wed 18/06/2025

tv

Marcella, Series 3, ITV review - Anna Friel returns as the defective detective

Adam Sweeting

Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet down next.

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It's a Sin, Channel 4 review - poignant, funny, vibrant masterpiece

David Nice

Finally, it seems, the time is right for a major British TV drama about how the AIDS crisis hit the early 1980s London gay scene.

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Call My Agent!, Series 4, Netflix review - the final bow for the Parisian showbiz saga?

Adam Sweeting

Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list French actors and getting them to behave in outlandish and ridiculous ways, but maybe they’re just running out of suitably recognisable names.

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Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, BBC Two review - documentary fails to deliver

Saskia Baron

What a television programme gets called is not always the choice of the people making it, but it certainly is the choice of its broadcaster. In the case of Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, the relevant people at the BBC may come to regret giving an otherwise decent documentary that title.

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Servant, Apple TV+ review - shocks, shivers and black humour in missing-baby saga

Adam Sweeting

The oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony Basgallop, he’s hit the spot with this unnerving series for Apple TV +.

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Finding Alice, ITV review - thriller, comedy or melodrama?

Adam Sweeting

Or, What The Durrells Did Next.

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Spiral, Series 8, BBC Four review - dark days in the City of Light

Adam Sweeting

The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine.

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Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie, Sky Documentaries review - the classic motor racing film that never was

Adam Sweeting

The motor racing passion of movie star Steve McQueen is well documented, from his motorcycling exploits in The Great Escape to the rubber-burning car chase around San Francisco in Bullitt to his weird but mesmeric sports car odyssey Le Mans. Less widely known, however, was his plan to shoot a movie about Formula One during the mid-Sixties.

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The Great, Channel 4 review - Russian history gets a whirl in the fictional blender

Adam Sweeting

History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas.

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The Serpent, BBC One review - tracking down the hippie-trail murderer

Markie Robson-Scott

“They’re only rich assholes.They don’t merit your concern,” serial killer and psychopath Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet, Heal the Living), aka rich French gem-dealer Alain Gautier, tells his girlfriend Marie-Andrée in The Serpent as he steals passports and money from a couple of unconscious

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