TV drama
Adam Sweeting
The last time I noticed Sean Harris he was playing Micheletto Corella, the merciless assassin and enforcer for Pope Jeremy Irons and his Borgia clan. Unpleasantly good at it he was too.Perhaps it would be unfair to describe his appearance in Southcliffe as typecasting, but you can hardly fail to spot some similarities. As Stephen Morton, whose robotic killing spree with his private collection of automatic weapons is the driver behind a group of interlocking stories set in the coastal town of Southcliffe, Harris projects a similar suppressed intensity and inner turmoil, as well as a staring- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Does it always have to be so flipping grim up north? In Channel 4's new four-parter, the Mill in question is at Quarry Bank in Cheshire. The date: 1833, during the Industrial Revolution. Villains du jour: the Greg family, industrialists and merciless exploiters of child labour.As the first episode opened with the tolling of the wake-up bell calling the poor, struggling young workers to another dismal day on the factory floor, it all felt terribly familar. We were back at Lowood school with Jane Eyre, enmeshed in the proles-versus-fatcats class struggle of South Riding, reliving the grinding Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mobster roles have helped define many of America's greatest screen actors, from James Cagney to Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Thanks to his portrayal of Tony Soprano in HBO's TV masterpiece The Sopranos, James Gandolfini has made an unforgettable addition to their ranks.Though he has died, apparently of a heart attack, at the shockingly early age of 51, Gandolfini's performance across the six seasons of The Sopranos felt more like a piece of American folklore than a mere acting performance. Violent and thuggish yet also confused and conflicted, Tony Soprano was the all-powerful Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The idea of writing nine 30-minute dramas (or more like 26 minutes when you take the ads out) about the thrills and calamities of first-dating might have been asking for trouble, but seems to be working out unexpectedly well so far. The crafty part about the concept (dreamed up by Bryan Skins Elsley) is that instead of having to explain the setup and establish the characters' relationships, you just watch two strangers starting the process from scratch, so they're doing the job for you.After a persuasive start on Monday with David and Mia, starring Oona Chaplin and Will Mellor, the ante edged Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In the end, it was always going to come down to the last episode whether The Fall was powerful female-driven drama or, to quote another writer for theartsdesk, “misogynistic torture porn”. That conclusion, however, was as elusive as the ending of Allan Cubitt’s thriller; cunningly set up as if to strongarm BBC Two into a second series before the announcement was made.The Fall has avoided many of the cliches of the traditional whodunnitPerhaps part of the confusion was mine, given that once upon a time Gillian Anderson played my first feminist hero. Having done the awkward stage door meet Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Maybe everything that dies someday comes back," Bruce Springsteen posited in "Atlantic City". The residents of the French Alpine village at the centre of The Returned may conclude that he had a point. The Returned (Les Revenants in the original French) might sound superficially as if it's the latest in the ongoing vogue for zombies which (along with a parallel strain of photogenic vampires) is exerting a stranglehold on the entertainment industry. Brad Pitt goes to war with a global zombie plague in the new movie World War Z, The Walking Dead needs no introduction, and we've had Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although Peter Moffat's story of a Derbyshire village has been designed to evolve into a 100-year saga, this first series amounted to an extended requiem for the fallen in World War One. The monstrous thunder of the guns has reverberated incessantly throughout these six episodes, as the story has wound its way though a woefully predictable trajectory of patriotism, optimism, disillusionment, despair and bitterness.But Moffat, in his Not-Downton Abbey hat, has been at pains to stress the ways that responses to the conflict were determined by class or social standing. In an especially anguished Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A new drama series at 9pm on a Friday? How often does that happen, eh? Friday is supposed to be reserved for quiz shows, comedies and BBC Four documentaries about disco music.Whether it should have happened is, for the time being, a moot point. After this first of three episodes (adapted by Kate Brooke from Dorothy Koomson's novel) we're left in that familiar position of having a crime, a victim, and some carefully-manufactured ambiguity about the perpetrator, or perpetratrors. We also have a double time frame, the present day and 1995, which can hardly help but bring on flashbacks to the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Peter Moffat's latest project is a long-form drama reminiscent of Heimat (the Edgar Reitz project that told a German family's story through the 20th century) in which he charts 100 years of life in a Derbyshire village up to the present day. The first series started last night and its six episodes cover 1914-1920; the following series haven't yet been commissioned, but on the evidence of the opening chapter Moffat must be hopeful.The story is told through the eyes of Bert Middleton (David Ryall), now the “second oldest man in Britain”, remembering his childhood. It starts with the summer of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This story is mostly familiar from Alfred Hitchchock's 1938 movie, starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Among the things it's best remembered for are the comic double act of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott trying to get home to England from somewhere in pre-war Europe to watch a Test match, and Dame May Whitty as the titular missing person, Miss Froy.This new BBC version, dramatised by Fiona Seres, lacked fanatical cricket supporters, though it was more faithful to Ethel Lina White's original novel, The Wheel Spins, which didn't Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The generational time-bomb is a popular dramatic device - ITV were at it only a couple of months ago with The Poison Tree - and new five-parter Lightfields boldly sprawls itself across three separate eras (1944, 1975 and 2012). Binding it all together is the titular location, a farmhouse in Suffolk, through which the different generations of characters pass.The rapid cutting between three separate periods featuring three different casts was hardly a guarantee of intelligibility, though you could more or less gather the gist of it as it whirled along. During the wartime period, 17-year- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
He may not be a household name, but Michael Emerson became a household face by virtue of his role as the sinister Benjamin Linus in Lost, the leader of the group called the Others on the show’s hallucinatory South Pacific island. Emerson, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1954, was already a theatre veteran with a string of intermittent TV performances to his credit. Now his ascent became rocket-assisted as he appeared in all of Lost's six seasons except the first, winning an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy in 2009. Lost ended in 2010, leaving even faithful viewers bewildered by Read more ...