tv reviews
Adam Sweeting

A joint production between Channel 5 and Australia’s Network 10, the four-part mystery Lie With Me didn’t do itself many favours by kicking off with its least persuasive episode. However, if you stuck with it, hidden layers began to reveal themselves, and the final instalment delivered a satisfyingly malevolent twist.

Adam Sweeting

The extraordinary story of motor industry executive Carlos Ghosn is a heady combination of power, money, corruption and international politics, with a Mission: Impossible-style ending that carries it over the finishing tape in dramatic style. It might be considered a cautionary tale, except that Ghosn’s experiences and personality were so unique that a repeat performance could never happen.

Adam Sweeting

Has Netflix succeeded in reshaping Mills & Boon for the YouPorn era?

Adam Sweeting

Last year, Netflix released Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, a four-part documentary about the notorious financier and convicted sex offender. Now, here’s a Ghislaine Maxwell: Epstein’s Shadow (Sky Documentaries), a three-parter about the woman accused by Epstein’s victims of helping him entrap them in his sordid pit of vice.

Adam Sweeting

She became one of the most successful pop stars in history, but Britney Spears has also become a paradigm of the horrors and pitfalls of life in the white heat of showbusiness.

Adam Sweeting

It’s not easy to sum up Physical in a pithy soundbite, though “quasi-political misanthropic comedy” might be vaguely in the right ballpark.

David Nice

A massive musical hope for the future is what we all need right now, after 14 stop/semi-start months and a threatened decimation of the concert and opera scene, the danger of which isn't over yet. This year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World delivered that hope in frissons and plenty of tear-inducing moments, even though the live audience in St David’s Hall consisted of only three empathetic judges.

Adam Sweeting

After appearing in six of Marvel’s Avengers movies, Tom Hiddleston’s Loki (the God of Mischief) gets his own TV series. Never quite enjoying the high profile of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man or Chris Evans’s Captain America, Loki has remained a somewhat enigmatic and ambiguous character, which has given him plenty of potential room for manoeuvre in this small(er)-screen incarnation.

Adam Sweeting

Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s named after (the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc), but about Assane Diop, who’s an obsessive fan of the Lupin novels.

Adam Sweeting

They all laughed when the streaming service Britbox declared that it wanted to become a sort of UK-orientated Netflix, because so far it’s been mostly a back catalogue operation which plunders the BBC and ITV archives. You really want to pay a subscription to watch Are You Being Served? and Rosemary and Thyme?