Suspect has a simple premise: a detective goes on a routine visit to a mortuary where an unidentified young woman has been taken after being found hanged. Suicide is the initial judgment: the cop, Danny Frater (James Nesbitt), grills the pathologist (Joely Richardson, pictured below) about the case and starts to leave. Then he pauses, policing instincts a-twitch, and uncovers the body’s head. Horror of horrors, it is his estranged daughter Christina, and he doesn’t believe she killed herself.Over eight half-hour episodes, Danny tracks the people in his daughter’s life, each episode bringing Read more ...

Renowned for an impressive body of work that includes This House, Quiz and Brexit: The Uncivil War, playwright and screenwriter James Graham has looked inwards and backwards for his new six-part series Sherwood.Set in a former mining community in Nottinghamshire, based on the author’s own home town, Sherwood (BBC One) charts a story of increasing violence and bitterness, based on real-life incidents that took place in the miners’ strike back in 1984.The historical background is evoked by newsreel footage from the Eighties of lines of police battling miners, and Prime Minister Margaret Read more ...

Has there ever been a smarter television series than DR’s Borgen? It’s regularly compared to The West Wing for its twisty interrogation of government shenanigans – and certainly it pays to get to grips with the coalition-driven political scene at the Castle, seat of the Danish government, just as it did with Aaron Sorkin’s take on the Hill. But what The West Wing didn’t have was a character as beguiling as Birgitte Nyborg, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, to guide its audience. The truly clever thing about Borgen is how palatable its politics are, even when they seem mind-numbing on the Read more ...

It has been 14 years since The Wire, David Simon’s labyrinthine epic about crime and policing in Baltimore, reached the end of the line. Yet it seems he couldn’t let it lie, because he’s back on the Baltimore beat with We Own This City (made by HBO, showing on Sky Atlantic). This time, the series is based on the eponymous non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, with crime novelist George Pelecanos sharing the “Creator” credit with Simon.This is not going to be a relaxing or easy watch, and flopping out on the sofa with a large glass of something mellow is not the ideal way Read more ...

Irony can be a trump card for a provocative comic such as Ricky Gervais, and he plays it right at the top of his SuperNature, an updated version of a show he started touring in 2019, which was rudely interrupted by the pandemic and is now his latest Netflix special. “Irony, where I say things I don’t mean. There’s going to be a lot of that throughout the show,” he says, launching into a clever skit purportedly saying women aren’t funny, but which then moves on to, for some, the most pressing issue of the day, self-ID.“I love the new women, Gervais says. “They’re great, aren’t they? The Read more ...

If your memory of the 1957 John Wyndham novel about an alien invasion of an English village by chilling children with blonde pageboy hair is still pin-sharp, probably best to back-burner it before you watch Sky’s new adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos. The bones of the original plot are still there, but tricked out in concerns of a more contemporary kind. A brief prologue sets up the stakes: a couple trying to escape the family home are intercepted by an eerie child, who wags a reproving finger at them. Then the opening credit graphics roll, picturing a long vaginal tunnel of trees, at Read more ...

The fact that John Lydon has complained so long and so loudly about director Danny Boyle’s TV drama about the Sex Pistols has only served to pump up interest in the project.“I'm the one that wrote those songs, right. I gave them their image. I gave them everything. And they've done this rather snidey kind of piece of work behind my back," raged Lydon on ITV’s This Morning. Danny Boyle is an “arsehole”, he added (pictured below, the real John Lydon).A dollop of Rotten-esque spleen is just the job for pushing the show into the limelight, and its pacey, lurid and cartoon-like nature should Read more ...

With Jurassic World: Dominion due in June, which will mark the end of the “Jurassic” movie franchise, here’s Apple TV’s alternative, science-based history of dinosaurs and their world. It’s produced by Jon Favreau, a key player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark “Whispering Dave” style. Attenborough likens it to his Planet Earth documentaries, except transported 66 million years into the past.Prehistoric Planet claims that it has incorporated all the latest research into the lives of the creatures that used to rule the earth, though much of Read more ...

The challenge for the makers of Das Boot is to keep finding new ways to move the show forwards and outwards without losing touch with its foundations in World War Two submarine warfare.This wasn’t a problem faced by Wolfgang Petersen when he made his original Das Boot movie in 1981, because the interior of a U-boat – U-96, to be specific – became the all-encompassing universe of his film. But he did call it “a journey to the edge of the mind”.Previously, Das Boot (the TV show, dubbed Das Reboot in some quarters) has delved into the Nazi occupation of France and the activities of the Read more ...

Sarah Perry’s 2016 bestseller The Essex Serpent has been described as “a novel of ideas”, which almost sounds like a warning to anybody wanting to televise it. Happily, director Clio Barnard and screenwriter Anna Symon picked up the gauntlet, and have wrought a kind of contemplative television in which the story’s historical and philosophical preoccupations are expressed through landscape and imagery as much as dialogue and action.Huge credit goes to cinematographer David Raedeker, whose astoundingly beautiful and haunting images of marshy Essex coastline in the Maldon and Brightlingsea area Read more ...

As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.You wonder whether the team responsible for Ozark envisaged as big a role for Julia Garner when Ruth first Read more ...

The real-life case of Michael Peterson and the death of his wife Kathleen in 2001 has generated a steady stream of TV documentaries, though this new series from HBO Max (showing on NOW) is the first time anybody has actually dramatised the story. With Colin Firth as Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, it’s a compelling mix of conspiracy theory, forensic detective thriller and legal drama, bristling with false trails and tantalising clues.The discovery of Kathleen’s battered and blood-soaked body at the bottom of the staircase at the family’s home in Durham, North Carolina sets the ball Read more ...