tv reviews
Adam Sweeting

Reese Witherspoon has evolved into a growth industry on the new frontier of Big Television. Her production company Hello Sunshine has a heap of projects on the go with a range of networks, and following her success with Big Little Lies (for HBO), Little Fires Everywhere comes to you courtesy of Hulu (in the US) and Amazon Prime.

Adam Sweeting

It’s impossible to tell whether this reality-doc series (C4) came to praise Best Western hotels or kill it off entirely. Some viewers have been weeping with laughter at the David Brent-style antics of the company’s Aussie CEO Rob Paterson and his motivational slogans (Smash It!, Give a *** etc), while others have hailed it as a red-flag warning about how not to run a business.

Adam Sweeting

It’s too early for a definitive account of the Covid-19 pandemic, and this was very much a Sky News version of what we’ve been through so far. Although it seems the virus has peaked and we’re entering a tentative stage of partial de-lockdown, the message was relentlessly grim.

Adam Sweeting

Great idea to use a symphony orchestra as the basis for a TV drama, because all of human life is there. Not to mention death, since this entertaining, though melodramatic, new French import (Channel 4) began with the dramatic collapse on the podium of veteran conductor George Delvaux just as he was launching into the finale of the New World symphony. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Veronica Lee

Since Donald Trump's election as US President in 2016, I imagine satirists have slowly lost the will to live – as nothing they can write can outdo his buffoonery. But when Greg Daniels (creator of the American version of The Office) and Steve Carell (its star) announced they were inspired to write Space Force from one of his ideas, it augured well.

Adam Sweeting

This short series of new dramas (on BBC Four) by a group of leading playwrights was commissioned by Headlong and Century Films, a week before the virus lockdown was announced on 23 March, and represents an artistic first response to a situation nobody can fully comprehend.

Adam Sweeting

David Olusoga’s A House Through Time concept (BBC Two) has proved a popular hit, using a specific property as a keyhole through which to observe historical and social changes. After previously picking sites in Liverpool and Newcastle, this time he’s chosen Bristol, the city where he has lived for over 20 years.

Adam Sweeting

Since it debuted in November last year, Apple TV+ has barely made a dent in a market largely shaped by Netflix, but this eight-part adaptation of William Landay’s bestselling novel is a decisive step in the right direction.

Adam Sweeting

Do TV companies get some sort of financial incentive to use the phrase “A Very British…” in their programme titles? This now-meaningless descriptor has been applied to airlines, brothels, political coups, the Renaissance, Margaret Thatcher, sex scandals, Brexit and lord knows what else. When you can’t think of an original title, you know what to do.

Adam Sweeting

Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously commented that football is far more serious than a matter of life and death. This couldn’t quite be said of Harry Redknapp’s renewed adventures of footballers reunited (ITV), yet behind its jokey facade of a bunch of Nineties-era England veterans drinking their way across Europe, Harry’s Heroes is strangely poignant and delivers some painful emotional truths.