TV drama
Jill Chuah Masters
Channel 4’s The Accident closed with a bang and a whimper. Jack Thorne provided a definitive answer to his series’ central question, but his characters and subplots petered out in the meantime.Over four episodes, this series examined the fallout of a fatal explosion, in a town cloaked by the long shadows of Grenfell and Aberfan. Each episode centred on a kind of reckoning: between old friends, husbands and wives, mothers and widows. But its core tension, as tonight’s episode hammered home, was the standoff between a broken-hearted community and a corporation unmoved by their loss.The finale Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A tip of the hat to Julia Ormond for boldly going where many an actress might have chosen not to. In this new six-parter by Marnie Dickens, she plays Julia Day, a mother of three who’s just divorced her husband and is turning 60. Dickens’s objective, we may surmise, was to drive away the fog of invisibility which can descend irrationally upon mature women, however capable they may be, and demonstrate that age can indeed be just a number.Julia has reached a turning point, and is brooding over roads taken or not taken, and what her life is worth. As she puts it in a voice-over, “daughter, wife Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A bit like all those people on the home front in 1940 (but only a little bit), we sit and nervously wait for news. Is World on Fire (BBC One) still listed among the living? Or even now is someone typing up the letter and sticking it in a brown envelope? “Fell bravely in the field … did its country proud etc…” Please may this ambitious Sunday-night drama live to fight another day? In seven highly impressive and involving episodes the first series has managed the near impossible and found an original way back to the Second World War.The portal in was the human heart, a messy and complicated Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You wouldn’t expect a drama called Dublin Murders (BBC One) to be a laugh a minute, but the cumulative anguish, menace and torment of this eight-parter made it almost unbearable, even if viewers were thrown a tiny scrap of hope in the final frames. Adapted by screenwriter Sarah Phelps from Tana French’s novels In the Woods and The Likeness, it was (mostly) the story of detectives Cassie Maddox and Rob Reilly (Sarah Greene and Killian Scott, both consistently impressive) trying to solve the murder of aspiring young ballerina Katy Devlin while struggling with traumas from their own pasts.The Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Pose offers something that is really rare in the TV world: it’s a show that manages to be both darkly sombre and completely uplifting. The drama, which is about New York City’s 1980s ball culture, focuses on the lives of trans women and gay men competing for glory in the ballroom while fighting for their lives on the streets.The first series was intoxicating. It was fast-moving, beautifully shot, and more camp than the Met Gala. It introduced us to a sprawling cast of talented trans actors. It told a nuanced and harrowing story about the love and loss of a community torn apart by HIV. Pose’s Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
I wouldn’t want to live in Jack Thorne’s head. Nor Sarah Lancashire’s, for that matter. The Accident is Thorne’s latest four-part drama, and the final instalment in his grim and gripping trilogy of shows for Channel 4. The Accident’s predecessors were National Treasure (2016), about historical sexual abuse, and Kiri (2018), which starred Lancashire and centred on the murder of a young black girl. The Accident is shaping up to be just as compelling as its forerunners, while – if you can imagine – even bleaker in its outlook.The Accident focuses on the aftermath of a fatal explosion at a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What did we learn at the end of The Capture (BBC One)? A rice jar is a good place to hide USB sticks. It’s possible to withhold the opening credits for 11 whole minutes. A green coat works exceptionally well with light blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair. And Ben Chanan, who originated the script and directed it himself, is a television dramatist to watch, and watch again.Whether we’ll be watching another round of The Capture remains to be discovered. We were left with the possibility that DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), having weighed up her options, has set herself up as a mole Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“I want something Russian…” It’s with such a cry that Helen Mirren, bored by the bizarrely transgressive masked ball that comes at the close of the first episode of Catherine the Great, gets the dancing going: nothing from the imported fashions of Europe will do for her, and the music duly strikes up, a soupily romantic melody on violin, the quintessence, you might think, of mythic "Russianness”. Indeed, this majestic four-part series, jointly produced by HBO and Sky, will no doubt come to represent for many foreign audiences the epitome of the country, every bit as much as classic literary Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Five episodes ago, BBC One's The Capture set off at a cracking pace with the apparent abduction and murder of barrister Hannah Roberts by army lance-corporal Shaun Emery. With Roberts’s help, Emery had been acquitted of killing a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood, the defence’s case hingeing on a timing glitch in the video taken at the scene by Emery’s body-camera.It didn’t make sense that he’d want to bump off the woman who’d dug him out of a huge legal hole, especially as he’d also become more than slightly enamoured of her. The feeling between them appeared to be mutual. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
For his new drama series for BBC One, writer Peter Bowker (The A Word, Monroe etc) has taken as his canvas no less than a panorama of Europe in 1939, just as World War Two is breaking out. His principal characters include Harry Chase, a young man from a wealthy family who’s in love with Manchester factory girl Lois Bennett, the Polish Tomaszeski family whose lives are upended by Germany’s invasion of their country, and Berlin-based American journalist Nancy Campbell, who’s trying to interpret the European turmoil for her listeners on American Radio International.Developing all these different Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucy Lawless achieved cult status in the Nineties fantasy classic Xena: Warrior Princess, and later became a regular in such disparate creations as Battlestar Galactica and Parks and Recreation. In My Life is Murder, she joins the ever-expanding ranks of TV ‘tecs as Melbourne-based investigator Alexa Crowe.We learned that Alexa used to be on the police force, but now spends her time making bread with a complicated German gadget called a Loobenschwegen (some fun was had with pronouncing the German instructions in a lubricious manner). Screenwriter Matt Ford must have a fetish for wacky brand Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connoisseurs of gnarly Boston-based crime sagas like The Town, The Departed and Black Mass will quickly find themselves at home in this sleaze-ridden new show, made by Showtime and brought to us by Sky Atlantic. Created and largely written by Chuck MacLean, it’s umbilically linked to the aforesaid movies in various ways, being produced by Boston’s finest Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (from The Town and The Departed) and starring Kevin Bacon – an FBI man in Black Mass – as another FBI man, Jackie Rohr.It’s 1992, and though there’s change in the wind, the Boston police are an incestuously-knit Read more ...