TV
Markie Robson-Scott
“I’ve killed so many people. I don’t want to do it any more, any of it.” So said Villanelle (Jodie Comer) to Eve (Sandra Oh) in the last episode of the third series of Killing Eve, soon after she’d pushed Rhian Bevan, an assassin hired by the Twelve, under a train. Yeah, right, you may have thought, yawning cynically.But lo! Series four, the final one, with new showrunner Laura Neal at the helm, proves us wrong, at least initially. Villanelle has joined a Christian church, calls herself Nelle, has moved in with the vicar, Phil (a splendidly deadpan Steve Oram), and his daughter, May (Zindzi Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They say this will be the final series of Peaky Blinders (BBC One) and its documenting of the tumultuous progress of the Shelby family, though creator Steven Knight promises there’s a feature film in the works. This opening episode kicked it off in style – perhaps a little too much style, since the show is now so self-consciously art-directed and signposted with iconic images that it’s difficult to find much human warmth within. Scenes are shot in portentous slow motion and overlaid with the sounds of super-amplified heavy breathing, while interiors are shot and lit like sets from grand opera Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly bogus-identity stories are all the rage. Netflix has been scoring big with Inventing Anna, the story of fake heiress Anna Delvey, as well as the The Tinder Swindler, a cautionary tale about a high-rolling conman who scams money from women he meets online.Meanwhile the BBC has brought us Chloe, screenwriter Alice Seabright’s drama about a woman who cloaks herself in a new identity to investigate the death of her childhood friend. Once again, Chloe is about the obsessional allure of the web. It all begins with Becky Green (Erin Doherty) poring over the seemingly gilded life of Chloe Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Con artists in film or TV need to be clever, charming, mysterious or at least entertaining (for instance Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can or Michelle Dockery in the much-underrated Good Behaviour). Bafflingly, Anna Delvey, the notorious fake heiress whose story has been fictionalised by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland company in Inventing Anna (Netflix), is none of these things.Between 2013 and 2017, Delvey bilked, scammed and fleeced hundreds of thousands of dollars from an array of wealthy New Yorkers and financial institutions. Her real name was Anna Sorokin, the daughter of a fairly Read more ...
David Nice
Painful more often than funny, this is not This Is Going To Hurt, the laugh-one-moment-rage-the-next book by obstetrician turned comedian Adam Kay. He’s written the script so essential truths remain. But the on-screen Adam Kay, national treasure Ben Whishaw – how happy Kay must have been about that – does relatively few lines to camera and what was essentially a diary has been shaped into a seven-part drama.It just about manages to balance horrors with human warmth and springs a few shocks even on those who’ve read the book or seen Kay’s show.An apparent bombshell was dropped recently by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The transformation of Lily James, demure star of Yesterday, Cinderella and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, into smokin’ beach babe Pamela Anderson is the most memorable thing about Disney+'s uneven eight-part drama. At its core is the stormy relationship between Anderson and Mötley Crüe’s drummer Tommy Lee which produced “the world’s most infamous sex tape”, as the 2014 Rolling Stone article upon which this is based described it.The theft of the tape by disgruntled carpenter Rand Gauthier, after Lee apparently refused to pay him for what he considered unsatisfactory work on Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having had her own problems with alcohol and anxiety, Sheridan Smith no doubt felt some kinship with Jenna Garvey, the central character she plays in The Teacher. Evidently a talented educator who inspires loyalty and enthusiasm in her pupils, Jenna is also partial to a hectic night’s clubbing fuelled by reckless quantities of drink.Jenna teaches English at Earlbridge School, somewhere in the north of England. Teaching is in her blood, not least because her father was also a teacher and was held in almost mystical regard by, for instance, Jenna’s principal, Ken Mills (Anil Desai). Jenna is so Read more ...
David Nice
They’re back, the Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Ozark District, otherwise sleek-seeming middle class Chicagoans Marty and Wendy Byrde. And thanks to the super-subtle performances of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, we hate them more than ever – except when they’re up against worse.It's clear where our sympathies should really lie, however complicated: with the young people caught up in the network of money-laundering, murder and general amorality. Ozark shares the concerns of Dickens over betrayed and abused children and adolescents. The Byrdes believe in family values, but are fucking up their Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Do we need another documentary about Nazi Germany? Yes, when it is as cogent and subtle as Luke Holland’s Final Account. Made over eight years while the veteran film-maker was battling with the cancer that killed him in 2020, it’s a tapestry of interviews with the ageing generation who lived under Hitler, a last chance to put them on camera.Holland, whose maternal grandparents died in the Holocaust, is intent on showing us ordinary folk, functionaries not monsters. These are regular people once enchanted by Nazism, now living in comfortable retirement in cosy houses or salubrious nursing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Cops on the box… don’t we just love ‘em? From Jimmy Perez and Ted Hastings to Inspector Reid from Ripper Street and Stella Gibson from The Fall the list is endless, but obviously we need more. The copper seems to have become the battered Everyperson we can dump all our fear, loathing and anxiety onto.Just this week, we have two new major police-orientated series, the credibility-stretching bomb disposal yarn Trigger Point (ITV), and The Responder on BBC One (wackily scheduled across two weeks). At first glance the latter is indisputably the superior of the two, largely because of a dominant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC have billed this as a “four-part thriller about sexual politics in the modern workplace”, which is slightly misleading because it looks as though it’s taking place in about 1983. The action centres on a sportswear company called Fly Dynamic, based somewhere in the north of England, a company which began as a market stall and now allegedly threatens the supremacy of JD Sports. It’s doing so well it’s about to float on the stock exchange.Screenwriter Ruth Fowler has evidently steeped herself in the history of #MeToo, the abuse of female employees and the deplorable “toxic masculinity” Read more ...