TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Acidic showbiz drama Hacks premiered on HBO Max in the States a year ago, and subsequently won a hatful of awards including three Emmys. Now, here it is on Prime Video, so we can get to see what all the fuss is about.Most of it is about Jean Smart’s sizzling performance in the central role of Deborah Vance, which won her the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress. Smart, who has delivered splendid turns in Frasier, Fargo, Mare of Easttown and many more, plays Vance like she’s known her all her life. She’s a revered veteran comedian now plying her trade in a long-term residency at the Palmetto Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
After two years away, Abi Morgan’s acclaimed legal drama/juicy soap The Split returns for its third series, reuniting us with the closely knit, or, you might say, incestuous, law firm of Noble Hale Defoe.Ruth Defoe (Deborah Findlay) and her daughters Hannah (Nicola Walker) and Nina (Annabel Sholey) all work at the firm, wearing silky clothes fit for a cocktail party. There’s another daughter, Rose (Fiona Button), the youngest, who, thankfully, is not a lawyer. Hardly a British version of The Good Fight – it's far more conventional, bland and often unconvincing – it’s still highly watchable.So Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Bridgerton (Netflix) became a ratings-blasting sensation because of the way it thrust a boldly multiracial cast into the midst of a Regency costume drama, and because of the camera-hogging presence of Regé-Jean Page as the swashbuckling Duke of Hastings. Above all, it had countless astonishingly graphic sex scenes.In season two, there’s no Duke of Hastings and shockingly little sex, so many original viewers may find themselves feeling that they’re getting noticeably less bang (if you will) for their buck. This time around, the action centres on Viscount Anthony Bridgerton Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Two years ago, the fourth season of The Last Kingdom (Netflix) found the Saxon saga not quite hitting peak form, possibly reeling from the fallout of the haunting death of King Alfred (David Dawson). Happily, any doubts are blown away with the arrival of 5, in which the show’s trademarks of knotty dynastic rivalry, anguished romantic entanglements and horrifying eruptions of bloodthirstiness are all roaring ahead at full blast. Sadly, they say this series will be the last, though a feature film may be in the works.Some things have changed (we are now without Ian Hart’s stalwart Beocca, Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The terrain Holding occupies is well travelled, but this new ITV four-part drama travels over it really well. The landmarks are familiar: a quiet rural community, a cop with an unhealthy lifestyle and a secret sorrow, a feud between rival lovers of the local lothario, a long-buried trauma that’s suddenly unearthed. We could be in any rural location in the primetime drama of the past half-century.But as soon as elderly Mrs Meany (Brenda Fricker, pictured below) comes into shot on her mobility scooter, riding into town like a lone gunslinger with a perm, it’s clear this drama will be having its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sidney J Furie’s 1965 film The Ipcress File is a much-loved benchmark of its period. Stylish, sinister, witty and depicting a determinedly un-swinging London, it was conceived as the flipside to the absurdly glamorous James Bond movies and pulled it off with panache. It also had Michael Caine playing the lead role of Harry Palmer, and a superb John Barry soundtrack famously featuring that mysterious instrument, the cimbalom.Turning the same story into a TV series nearly 60 years later was not a job for the faint-hearted, but, remarkably, screenwriter John Hodge and director James Watkins have Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...