TV
Adam Sweeting
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a dramatic fiction adapted from the novel by Imran Mahmood, and Hero’s decision to defend himself at his own murder trial found him standing up in court and giving an actorly rendition of his own version of the plot.I liked it better than the prosecution’s version – is the law really just a story-telling contest? – even though Hero seemed to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), Hellbound is derived from the “webtoon” series he created with cartoonist Choi Gyuseok. It depicts a nightmarish society where “sinners” are picked out seemingly at random by a mysterious “angel” and informed that they will Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A caption tells us that while filming the Beatles at Twickenham Film Studios in January 1969 for a planned TV broadcast, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg and his crew amassed 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recordings. Some of it was seen in the 1970 film Let It Be, but the bulk of it has remained locked in the vaults ever since. Until now. Sometimes, watching Peter Jackson’s vast three-part documentary series Get Back, it feels like we’re having to sit through every second of all of it.Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) spent four years editing and restoring the footage, and could only Read more ...
aleks.sierz
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England trilogy. Written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, these three brilliant monologues have not only explored vital questions of race and racism, identity and belonging, but have also provided a record of theatre-going before, during and after the pandemic lockdown.From the first episode, which was staged live at the National Theatre in January 2020, to the second which only had one performance but was then streamed in October 2020, to this final part, which is a film, the story of fractious Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Drug companies are supposed to be honest,” says a lady from the Department of Justice, explaining why the US Food and Drug Administration had been treating the pharmaceutical industry with a light, indeed barely detectable, regulatory touch.Dopesick is the story of how the chickens came home to roost when the unscrupulous drugs monolith Purdue launched its painkilling drug OxyContin on an unsuspecting American public, and from the mid-1990s into the 2000s set in motion one of the most devastating health scandals in medical history.Based on the book by Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest offering from the ubiquitous World Productions (creators of Line of Duty, the farcical but strangely popular Vigil, Bodyguard etc etc) is a whodunnit, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, as it explores the mysterious disappearance and death of university student Hannah Ellis. Thanks to a smart and sometimes blackly-comic script by Ben Richards, Showtrial is a notch or two above a lot of the cut-and-paste dramas that have been clogging the schedules lately, and even goes so far as to credit the viewer with being able to discern that there may be more to somebody’s personality than its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Treading in the footsteps of Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, Bertie Carvel is a making a decent (albeit soporific) stab at embodying P D James’s introspective detective Adam Dalgliesh, though you have to wonder if he’s getting the help he needs from Channel 5. This current series of three two-part stories over consecutive nights is designed to grab two bites of the audience cherry, but would surely have greater impact and more narrative coherence as three two-hour slots. It never did Poirot or Morse any harm.The problem is the commercial TV hour, which gets you about 47 minutes of programme Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to know how seriously to take Temple, Sky Max’s outlandish medical thriller about surgeon Dr Daniel Milton and his gothicky secret clinic, hidden under Temple tube station in London. In the first series, he miraculously managed to save his wife Beth (Catherine McCormack) from a terminal case of a mystery disease (despite the fact that he’d already delivered the eulogy at her funeral), but not without committing a few grossly unethical acts along the way. In this second series, flocks of chickens are coming home to roost.The best thing about it, apart from its lovingly-shot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The population of the Shetland archipelago is only about 23,000 (similar to Broadstairs or Amersham), though judging by the adventures of DI Jimmy Perez, an extraordinarily large percentage of them harbour dark secrets or murderous tendencies. BBC One's sixth series of Shetland (scripted by David Kane, since the original Ann Cleeves novels have long since been used up) finds Perez world-wearier than ever, as he probes into the steadily darkening circumstances surrounding the murder of local lawyer Alex Galbraith.The original appeal of Shetland was the way its human dramas were entwined with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5’ s decision to remake James Herriot’s much-loved Yorkshire vet stories was an inspired one, and this second series has effortlessly carried on the mood of gentle observation, nostalgia and slapstick comedy amid scintillating Yorkshire Dales scenery. A teeming cast of dogs, cats, horses, cows and chickens is permanently on call to provide fuel for the adventures of Herriot and the Farnon veterinary dynasty.Much of the time, the second series has merely rung a few changes on the formula perfected last time around, but fans of the show (and of Herriot’s original books) won’t mind. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This Korean-made show suddenly became Netflix’s all-time greatest hit, demonstrating once again the irresistible allure of a game show which ruthlessly massacres its contestants. Squid Game has some fairly obvious antecedents – for instance The Hunger Games, the Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man and the Japanese TV show Battle Royale – and also carries echoes of the 1960s cult mystery The Prisoner and perhaps a soupçon of Lord of the Flies. The fact that it has come out of South Korea undoubtedly sprays on an added miasma of strangeness (avoid the dubbed English dialogue option, because Read more ...