TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s original Alien movie from 1979 was an all-time sci-fi/horror classic, and even an endless stream of sequels and spin-offs – Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, Alien vs Predator, Prometheus, Alien: Romulus et al – hasn’t diluted the electrifying impact of the original.Now FX and Disney have shovelled a shed-load of money into this glossily-produced series for TV, written and directed by Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion etc). But can it boldly go where no Alien-related product has gone before?Er... not really, it's more a case of reshuffling themes from previous incarnations. Alien: Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alexandre Dumas’ novel has been filmed an immeasurable number of times (there was a new French version only last year) and televised even more frequently (a Mexican incarnation materialised in 2023). Yet the world still can’t get enough, so here’s another one, this time a French/Italian production with a polyglot Euro-cast.Apparently much of it was shot in Malta, where the golden Mediterranean light illuminating antique stone towers and ramparts stands in very picturesquely for Dumas’ Marseille. The original novel clocks in at about 1200 pages in most versions – I tried reading it on a Kindle Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A mixture of legal drama, medical mystery and psychological thriller with creepy supernatural overtones, Insomnia sometimes seems to be trying to cram too much in, but it’s well worth sticking with it to the end to reap the full benefits. Not the least of its strengths are its classy production values and an excellent all-round cast, with Vicky McClure in the lead role of high-flying City lawyer Emma Averill, Leanne Best as her sister Phoebe, and Lyndsey Marshal throwing any number of flies into the ointment as Caroline Mitchell.Emma and her husband Robert (Tom Cullen) have two children,18- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix’s new detective-noir is a somewhat cosmopolitan beast. It’s written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, derived from a novel, Mercy, by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, and set in Edinburgh (as well as other flavourful Scottish locations). There are plenty of Scots in the cast too, although it’s the very English Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey, The Crown etc) who takes the lead role of DCI Carl Morck.But Morck not only doesn’t have a very English name, but is far from your ideal English gentleman with a Lady Mary on his arm. The series opens with a brutal incident in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. This focused on the dogged and agonising search for truth by Jim Swire (played by Colin Firth), whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and raised a host of possibilities and theories about who did it and why.The BBC’s new six-part series takes a different tack. While it explores the investigation into who planted the bomb on the plane and the ensuing trial of two Libyan suspects, one of its prime concerns is to make Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you compiled a list of favourite TV series from the last couple of decades, you’d find that Zoë Telford has appeared in most of them. The Thick of It, Foyle’s War, Ashes to Ashes, Sherlock, Silent Witness, Unforgotten, Grantchester, Vera… they all appear on her on CV, with many more besides. She’s put in her time on ITV’s Agatha Christie beat, playing Emily Trefusis in the Miss Marple story, The Sittaford Mystery, and appearing as Rosalie Otterbourne in the Hercule Poirot favourite, Death on the Nile. In 2008 she played Abigail Thomas, the assistant private secretary to King Richard IV, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following on from the first series of Malpractice in 2023, this second season again probes into issues of medical malfeasance and institutional corruption, in an environment where patient care frequently comes second to internal politics and self-preservation. The protagonist first time around was Niamh Algar’s Dr Lucinda Edwards, but this time it’s Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford, who works as a psychiatric registrar at the fictional Queen Mother’s University Hospital.Writer Grace Ofori-Attah had personal experience as an NHS psychiatrist, which has undoubtedly helped to lend the show a sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the story of a relationship between Joe Burt (David Wenham), apparently a divorced business entrepreneur and farmer forever juggling a variety of property schemes and financial deals, and 50-ish food journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time not writing very much for her newspaper.They first meet via a dating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They stopped making the BBC’s original Bergerac in 1991, so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature. John Nettles became closely identified with the titular detective Jim Bergerac before he decamped to Midsomer, murder capital of the world, and has declared himself impressed with Damien Molony’s performance as the born-again sleuth (pictured below, Molony picks up the baton from Nettles).So, we’re back among the picturesque architecture, broad sandy beaches and French-sounding place names of Jersey, where we find Chief Inspector Bergerac in a troubled frame of mind.His wife Read more ...