tv reviews
Adam Sweeting

The theme of a parent haunted by the loss of a child can have powerful dramatic potential, and this is the premise behind The Drowning, Channel 5’s new four-night mystery. Nine years earlier, Jodie and Frank’s four-year-old son Tom vanished during a family outing to a local lake. His body was never found, and he was presumed dead.

Adam Sweeting

If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a happy ending (or at least not the bloodbath that had threatened to erupt).

Adam Sweeting

Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet down next.

David Nice

Finally, it seems, the time is right for a major British TV drama about how the AIDS crisis hit the early 1980s London gay scene.

Adam Sweeting

Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (Netflix) will be the final outing for this caustically addictive saga of actors and their agents. The show’s unique trademark has been its success in attracting an impressive roster of A-list French actors and getting them to behave in outlandish and ridiculous ways, but maybe they’re just running out of suitably recognisable names.

Saskia Baron

What a television programme gets called is not always the choice of the people making it, but it certainly is the choice of its broadcaster. In the case of Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, the relevant people at the BBC may come to regret giving an otherwise decent documentary that title.

Adam Sweeting

The oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony Basgallop, he’s hit the spot with this unnerving series for Apple TV +. Just back for its second season, Servant homes in on the fraught and freaky lives of Sean and Dorothy Turner.

Adam Sweeting

Or, What The Durrells Did Next. Writer Simon Nye, writer/director Roger Goldby and star Keeley Hawes are all veterans of ITV’s Corfu-based fantasy, and while Finding Alice superficially resembles a thriller, like its predecessor it’s more of an undemanding family melodrama once you’ve peeled away the wrapping.

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.

Adam Sweeting

The motor racing passion of movie star Steve McQueen is well documented, from his motorcycling exploits in The Great Escape to the rubber-burning car chase around San Francisco in Bullitt to his weird but mesmeric sports car odyssey Le Mans. Less widely known, however, was his plan to shoot a movie about Formula One during the mid-Sixties.