TV
Adam Sweeting
There’s no stopping Harry and Meghan. Logic, reason and facts can’t stand in the way of their “war on oppression and injustice” and determination to become “advocates of healing”. Even though their notorious interview with Oprah Winfrey was littered with demonstrable untruths, it seems their target audience buys into the notion of them telling “their” truth, surely the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The absurdity of preaching eco-awareness while travelling everywhere by private jet and motorcade never seems to prick their perma-bubble of blissful self-regard.Finally their Netflix Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some may consider country music to be corny, sentimental and a relic of a forgotten era. If so, this six-part dramatisation of the lives of Tammy Wynette and George Jones is a reminder of how powerful and soulful the best country music can be, fuelled by raw emotions and personal turmoil.The tumultuous and frequently agonising progress of Jones and Wynette’s relationship was so traumatic that nobody could have dared to make it up, but the series is based on the factual recollections of the couple’s daughter Georgette in her book The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George. It’s a bone- Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Apple TV+ is using the arrival of season two of Slow Horses to offer a generous three-month free trial to its streamer service. Ample time to catch up with season one and watch it multiple times before all of season two is available at the end of December. Go for it.Mick Herron is now preparing the ninth Slough House novel for publication in 2023 (there have also been three related novellas in the sequence), while the TV series is just embarking on volume two, Dead Lions. Predictably, the literary critical backlash has already begun: the books are formulaic, the magic doesn’t last, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was originally a plan to make Tokyo Vice a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, but it has ended up as a TV series starring Ansel Elgort. It’s almost certainly the better for it, because the eight episodes of this first season – the way it ends, or rather doesn’t, makes a second helping inevitable – give it space to explore Japanese culture and its often mutually uncomprehending relationship with American or European values.It’s based on the book of the same name by Jake Adelstein, a Missouri-born journalist who relocated to Tokyo, joined the staff of a Japanese newspaper and worked his way Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese won delirious acclaim for their previous Netflix series Dark, a labyrinthine and fantastical account of children vanishing from a small German town. Anyone familiar with its baffling events and leaps across different timelines will probably feel at home with 1899, the duo’s similarly mind-bending follow-up.The story this time pivots around the disappearance of an ocean liner, the Prometheus, which has been missing at sea for four months. When a strange, constantly-repeating telegraph message is received, apparently coming from the vanished vessel, it prompts Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“It was like Woodstock on steroids,” opines an expert in Netflix’s new release about the doomed marriage of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (yes, another one).Not sure you remember anything of that description from your history lessons? That would be the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the lavish spectacle staged near Calais in 1520 for a summit between Henry and François I of France. This remark should tell you the key thing you need to know about Blood, Sex & Royalty. It’s probably not for you, unless you are vetting it on behalf of teenage offspring. Its mesh of costumed soap with Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Why did Maui work better than Taormina? Mike White’s second series of The White Lotus, which has relocated for its second season from an upscale Hawaiian resort to the fleshpots of Sicily, is still a worthwhile watch, but it’s hard not to wonder where that special savour has gone this time. We know the drill now, for starters: a dead body turns up in an earthly paradise for rich people, and six episodes later we will know the who, why and when. Season one had fun misleading us about the perp; the second has opted for the trickier stunt of concealing exactly how many bodies there are, and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Writer and director Hugo Blick isn’t afraid of getting stuck into some knotty and morally complicated issues, whether it’s Middle Eastern politics (The Honourable Woman) or the Rwandan genocide (Black Earth Rising), but perhaps he wouldn’t be your automatic go-to guy for Westerns. Nevertheless, here he is, giving it some high-plains-drifter in a baleful tale of revenge, violence and twists of fate.It’s 1890, and we first meet Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt) in the prairie flatlands of Kansas. The landscape is gaunt and bleak, the view only interrupted by a rickety wooden hotel which looks Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now into its fifth season, Netflix’s royal pageant is entering that danger zone where once-majestic TV series suddenly find they’re running out of steam. Perhaps Harry and Meghan’s publicity-hogging shenanigans and the real-life loss of the Queen and Prince Philip have somewhat overshadowed Netflix’s quasi-fictional drama. Perhaps everybody has become sick to death of rehashed versions of the life of Princess Diana.Whatever the reasons, The Crown now feels slightly jaded, re-running familiar themes and recycling whiffs of various historic scandals with yet another different cast. As ever, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one thing only. However much serious work he did in the theatre and on screen, he is forever handcuffed to the skirt-chaser he gave us in sundry Carry Ons and Doctor films and London bus movies. Although he was to reach the age of 98, he already felt very senior when I met him at his home in his mid-seventies. He was very keen to stress that his abilities stretched beyond delivering a famous catchphrase and luring girls into an open-top sports car.Those famous Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Owl Service is instantly unsettling, Bridget Appleby’s credit sequence cutting between flickering candles and shadow puppets while a plaintive Welsh folksong is drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle. Alan Garner’s uncompromising 1967 fantasy novel is a spare, elegant fable told mostly through dialogue; in Philip Pullman’s words, “everything we need is there, and nothing we don’t need.”Granada TV’s eight-part 1969 adaptation boasts a screenplay by Garner and was directed and produced by Peter Plummer, the series filmed, unusually, on location in North Wales in full colour, though a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Irregular warfare has proved to be a speciality with the British armed forces. This new six-part series, based on Ben Macintyre’s 2016 book, tells the story of the chaotic birth of the Special Air Service during the war in North Africa in 1941, and it's a rollicking ride.The screenplay is by Steven Knight, who has repeated his Peaky Blinders trick of using an ahistorical soundtrack to soup up the on-screen action. However, where the Brummie gangster odyssey unfolded against a backdrop of the White Stripes, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, this time Knight has gone rockier. The narrative is Read more ...