TV drama
Adam Sweeting
At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important matters had come to a close. I was dubious about LoD when it began in 2012, but what has gradually become apparent is that its mastermind Jed Mercurio (pictured below) has been playing a long, labyrinthine game. Now the fourth series is upon us – promoted to BBC One from BBC Two – and judging by the first episode, it has the potential to be another Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The prequel is here to stay. In the end every popular TV drama flogs itself to death. The star wants out, or the writer dies, or the original source material runs dry, or the public falls asleep. And there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere, that is, apart from back in time. Hence the retro-fitted Endeavour and Gotham and Better Call Saul. In these risk-averse times, the execs enjoy the reassurance that the hard yards of establishing a character have already been gained. It (sort of) worked for Morse. How about the other great ITV cop of the last 30 years?Jane Tennison in the early 1990s was the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Can something be gained in translation? From its title The Swingers promises much. Much more than the original Dutch title Nieuwe Buren, which the caption in the opening credit sequence translates as The Neighbours. Someone in syndication has asked themselves the question: who the hell watches Dutch TV dramas called The Neighbours (aside from captive Dutch audiences)? And made the decision to pep things up for the international audience.It’s a bold change. Will the show come good on the promise of what in the patriarchal 1970s they used to call wife-swapping? Channel 4 is positioning it as Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us who saw the first, 1977 TV adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots in our teens still remember the shock and horror at its handling of a subject about which we knew little, American slavery. We know a lot more now, but the visceral reaction to inhumanity and injustice is no less strong. That's thanks to the high production values of the latest version, its gift for finding the right actors, and the often giddying cinematography of an honourable mainstream parallel to a towering masterpiece among movies, 12 Years a Slave.Roots, originally commissioned by the History Channel, may be more Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now…One of the many ironies of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s massive novel partly set in 1940s London, is that what follows these opening lines (760 pages in the original edition) actually occurs in the blink of an eye: the time it takes for the falling bomb to hit the sitting ducks in a picturehouse audience. Viewers of The Halcyon have known a bomb explodes at a party to celebrate the luxury hotel’s 50th year in November 1940 ever since the first episode eight weeks ago. Tonight we learned Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Tasmania, Down Under is like Canvey Island (although somewhat larger): everyone knows where it is but no one wants to go there. The Kettering Incident reveals why: the bleak but beautiful landscape is blasted by Antarctic gales and the natives, with few exceptions, are ugly devils, resentful of strangers and quarrelsome with their neighbours. And that’s just the humans.This eight-part “supernatural” drama began with a shot of a column of rock thrusting out of the sea between a V-shaped cleft in cliffs. Alas, what followed was also a load of cock. We’ve seen it all before, many times.This is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
From Jimmy Savile to the Rotherham scandal, child sexual abuse has become a recurring nightmare of our society, and thus is inevitably grist to the TV dramatist’s mill. It has been a crucial component in The Missing, National Treasure and Line of Duty, to name merely three recent examples.It gradually emerged again, like a monster from the deep, as the dominant theme of this second series of Unforgotten (★★★★) and writer Chris Lang had been skilful enough to thread it through the very different lives of his protagonists and deliver a finale that lived up to all that had Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
It takes a certain kind of perversity to make a true-life drama about a missing girl (Shannon Matthews) who wasn’t missing at all – the danger is that drama will be the only thing that’s missing. Neil McKay’s answer to the problem is to take a leaf out of Shane Meadows’s book of tricks and treat the whole sorry affair as a black comedy.The Moorside takes us back to the housing estate in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, that became so familiar in the winter of 2008 when the nation’s media descended upon it in search of the truth behind the disappearance of a nine-year-old girl. What they found – a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Guilty or not guilty? Dum dum, dum dum. No, it was not just in your imagination. As the axe hovered over the neck of Yvonne Carmichael at the climax of Apple Tree Yard, and the madam forewoman waited to deliver the jury’s verdict, there was an entirely synthetic and deeply irritating pause for dramatic effect. Guilty of the murder or manslaughter of George Selway? Dum dum. Dum dum. Or innocent? Dum dum. Perhaps Mrs Carmichael also found herself cursing Simon Cowell as the hideous grammar of his talent show bled into the doings of courtroom drama. Dum dum, dum dum. Over on ITV they’d have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's nothing like a tale set in a warm, exotic climate to lure in the viewers in damp and wintry northern Europe. Send the Nonnatus House midwives to South Africa for Christmas! Shoot a ridiculous detective drama in Guadeloupe! Go back to the Raj with Channel 4's Indian Summers!It's an old trick and it always works, and it probably will here as well. The title of The Good Karma Hospital makes it sound like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with added doctors and nurses, but thanks to a crisp and often witty script by Dan Sefton, it stands a good chance of establishing a distinctive identity Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There were signs of a collision as early as the second series. The event loomed larger in the third last year and last night, after an actual car crash, it finally happened: Endeavour became interchangeable with Midsomer Murders. How are the mighty fallen.Morse, investigating the disappearance of an academic in 1962, had doors slammed in his face while Morris Men practiced their menacing moves in the picturesque village of Bramford. The local yokels were preparing for the autumnal equinox (even though the trees were covered in green leaves) just as they were when the botanist, checking Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another night, another woman battered/strangled/raped/murdered. On Sunday a pregnant woman was brutally slapped about by her husband in Call the Midwife, while Emily Watson’s character in Apple Tree Yard was the victim of a punishment rape. And so it continues in Case, the latest Nordic noir to make its way here, this time from Iceland. It opened with two police officers making their way to the stage of a theatre. A glimpse through a doorway revealed what had brought them: the bottom half of a young woman’s body, dangling six feet above the ground.Lara is roughly the same age as Nanna Birk Read more ...