TV drama
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. Of course, this was only the end of a piece of string leading Captain Laure Berthaud and her team into a labyrinth of organised crime and drug-smuggling.This is Spiral’s eighth and final series (on BBC Four), which is perhaps why the mood feels even more dour and downbeat than usual. This is not least because it opened with Gilou ( Read more ...
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. Now here’s The Great (Channel 4), which sort-of purports to tell the story of Catherine the Great, although writer Tony McNamara has given himself plenty of room for whimsy and invention.Each episode is prefaced with the caption “An occasionally true story” (a precaution some other programme-makers might like to consider), and Read more ...
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 tourists he’s just drugged on a beach in Thailand in the mid-Seventies.“Free your mind from bourgeois sentiments. You’re above all this,” he encourages her. This is the first time that she begins to realise what she’s got herself into, having left Quebec for Asia and the love of a not-so-good Read more ...
theartsdesk
Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up. With large chunks of the population forced to stay home, what could be more natural than to reach for the remote controller to magic up another bingeable boxset or Walter's latest noir thriller? Above all, with its seemingly infinite catalogue, this felt like the moment that Netflix became the generic term for "home entertainment", joining Amazon and Google in dividing up the planet between Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having launched their new-look All Creatures… back in September to wild acclaim, it was a no-brainer for Channel 5 to commission this Christmas Special. The only mystery is why they didn’t schedule it for Christmas Day, where it would probably have seen off most of the not-very-thrilling competition.It picked up where the previous six episodes left off, using the annual Christmas party at the home of Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West) and his veterinary practice in Darrowby as a convenient device for bringing all the various strands of the story together. With the exception of the sadly deceased Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Breaking away from the outlandish shenanigans in Little Big Bear in the Canadian wilds of its first two series, this third outing for Tin Star brings Jack Worth (Tim Roth), wife Angela (Genevieve O’Reilly) and daughter Anna (Abigail Lawrie) back across the Atlantic to Liverpool to confront dirty secrets they’ve been running away from for 20 years. As you might expect, power, corruption and oodles of bloody violence are the order of the day.After the peculiar mixture of Ammonite preachers and Mexican drug cartels in series two, this return to basics could have proved to be a blessing, adding a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
On the face of it, this new Sky Atlantic series sounded as though it might be a grave and sombre slice of American history, telling the story of the anti-slavery crusader John Brown and how his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia helped push America into the Civil War. Instead, it’s a riotous ride through a primitive America whose identity is still in the process of being formed, led by an outsized performance from Ethan Hawke as Brown.Though the story (based on James McBride’s 2013 novel) is rooted in factual events, this looks nothing like a history lesson, and you just have to sit back and let Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Pre-release excitement about the fourth coming of The Crown (Netflix) has centred on Emma Corrin’s portrayal of Princess Diana, still big box-office 23 years after her death. There’s no denying that Corrin has risen heroically to the challenge of playing a character who has assumed mythic proportions, skilfully evoking Diana’s way of speaking as well as catching her coy, doe-eyed expressions and physical gestures. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Earl Spencer has chosen the run-up to Diana’s new TV incarnation in which to launch his assault on the BBC regarding Martin Bashir’s notorious 1995 Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The first series of the BBC and HBO’s fantasy adventure His Dark Materials felt even more timely than when author Phillip Pullman first published Northern Lights twenty-five-years ago. The second season builds on the heady mix of philosophy and theology, and more than a touch of environmentalism, all delivered as a thrilling adventure yarn in the mould of C S Lewis but with a very different attitude towards religion. The main thrust remains sure-footed in teaching young and old that speaking truth to power is no bad thing when the power is authoritarian in nature. At the centre of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
So you want to be a TV screenwriter? You might do a lot worse than to sign up for Jed Mercurio's new online course at BBC Maestro, where over 28 lessons he explores the pitfalls and hurdles of a screenwriter's life, from the nuts and bolts of creating a workable script to ways of gaining access to the right people in the TV industry who can help bring your work to the screen.The Lancashire-born Mercurio knows whereof he speaks, as fans of his hit series Line of Duty and Bodyguard are well aware. He made his breakthrough into TV in the mid-Nineties when, as a junior hospital doctor, he was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s surprising, perhaps, that the dramatic potential of chess hasn’t been more widely exploited. There was a nail-biting tournament in From Russia with Love, while the knight’s chequerboard struggle with Death was the centrepiece of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. In 1972 the game became a proxy for global power politics when Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in Iceland, an event former world champion Garry Kasparov called “a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War”.But mostly this enigmatic pastime remains the preserve of its devotees, and its labyrinthine and intellectually Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Neil Cross’s novel Burial was hailed for its skilful plotting and insightful characterisations, as well as its macabre atmosphere. Disappointingly, the author’s own adaptation of the book looks clumsy and uncomfortable on TV.It’s being shown in four parts on consecutive nights on ITV, and Wednesday’s part three left us poised on the brink of a denouement which may prove ugly and brutal. However, so far the story has failed to ignite, despite the way it keeps telling us how creepy, spooky and other-worldly it’s supposed to be. The main stumbling block is Russell Tovey’s leading role as Nathan Read more ...