TV
Helen Hawkins
The problem facing any chef series is that its daily dramas are essentially rooted in the same small, sweaty space. It’s like one of the reductions prepared there, all the flavours compressed into an intense spoonful of sauce.As in Disney+’s riveting The Bear, the cast can take trips outside – that Chicago restaurant’s patissier even travelled as far as Copenhagen – but the triggers of the drama will most likely be in the pass and the pot-washing. Even so, taking a leaf out of the Shane Meadows film-to-TV-drama playbook, Stephen Graham’s production company has created a terrific series Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now that earnings from the John Wick movie franchise have topped a billion dollars, it’s no surprise that there should be moves afoot to cash in by developing a “John Wick Universe”.And here we have it, since Amazon's The Continental (subtitled "From the World of John Wick") is the back story of the renowned New York hotel in the Wick movies. It's a demilitarised zone of mandatory calm where weary hitmen come for a bit of rest and relaxation in between their murderous endeavours.In the movies, the Continental is suavely managed by Winston Scott, played with cynical guile by Ian McShane. But Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jenna Coleman has had a mostly upbeat acting CV to date, notably playing Clara in Doctor Who and the young Queen in ITV’s Victoria. The mood darkened with her excellent turn as the French-Canadian girlfriend of the mass murderer in The Serpent; now it turns to pitch with Wilderness.This time Coleman is Liv and attemptedly Welsh (the accent comes and goes), recently married to aspirational Englishman Will (Oliver Jackson Cohen), who is promoted to a plum job in New York by the luxury hotel company he works for. There, in her sumptuous apartment, where she is ostensibly writing an untitled Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
And so Ronan Bennett’s Hackney gangster odyssey reaches its conclusion, having made the leap from its Channel 4 origins back in 2011 to become, over its last three series, one of Netflix’s top-rating and most acclaimed shows. And it has managed to do it without diluting or compromising its London roots, despite detours to Jamaica, Spain, Morocco and even Ramsgate.The message was always bleak, and throughout these last six episodes the song remains the same. Right back in the first series, Dushane (Ashley Walters), setting out on his tortuous drug-dealing path, declared that “I haven’t 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 ...
Helen Hawkins
Ruth Wilson possibly hasn’t had as much to get her teeth into on-screen since she vamped it up in Luther. Her performance as Lorna Brady in The Woman in the Wall is an object lesson in the way a performer in demand for her engaging looks and edgy sexiness can smartly step off that particular conveyor belt and go off in a totally new direction. In Joe Murtagh’s script, she has found the ideal channel for both her experience and talent (she is an executive producer of the series too) and an important cause to champion. It’s 2015 in a small town in western Ireland, where bedraggled Lorna, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They could have titled this series Gaslighting. It’s a sly and twisty thriller about a conman whose deadliest weapon is his gift for making his victims feel as if everything that happened to them was their own fault, and they brought it on themselves.It’s written by sisters Penelope and Ginny Skinner, and it makes you wonder what ghastly experiences they might have gone through to be able to create a character as hideously unscrupulous as Dr Rob Chance. Or at any rate that’s the name he’s using when we first encounter him – through the eyes of one of his victims, Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton 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
If you want to get a hit show on American TV, you could do a lot worse than recruit Taylor Sheridan to create it for you. Special Ops: Lioness, a bruising trip into the innards of a CIA counter-terror unit, follows a string of successes which have made Sheridan a towering presence in film and TV.These include the movies Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, and Paramount’s Tulsa King, Mayor of Kingstown and the neo-Western series Yellowstone and its spin-offs.The fact that Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldaña both star in and exec-produce Lioness suggests that this is a project that has a lot Read more ...