fri 25/07/2025

tv

The Terror, BBC Two review - nightmare in the Arctic wastes

Adam Sweeting

Admittedly, Antarctic explorer Captain Scott was at the other end of the earth from the protagonists of The Terror (BBC Two), but they would surely have concurred with his anguished observation: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Based on Dan Simmons’s novel, The Terror is a fictionalised account of the 1845 attempt by Sir John Franklin to find the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean.

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Your Honor, Sky Atlantic review - Bryan Cranston suffers fear and loathing in New Orleans

Adam Sweeting

Nice to find Bryan Cranston taking the lead in a TV series again (this is his first since Breaking Bad ended in 2013), and the role of New Orleans judge Michael Desiato fits him like a well-tailored suit.

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Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Apple TV+ review - sprawling account of the singer's rise to superstardom

Adam Sweeting

The Billie Eilish story is a paradigm of pop music and marketing, 2020s-style. Eilish’s instinctive talent became evident when she was barely into her teens, and she flourished with the support of a close-knit and musical family.

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Stand Up and Deliver, Channel 4 review - how to make a comic

Veronica Lee

Everyone (well, almost everyone) can tell a joke. But being a comic – holding an audience rapt, getting a roomful of strangers to like you and laugh at your material – takes real talent.

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Bloodlands, BBC One review - ghosts of the Troubles return to poison the present

Adam Sweeting

Belfast-based thriller Bloodlands comes from the pen of first-time TV writer Chris Brandon, though he may find some of his thunder being stolen by the show’s producer, Line of Duty supremo Jed Mercurio. Line of Duty is filmed in Belfast too, though it doesn’t advertise the fact on screen.

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Whirlybird: Live Above LA - Storyville, BBC Four review - rise and fall of the first couple of airborne TV news

Adam Sweeting

A story of obsession, media madness and the price of fame, as well as a filmic incarnation of Jim Morrison’s “bloody red sun of fantastic LA”, Matt Yoka’s film Whirlybird is a strange and fascinating hybrid.

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ZeroZeroZero, Sky Atlantic review - how drug money makes the world go round

Adam Sweeting

Based on a book by Roberto Saviano, author of the Neapolitan gang saga Gomorrah, ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic) is an account of the international drugs trade and the way its tentacles wrap themselves around the...

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The Drowning, Channel 5 review - unbelievable

Adam Sweeting

The theme of a parent haunted by the loss of a child can have powerful dramatic potential, and this is the premise behind The Drowning, Channel 5’s new four-night mystery. Nine years earlier, Jodie and Frank’s four-year-old son Tom vanished during a family outing to a local lake.

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Spiral, Series 8 Finale, BBC Four review - justice is done in stormy climactic episodes

Adam Sweeting

If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done.

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Marcella, Series 3, ITV review - Anna Friel returns as the defective detective

Adam Sweeting

Anna Friel’s unstable detective Marcella Backland has been on the brink of existential burn-out ever since her first appearance on ITV in 2016, but it seems audiences have a perverse desire to see what psychological black holes she might plummet down next.

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