TV
Adam Sweeting
Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice. She faces charges of complicity with Epstein in the sexual abuse and trafficking of under-age girls, and is due to be tried this autumn. Her name is pronounced “Gillane”, apparently.The story exerts a sickly fascination, its toxic allure intensified by the conspiracy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness. This new documentary by Samantha Stark (made by the New York Times) tracks Britney’s path from her upbringing in the small Bible Belt town of Kentwood, Louisiana through her precocious progress from an 11-year old star of TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club – also featuring Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling and Christina Aguilera – to monster-selling hits like "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops!.. I Did It Again". But then come Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to sum up Physical in a pithy soundbite, though “quasi-political misanthropic comedy” might be vaguely in the right ballpark. It’s set in San Diego, California in the early Eighties, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s election to the Presidency, and focuses on a dislikeable married couple, Sheila and Danny Ruben.Their problems might be solvable if they were completely different people, but as it is they have an assortment of mountains to climb. Danny, played by Rory Scovel (pictured below) with an aura of sleaze and moral turpitude which seems to discharge its own specific and Read more ...
David Nice
A massive musical hope for the future is what we all need right now, after 14 stop/semi-start months and a threatened decimation of the concert and opera scene, the danger of which isn't over yet. This year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World delivered that hope in frissons and plenty of tear-inducing moments, even though the live audience in St David’s Hall consisted of only three empathetic judges. Mezzo Jamie Barton was a clear winner in 2013; the next two singers to take the ultimate prize were more controversial (neither was my first choice); this year, any one among a stunning trio out of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After appearing in six of Marvel’s Avengers movies, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki (the God of Mischief) gets his own TV series. Never quite enjoying the high profile of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man or Chris Evans’s Captain America, Loki has remained a somewhat enigmatic and ambiguous character, which has given him plenty of potential room for manoeuvre in this small(er)-screen incarnation. Hiddleston evidently relished the prospect of exploring further his shapeshifting attributes and gender-fluidity.While the production values here are reminiscent of the uber-budget appurtenances lavished on the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels. He’s also a gentleman thief and master of disguise himself, as he displays in multiple disappearing acts, sleights of hand and bewildering stunts in this French-made series.This five-episode Part 2 is really a season-ette, since it’s the second half of the first part which appeared in January. That left viewers dangling nervously, as it ended with the abduction of Assane’s son Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They all laughed when the streaming service Britbox declared that it wanted to become a sort of UK-orientated Netflix, because so far it’s been mostly a back catalogue operation which plunders the BBC and ITV archives. You really want to pay a subscription to watch Are You Being Served? and Rosemary and Thyme?However, Britbox has produced, or co-produced, series including The Pembrokeshire Murders and the forthcoming A Spy Among Friends, and The Beast Must Die is the first drama to be shot for Britbox UK. It’s been adapted from the 1938 novel by Nicholas Blake (the pseudonym of Cecil Day- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jimmy McGovern’s new three-part drama about prison life is about as far as you could travel from Ronnie Barker’s Seventies sitcom Porridge, even if they are both on the same TV channel. Having said that, McGovern’s fictional HM Prison Craigmore doesn’t look as if it’s had a facelift in 50 years, and its cramped cells and brutishly ugly corridors are enough to trigger panic attacks in the hardiest viewer. And that’s before you’ve met the inmates.Into this living nightmare comes Mark Cobden (Sean Bean), a teacher from a comprehensive school who’s been handed a four-year sentence after killing a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"Get out!" The order, spoken some way into the third and final episode of Channel 5's entry into the Tudor drama sweepstakes, Anne Boleyn, certainly seizes one's attention. Not only is our doomed heroine snapping under pressure on the way to one of history's most-chronicled deaths, but her command to Thomas Cromwell marks one of the very few times across nearly three largely prosaic hours that Jodie Turner-Smith, in the title role, raises her voice. For most of the rest of the director Lynsey Miller's retread of this time-honoured story, Turner-Smith speaks in an often coy, whispery purr Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the last series of Line of Duty having left portions of its viewership dismayed and disgruntled, one consolation prize has been the way the many fine qualities of HBO’s Mare of Easttown (on Sky Atlantic) have seen it promoted it into the “unmissable” bracket. It isn’t anything like LoD, of course, and indeed the way it has stepped nimbly around the conventional pigeonholes of thriller or cop-show is one of the keys to its success. The series even ended after a thoroughly unconventional seven episodes.But perhaps seven was the perfect number, not too short but not lumbering interminably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps inspired by its ever-intriguing Walter Presents strand, Channel 4’s new thriller Before We Die is based on a Swedish original called Innan vi dör (“before we die” in Swedish). The action has been transplanted to Bristol, whose buildings, bridges and narrow streets have been rendered atmospheric with rich colour textures and stylish visual compositions. The opening credits, with ominously pulsating music and dramatic monochrome portraits of the cast-members, also suggests we’ve stepped away a little from the Brit-TV norm.Lesley Sharp stars as DI Hannah Laing, who’s reaching a stage in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in the mid-Eighties, BBC television started broadcasting The Rock'n' Roll Years, one of the first rock music retrospectives. Each half-hour episode focused on a year, with news reports and music intermixed to give a revealing look at the development of rock culture against the context of current affairs.That is more or less the basic template employed by the makers of Apple TV+’s new eight-parter, 1971 - The Year that Music Changed Everything, ballooning that half-hour to around about six hours of great music, incredible footage, and more great music. It’s loosely based on David Read more ...