TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst has some stellar credits on his CV (Shameless, Exile and The Street among others), though I don't know if Ordinary Lies is going to rate among his finest achievements. Over six episodes, the series will tell the stories of six employees of a car showroom, JS Motor Group Ltd (seemingly somewhere in the north-west), and how being frugal with the actualité blights their lives.This opener starred Jason Manford as Marty, a salesman who prided himself on his glib motormouthing skills. However, it looked like his career was heading for the ditch. No longer brimming Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hooray! The BBC has learned its lesson from the "Mumblegate" furore that erupted around last year's adaptation of Jamaica Inn, and ensured that even the most unwashed and toothless Cornish yokel in this all-new Poldark is almost 90 per cent intelligible. As the central character Ross Poldark, Aidan Turner (of Hobbit fame) is a model of robust actorly diction. However, elsewhere Poldark displays potentially more damaging failings. The Corporation is indecently fond of bigging up its own creations, but the trailers for Poldark were better then the thing itself. It feels like a mash-up of Read more ...
Florence Hallett
As worst-case scenarios go, the prospect of a UKIP government in a little under three months’ time is a frightening but unlikely one – isn’t it? That they have only two MPs, and leader Nigel Farage is yet to find a seat, has done nothing to stop UKIP setting the political agenda, bulldozing its way to centre stage to demand a place in the forthcoming televised election debates. And while the pantomime buffoonery of Farage and Godfrey Bloom has provided endless scope for ridicule, the very existence of Channel 4’s fictional documentary, set in an imagined but uncomfortably near future, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
In the tradition of A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown and Staying On, Indian Summers is ambitious, a serious soap attempting to show the dying days of the Raj through a host of interwoven personal and political attachments. Passions run high in the foothills of the Himalayas, cool in the Indian summer, but X-rated for human relationships. This jumbo-sized opener (the first of 10 episodes) had a tangled web of plotlines woven round a variety of class and caste, racial, religious and sexual tensions, amid a potentially explosive political situation. It's all set in the gorgeous Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Finally the moment the Breaking Bad diaspora has been waiting for, with the arrival of Vince Gilligan's new show about the earlier career of New Mexico's least scrupulous lawyer, Saul Goodman. Mind you, the title is a little bit misleading, because Saul doesn't exist yet. In this incarnation, he's still just a hustling low-life called Jimmy McGill, a man who never knowingly leaves any barrel unscraped.Goodman was often used as light relief in Breaking Bad, providing interludes of comic sleaze amid the remorseless descent into moral darkness, but here we must, perforce, get a fuller sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you can't beat 'em, steal brazenly from 'em. Instead of importing another Scandinavian drama series and slapping on some subtitles, or recycling Fargo or Breaking Bad (or for that matter Deadwood or Twin Peaks), Sky Atlantic has pushed the boat out and created its own slab of sub-zero Nordic mystery, packed with bankable international names. If this extended pilot episode was a reliable guide, it's going to be a tortuous ride on black ice.Fortitude is a remote town in the Arctic Circle, perched on the edge of a majestic and somewhat scary glacier. Up to now it's been renowned among the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Mercifully not preceded by a Broadchurch-style hype-tsunami, the new series of Mr Selfridge has slipped neatly back into the Sunday 9pm slot as if it's the rightful owner just back from a year of travelling round the world. It's not revolutionary, ground-breaking or "subversive", but equipped with some new characters and promising plotlines, this opening episode ushered us into the post-World War One era with a spring in its step and the wind in its hair.However, first we had to dispatch poor Rose Selfridge, Harry's much-loved wife (who was played by Frances O'Connor, latterly of The Missing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You can see why writers and TV companies like the idea of creating sequels to successful series, but trying to make lightning strike twice has obvious drawbacks. In the case of the original Broadchurch, the runaway ratings blockbuster which ended in April 2013, the story felt so complete and self-contained that the notion of a sequel seemed redundant, or gratuitous.But anyway here's series two, arriving in a kind of tumult of secrecy as ITV stoutly withheld any previews or much information of any kind from clamouring newshounds. Such is the allure of the Broadchurch brand that this opener Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer Anthony Horowitz has imbued Foyle's War with longevity by anchoring it among some lesser-known and frequently shameful occurrences in the margins of World War Two, and this ninth series opener duly embroiled us in murky shenanigans involving unscrupulous oil barons and cynical German industrialists. The former DCS Foyle is continuing in his post-war role with MI5, as the Russians continue to infiltrate remorselessly from the east while the West is still struggling to pick itself up off the cratered and rubble-strewn floor.Horowitz had threaded the Nuremberg war trials into his story Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Apologies in advance to fans of The Missing, The Honourable Woman, The Fall, Game of Thrones or House of Cards, none of which feature in the list below, but might well have done. So might The Good Wife, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders. The fact is, in our teeming everything-everywhere world now boosted by Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Now TV and many more, whittling a whole year down to a handful of nuggets requires the wisdom of Solomon, the patience of Job, and the devious brain of a superhacker. But at least it's no longer feasible to protest that "there's nothing on the telly". Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Back for its third series [***], Sally Wainwright's saga of Yorkshire folk continues to tread a precarious line between syrupy soapfulness and a family drama with sharp little teeth. Its excellent cast helps to carry it over the worst of the soggy bits, and its best moments have a way of catching you unawares. You'd have to guess that it also scores strongly by not being crammed with serial killers, paedophiles and corrupt cops.It's a sign of the confidence that healthy ratings bring that they dared to open this new season with Alan (Derek Jacobi) and Celia (Anne Reid) sitting at a restaurant Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Christmas scoop was the first appearance of the authorial voice, Vanessa Redgrave, playing Jennifer Worth, writing Christmas cards, looking at the photographs of herself with her two midwife friends and plunging us into memory from 2005 to 1959. She tells her husband Philip (Ronald Pickup) with tender affection how different it was, but "once a nurse, always a nurse," he responds. Bookending this episode were her words as she and Philip finished Christmas preparations, that if we are lucky we find love, and even its meaning. Philip then persuades Jennifer to write her memoirs, and the Read more ...