TV drama
howard.male
While the rest of the country has been busy discussing the knitwear of Denmark’s answer to DCI Jane Tennison, I found myself bereft of anyone to share my unbridled enthusiasm for this Australian adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap. Even at the virtual watercooler of Facebook, only one person gave me a thumbs up when I wrote a paragraph on its excellence. Why a fairly generic murder procedural should inspire such obsessive devotion while a completely original and gripping family drama is relatively ignored is something of a mystery.But perhaps it’s because The Slap dared to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's your worst nightmare. Two WPCs appear at your door and inform you that your husband has been killed in a road accident. It doesn't help that the one doing the talking looks like the uglier sister of Macbeth's witches. Then they twist the knife by telling you that there was an unknown woman in the passenger seat, now also dead. Only moments earlier, Ellie Manning (Anna Friel) seemed to have it all, or about 90 per cent of it. She and husband Greg (Marc Warren) were trying enthusiastically for a baby. She seemed happy in her job as a primary school teacher, and Greg appeared to be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It was several minutes into The National Anthem, Charlie Brooker's latest dramatic output on Channel 4 after his excellent 2008 mini-series Dead Set, a zombie-laden satire about reality television, before I laughed. I say that not as a criticism – far from from it – but as a huge compliment. For Brooker neatly confounded our expectations by making the opening scenes (shown as part of the Black Mirror season) appear as if they were part of a serious political thriller. It was only when the storyline took a ridiculous and hilariously obscene turn that one realised this was meant to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
ITV has been cunningly trailing its Christmas bumper edition of Downton Abbey, which will feature guest stars Nigel Havers and Samantha Bond and the spectacle of Mr Bates being dragged before the beak for murdering his first wife. Now that details of the Yuletide schedules have emerged, it's clear that Downton is the one to beat on Christmas Day.Gazing down imperiously from its 9-11pm slot, Downton will be hoping to keep BBC One's EastEnders (9-10pm) in second place, along with Absolutely Fabulous - in its first new episode for six years - that follows it. Earlier in the evening, BBC One Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the great revelations of the decade-long HBO TV invasion is that so many of their series take everything at a truly leisurely pace. Their groundbreaking MO is not to rush, as pre-millennial TV shows usually did, but to give the plot space to breathe in a way that matches how we now watch TV - at our own pace, in our own time. In the case of Mildred Pierce, film director Todd Haynes’s beautiful-looking, Emmy-winning five-episode adaptation of the 1941 James M Cain novel, this sometimes backfires. The narrative has almost too much space to spread out, with five and a half hours viewing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
People speak to her. It could be her mother. It could be a colleague. But she doesn’t react, continues what she’s doing. Which, usually, is leaving. It’s welcome back to Sarah Lund, whose watchability is in inverse proportion to her demonstrativeness. As recalcitrant detective Lund, in the second series of Denmark’s The Killing, Sofie Gråbøl is as magnetic as the first time around, whatever she’s wearing. Sweaters be damned, these two opening episodes were up there with the BAFTA-winning first series.After the lash-ups of the first series – the killing of her detective partner, serial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is a very odd series. Even the BBC seem to be wondering what on earth they're supposed to be doing with it, since after the Wednesday night airing of these first two episodes Pan Am is moving to Saturday evening, with a Thursday repeat. Effectively it's a giant posthumous commercial for the glory years of America's most famous airline, rendered as a mixture of tacky corporate promo film and feather-brained soap with patently fake sets. It's 1963, and we zero in on a group of wonderfully glamorous Pan Am hostesses in their figure-hugging blue uniforms as they prepare to fly out of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Garrow’s Law, which returned last night for a third series, would seem to be entirely about the foreign country that is Georgian England. One of its progenitors is Tony Marchant who, give or take the odd adaptation of Dickens or Dostoevsky, has spent his packed writing life in the modern day. But they don’t seem to make his kind of searing contemporary drama any more, the type that hunts for the root cause of moral failure in individuals and society. So in order to hold a mirror up to his audience, he has turned to the 1700s. Profitably.The shrewdness of Garrow’s Law is that it has a foot in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In TV's seasonal rush of Spooks, Downton etc, we must also hail the sterling (if gruesome) work going on at the FX channel. Alongside series two of The Walking Dead, they've thrown in the additional delights of gory French cop thriller Braquo and, last night, we saw the debut of the weird and scary American Horror Story.You'll like Braquo if you were enamoured of stuff like Training Day or The Shield, while it's less multilayered but even more visceral than Spiral (or Engrenages), its stable mate at French network Canal+. It's about a thuggish squad of Paris-based detectives who live in their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apart from voting, there is only one duty the United Kingdom asks of its residents: if, or less likely when, it comes, to answer the summons to sit and listen to evidence in a criminal court and, with 11 other randomly selected individuals, reach a collective decision about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Trial by jury is rightly held to be one of the more unimpeachable achievements of civilised society.The jurors being emblematically the nice guys in this national success story, they are also the colourless guys. Which is why legal dramas – and there have been perhaps a dozen of them Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One striking fact about Ronan Bennett's punishing four-part East End gang drama is that, so far, there hasn't been any sign of a policeman. No scruffy, down-at-heel detective with a chip on his shoulder, no thuggish Flying Squad heavies, and certainly no Wagner-loving aesthete who goes around quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning.Instead, Top Boy exists exclusively in its own sealed environment of violence, fear and dog-eat-dog ambition, where being sucked into gangland drug-dealing is the only option that bears any resemblance to a career ladder. Let's face it, how many kids can hope to get Read more ...