career of New Mexico's least scrupulous lawyer, Saul Goodman. Mind you, the title is a little bit misleading, because Saul doesn't exist yet. In this incarnation, he's still just a hustling low-life called Jimmy McGill, a man who never knowingly leaves any barrel unscraped.Goodman was often used as light relief in Breaking Bad, providing interludes of comic sleaze amid the remorseless descent into moral darkness, but here we must, perforce, get a fuller sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can't beat 'em, steal brazenly from 'em. Instead of importing another Scandinavian drama series and slapping on some subtitles, or recycling Fargo or Breaking Bad (or for that matter Deadwood or Twin Peaks), Sky Atlantic has pushed the boat out and created its own slab of sub-zero Nordic mystery, packed with bankable international names. If this extended pilot episode was a reliable guide, it's going to be a tortuous ride on black ice.Fortitude is a remote town in the Arctic Circle, perched on the edge of a majestic and somewhat scary glacier. Up to now it's been renowned among the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mercifully not preceded by a Broadchurch-style hype-tsunami, the new series of Mr Selfridge has slipped neatly back into the Sunday 9pm slot as if it's the rightful owner just back from a year of travelling round the world. It's not revolutionary, ground-breaking or "subversive", but equipped with some new characters and promising plotlines, this opening episode ushered us into the post-World War One era with a spring in its step and the wind in its hair.However, first we had to dispatch poor Rose Selfridge, Harry's much-loved wife (who was played by Frances O'Connor, latterly of The Missing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why writers and TV companies like the idea of creating sequels to successful series, but trying to make lightning strike twice has obvious drawbacks. In the case of the original Broadchurch, the runaway ratings blockbuster which ended in April 2013, the story felt so complete and self-contained that the notion of a sequel seemed redundant, or gratuitous.But anyway here's series two, arriving in a kind of tumult of secrecy as ITV stoutly withheld any previews or much information of any kind from clamouring newshounds. Such is the allure of the Broadchurch brand that this opener Read more ...