TV
David Nice
They’re back, the Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Ozark District, otherwise sleek-seeming middle class Chicagoans Marty and Wendy Byrde. And thanks to the super-subtle performances of Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, we hate them more than ever – except when they’re up against worse.It's clear where our sympathies should really lie, however complicated: with the young people caught up in the network of money-laundering, murder and general amorality. Ozark shares the concerns of Dickens over betrayed and abused children and adolescents. The Byrdes believe in family values, but are fucking up their Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Do we need another documentary about Nazi Germany? Yes, when it is as cogent and subtle as Luke Holland’s Final Account. Made over eight years while the veteran film-maker was battling with the cancer that killed him in 2020, it’s a tapestry of interviews with the ageing generation who lived under Hitler, a last chance to put them on camera.Holland, whose maternal grandparents died in the Holocaust, is intent on showing us ordinary folk, functionaries not monsters. These are regular people once enchanted by Nazism, now living in comfortable retirement in cosy houses or salubrious nursing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Cops on the box… don’t we just love ‘em? From Jimmy Perez and Ted Hastings to Inspector Reid from Ripper Street and Stella Gibson from The Fall the list is endless, but obviously we need more. The copper seems to have become the battered Everyperson we can dump all our fear, loathing and anxiety onto.Just this week, we have two new major police-orientated series, the credibility-stretching bomb disposal yarn Trigger Point (ITV), and The Responder on BBC One (wackily scheduled across two weeks). At first glance the latter is indisputably the superior of the two, largely because of a dominant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC have billed this as a “four-part thriller about sexual politics in the modern workplace”, which is slightly misleading because it looks as though it’s taking place in about 1983. The action centres on a sportswear company called Fly Dynamic, based somewhere in the north of England, a company which began as a market stall and now allegedly threatens the supremacy of JD Sports. It’s doing so well it’s about to float on the stock exchange.Screenwriter Ruth Fowler has evidently steeped herself in the history of #MeToo, the abuse of female employees and the deplorable “toxic masculinity” Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When business and politics collide, the result may very well be corruption. Such is the case in this taut, streamlined thriller from Norway, one of many gems from the Walter Presents stable.Ida Waage (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, pictured below) is the Chief Financial Officer at Oslo law firm Biermann & Gude. A diligent wife and mother and a level-headed professional, she seems the perfect fit for this seemingly exemplary and prestigious outfit. However, when she’s asked to pay an invoice for 450,000 kroner to a company called Klant Consulting, which supposedly Biermann & Gude don’t do any Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“Will they never learn?” people must have been screaming as they watched the opening episode of the 16th series of The Apprentice – I certainly was. After all these years, the hopefuls vying to take Lord Sugar's £250,000 to invest in their business idea seem blissfully unaware of how daft they look with their strutting boasts. I know it's a competition, but not in how to sound the most foolish.So we had the usual bombast bingo list. “I'm the complete package”, “I would compare myself to a Ferrari”, “Failure is not an option” and “I'm so confident to the point people think I'm deluded”. Bless Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's so much stuff on TV, in all its many multi-streaming hats, that I somehow haven't got around to watching Succession. Apparently it's the best TV show ever made.Oh well, there's bound to be another one along in a minute. Theartsdesk's eagle-eyed reviewers have found plenty to amuse themseves with elsewhere during 2021, and we parade our particular predilections below. Adam SweetingIt's a Sin, Channel 4 When I reviewed the first two episodes of Russell T Davies's shattering, but also where appropriate very funny, take on how the AIDS crisis hit Londin in the 1980s, I could have Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw?Duh, of course not! That was A Very English Scandal (though both of them are produced by Blueprint Pictures). But was it really a great idea to tag this plushly-produced, starrily-cast, historically-based three-parter as though it’s just the latest product to trundle off a televisual production line? We look forward to the box set where it’s bundled in with A Very English Education, A Very British Brothel, A Very British Hotel Chain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Friday night was Mark Gatiss night. His new version of Antonia Barber’s novel The Ghosts (filmed as The Amazing Mr Blunden in 1972 by Lionel Jeffries and similarly titled here) sprawled across two hours on Sky, while his adaptation of M R James’s ghost story The Mezzotint was awarded a mere 30 minutes on BBC Two. The latter won hands down.Gatiss’s Mr Blunden (★★) stuck faithfully enough to the original story of a modern-day family being visited by a ghostly solicitor, the titular Mr Blunden (played here by the fruitily thespian Simon Callow as though he’d just popped in one from one of his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect? That is one question posed by this four-part drama (adapted by JP Delaney from his own novel), a kind of haunted house mystery underpinned by the damaged psychological states of its protagonists.David Oleyowo plays Edward Monkford, the architect in question, whose minimalistic and futuristic creation at One Folgate Street becomes the setting in which themes of compulsion, obsession and deception are played out in an atmosphere of steadily-gathering menace. Orbiting around Edward and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2014, Susan and Christopher Edwards were jailed for a minimum of 25 years for the killing of Susan’s parents, William and Patricia Wycherley. They’d been shot dead in 1998, and lay buried in their garden at 2 Blenheim Close, Mansfield for 15 years.Susan and Christopher had successfully maintained the fiction that the Wycherleys were still alive, but taking extended holidays, by writing greeting cards to relatives or keeping in touch with their GP’s surgery on their behalf. The killings might never have come to light had the Department for Work and Pensions not written to William Wycherley Read more ...