TV drama
Adam Sweeting
Could you cope with spending three years away from your family and loved ones while you went on the first crewed mission to Mars? This is the question that underpins Away, Netflix’s new space exploration drama.Certainly it’s a daunting ask, but if you were a career astronaut surely it’s something you’d have faced up to long before, even if it was only at some point during the long and arduous training programme that would precede a mission like this. However, for mission commander Emma Green (Hilary Swank) and her four companions, life on board their ship Atlas is full of awkward surprises, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC’s version of James Herriot’s books about his life as a Yorkshire vet became a weekend TV staple, running for seven series and a couple of Christmas specials between the late Seventies and the start of the Nineties. This elegantly-mounted revival is a partnership between Channel 5 and PBS in the States, and judging from this opening episode it has the potential to pick up where its much-loved predecessor left off.It’s 1937, and in dingy, depressed Glasgow, the young James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) has trained as a vet but is having trouble finding a job. His father, an unemployed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again, except somebody had renamed it The House at Knockdara. This was the title of the first novel by Michael Callaghan, Cambridge literature don, aspiring writer and serial seducer of his female students. Played here by Emmett J Scanlan, in young-fogey tweeds and Ernest Hemingway beard, Callaghan had “F for Fake” running all the way through him.Running over four consecutive nights this week, The Deceived sounded promising on paper, not least because it was written by Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee and her husband Tobias Beer, but is proving to be less Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Diarist, novelist and writer of erotica Anaïs Nin lived a brilliantly-coloured life littered with affairs with literary A-listers (Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell et al). She might have been delighted by this playfully-written and shrewdly cast dramatisation of her Little Birds story collection (Sky Atlantic), which creates a fabulously vivid and decadent picture of Tangier in the mid-1950s.In this opening pair of episodes, we followed sheltered American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) as she ventured forth from her family’s palatial New York apartment to meet her intended Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We knew that Michael Sheen was a skilful and versatile actor, but lately he’s been getting dangerously good. Last year he roared into the third season of The Good Fight as the outrageous drug-fuelled lawyer Roland Blum, like an explosive fusion of his fellow-Welshmen Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins. Now, after wickedly impersonating Chris Tarrant in ITV’s Quiz and indulging in some comical actor-baiting in the BBC’s Staged, he arrives in Sky 1’s new US import Prodigal Son as the brilliant Dr Martin Whitly.But behind his suave and charming exterior, Dr Whitly is a profoundly deranged serial Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on Philip Roth’s 2004 novel of the same name, The Plot Against America flashes back to the global turbulence of the 1940s to depict a counterfactual America that turns to the dark side. Instead of the re-election of Franklin D Roosevelt for a third term in 1940, the aviation pioneer and wildly popular celebrity Charles Lindbergh is elected President, on a platform of keeping America out of the new war in Europe.The real Lindbergh had lived in Europe during the 1930s and was suspected of Nazi sympathies – he was awarded the Order of Merit of the German Eagle, which the Hitler regime gave Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the midst of our increasingly confrontational politics of race and gender, it was a timely move to make this series (on BBC Two) about Seventies radical feminism and the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the USA, even if some of the minutiae are liable to sound abstract or alien to British viewers. Cate Blanchett storms brilliantly to the fore as Phyllis Schlafly, a proud Republican housewife and champion of traditional family values, and staunch opponent of the Amendment.Schlafly is that bewildering paradox, a conservative revolutionary, which apparently is what lured Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
American history of the 1930s and ‘40s suddenly seems to be all the rage on TV, cropping up in the reborn Perry Mason, Das Boot and now this new incarnation of Penny Dreadful (Sky Atlantic). The original was a blowsy Gothic mash-up of Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll & Hyde and anything vaguely related that could be made to fit.But this new one, again created and written by John Logan, leaps forward to Los Angeles in 1938. The city looks alluring under beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine, but there is unease in the air. Rumours of the coming European war are percolating, California’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The second series of Das Boot (Sky Atlantic) began strongly, and by the time we reached this last pair of episodes it was almost too agonising to watch. You could argue that it sometimes overreached by stretching the scope of the narrative to breaking point, but at its core it’s a study of human values under impossible pressure. Many have been found wanting, but others have discovered something fine within themselves.As it sped towards a conclusion – although not one so conclusive that it didn’t leave plenty of potential for series 3 – the horror of total war continued to exert crushing force Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.For the purposes of this entertaining, if slight, new US drama series (on ITV2), the object was a flying saucer, and unknown to the locals, unearthly survivors from the crash have been living among them ever since. The secrets of the past begin to unravel when Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to this “sleepy cowboy town” and starts re-establishing contact with her old Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).The original Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner told readers next to nothing about Mason’s history and background, so creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones had a huge canvas to splash about on when they devised their new show. Read more ...
Davide Abbatescianni
After the success of the sci-fi crime drama 1983 (2018), another Polish original series has landed at Netflix. The Woods, directed by Leszek Dawid and Bartosz Konopka, is a six-part mystery thriller adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel, set in two main time spans: 1994 and 2019. The story centres on the Warsaw prosecutor Paweł Kopiński (Grzegorz Damięcki), who is still grieving the loss of his sister Kamila (Martyna Byczkowska) 25 years earlier, when she walked into the woods at a summer camp and was never seen again.In 2019, the discovery of a homicide victim – presumably Artur Perkowski, a boy Read more ...