TV drama
Adam Sweeting
The question they’re all asking is, can Shetland survive the loss of Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez? After all, it was Henshall’s shrewd and quietly anguished performance which gave the show much of its allure. And now there’s no Mark Bonnar either, who could always be relied on to add a soupçon of angst.Instead, it’s Ashley Jensen (Agatha Raisin, After Life etc) who’s front and centre in the new, revamped Shetland. She plays DI Ruth Calder of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the murder of a London gangster, Philip Remis. She’s looking for a runaway witness to the crime, Ellen Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One thing we know for sure about Erin Carter is that she’s played by Swedish-Kurdish actor Evin Ahmad, and it’s clear right from the start that she’s a woman with a complicated past which she’s trying to run away from. But you’ll have to get to episode four before the mysteries start to unwind themselves.We also know that she fled furtively across the Channel from Folkestone in a trawler with her daughter Harper (Indica Watson, pictured below), and has started a new life (with a new identity) as a supply schoolteacher in Barcelona. With her hospital nurse partner Jordi (Sean Teale, from Skins Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix scooped up the rights to an armful of Harlan Coben’s standalone novels for a colossal sum, and now Amazon Prime has nipped in and signed up Coben’s series of Mickey Bolitar books, which fall under the “young adult” heading. Shelter is the first one off the blocks.We find our hero, the aforementioned Bolitar, as he’s struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of a road accident four months earlier which killed his father, Brad, and has left his mother in hospital convalescing from the emotional trauma. Mickey, now staying with his aunt Shira, is just starting at high school in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite its cursory nods to new technology, there’s something deliciously old-fashioned about Only Murders in the Building. Now into its third series, it tells the stories of a trio of affluent Manhattanites who make true-life podcasts about the mysterious deaths that occur in their palatial Upper West Side apartment building.It’s a grandiose pile designed in Italian Renaissance style, and its name, The Arconia, makes it sound more like an ocean liner than a block of flats. You could imagine bumping into Myrna Loy and William Powell in the lobby.The leading threesome comprises veteran actors/ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presented to you by Channel 4’s industrious Walter, Enemy of the People is a punchy Finnish drama which makes some smart and timely observations about life in the age of digital money and poisonous social media.It’s the story of an ambitious and dogged investigative journalist, Katja Salonen (Kreeta Salminen). She has written an article suggesting that football hero Samuli Tolonen (Jussi Partanen) has failed to make a financial investment in the local FC Tampere football stadium, after promising to do so.This earns Katja a tsunami of online messages dripping with bile, sexism and hatred, but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted by Megan Gallagher from one of Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffery novels (the seventh one, apparently), Wolf might be described as Welsh Gothic, spiced up with a splash of gratuitous sadism. Episode two, for instance, is titled merely “Torture”, which might apply to some of the acting as much as the dramatic content.Not that it doesn’t have its fair share of notable thesps. Somehow they’ve lured Juliet Stevenson aboard as Matilda Anchor-Ferrers, preparing to be scared to death as she, her husband Oliver (Owen Teale) and daughter Lucia (Annes Elwy, all pictured below) find themselves the targets Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer Peter Bowker apparently had plans to make six series of World on Fire, but the arrival of Covid after 2019’s first series threw a spanner in the works. Anyway, here’s the second one at last, and it’s a little strange to find that this encyclopedic saga of the Second World War has only advanced as far as the autumn of 1940.Bowker’s plan was to stitch together a panorama of the war told through the stories of a range of characters across different continents, and this time we find ourselves visiting Manchester, Paris, Berlin and the Egyptian desert. Familiar characters return, including Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This five-part policier is the finale of the current Walter Presents French season, and takes us to the town of Montclair on France’s eastern border. The opening self-contained episode, occupying a chunky two-hour slot, took for its theme the legend of the Pied Piper. In this, you may recall, the children of Hamelin were lured away by the titular itinerant musician and drowned.As its title suggests (the original French is Disparition Inquiétante), missing persons are the show’s stock-in-trade. In this case, a group of nine young schoolchildren vanished without trace from the centre of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Probably because it’s a secret fear shared by many a flyer, aircraft hijacking has become its own screen mini-genre. We’ve already had not only Hijack but also Hijacked, not to mention the Wesley Snipes vehicle Passenger 57, Jodie Foster in Flightplan and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 7500. In Air Force One, the President himself (played by Harrison Ford) was hijacked. And then there’s Liam Neeson in Non-Stop.In Apple TV’s new seven-parter Hijack, it’s Idris Elba’s turn to be the cool, unflusterable one who finds himself in the eye of the in-flight storm, as a gang of oafish thugs take over the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When we consider the storied history of Portuguese television, we naturally think of… er… well, perhaps we'll get back to you on that. But in the meantime there’s Turn of the Tide (or Rabo de Peixe to give it its original title), Augusto Fraga’s surprising and captivating story of a tiny community in the Azores which suddenly finds itself awash with cocaine. It’s set in the titular village of Rabo de Peixe, and centres on four friends who are eking out their uneventful and unpromising lives in the picturesque but remote archipelago (the islands are about 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is possibly not ideal viewing for a spell of sunny weather in June, but Jack Thorne’s drama about a family trying to cope with a terminally ill child is as compelling as it’s painful. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen star as parents Andrew and Nicci, and Best Interests probes their private agony in piercingly intimate detail, but the focus also pulls out to encompass prickly issues of ethics, morality and the labyrinthine innards of the NHS.It might have ended up as a preachy, finger-pointing litany of sclerotic bureaucracy and entrenched attitudes, but Thorne’s writing and an excellent Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Hey-hey! Alright! The standard greeting of Kendall Roy will be much missed, along with all the other regular joys of Succession. It wasn’t always 100% perfect, thank goodness, it was all too human: changeable, moody, ultimately self-serving, just like its characters, especially as it powered to a climax.But its finale was television writing at its best, daring to slow down, even veer towards sentimentality, before hustling its audience to the finish line with a series of bruising twists and satisfying emotional contortions (a few spoilers lie ahead). Inside Waystar's glass palace the action Read more ...