TV
Adam Sweeting
With the last series of Line of Duty having left portions of its viewership dismayed and disgruntled, one consolation prize has been the way the many fine qualities of HBO’s Mare of Easttown (on Sky Atlantic) have seen it promoted it into the “unmissable” bracket. It isn’t anything like LoD, of course, and indeed the way it has stepped nimbly around the conventional pigeonholes of thriller or cop-show is one of the keys to its success. The series even ended after a thoroughly unconventional seven episodes.But perhaps seven was the perfect number, not too short but not lumbering interminably Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Perhaps inspired by its ever-intriguing Walter Presents strand, Channel 4’s new thriller Before We Die is based on a Swedish original called Innan vi dör (“before we die” in Swedish). The action has been transplanted to Bristol, whose buildings, bridges and narrow streets have been rendered atmospheric with rich colour textures and stylish visual compositions. The opening credits, with ominously pulsating music and dramatic monochrome portraits of the cast-members, also suggests we’ve stepped away a little from the Brit-TV norm.Lesley Sharp stars as DI Hannah Laing, who’s reaching a stage in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in the mid-Eighties, BBC television started broadcasting The Rock'n' Roll Years, one of the first rock music retrospectives. Each half-hour episode focused on a year, with news reports and music intermixed to give a revealing look at the development of rock culture against the context of current affairs.That is more or less the basic template employed by the makers of Apple TV+’s new eight-parter, 1971 - The Year that Music Changed Everything, ballooning that half-hour to around about six hours of great music, incredible footage, and more great music. It’s loosely based on David Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s crazy, but could it possibly work? Writer Nida Manzoor (a veteran of Doctor Who and BBC Three’s sitcom Enterprice) grew up in a Muslim family, but that didn’t stop her being a fan of punk rock, Blackadder and This Is Spinal Tap. She also writes songs, so creating a sitcom about the female Muslim punk band Lady Parts wasn’t quite such a stretch as it might seem.Her smartest trick here, though, is to have used the device of the band to cast a wry and hilarious eye over not just Muslim life but common preconceptions of it, and its complicated interactions with the secular West (it’s not all Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An attractive and likeable cast remains the principal drawing card of Trying, the Apple TV+ romcom centred around the efforts of a 30something couple to adopt a child. Following on from the first season aired last spring, Andy Wolton's creation gives pride of place to a terrific assemblage of actors, who carry the day even when the piece itself seems to tread faintly overfamiliar ground.You feel, for instance, as if you've already heard the sort of badinage that bonds Nikki (Esther Smith) and Jason (Rafe Spall), the affectionately sparring duo who may debate the age your shoulders drop (not Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Many a director might have considered that televising Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad was impossible, but Barry Jenkins, Oscar-winning director of Moonlight, has proved it can be done. His 10-part series for Amazon Prime is a remarkable achievement in its authorial depth and cinematic scope. The only cloud on its undoubtedly award-winning horizon is the fact that large chunks of it are almost too horrific to watch. The cast found some of the material so disturbing that Jenkins had a mental health counsellor on set.Traumatised responses were probably inevitable, given that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ancient Rome has always been a popular playground for film and TV, whether it’s Ben Hur, Gladiator or the 2005 TV series Rome. This Italian-made series for Sky Atlantic was shot at the renowned Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where Visconti, Leone, Scorsese and Bertolucci have all worked, but sadly none of that old-time movie magic has rubbed off on it.We are transported back to 40BC or thereabouts, and it’s the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar. Caesar’s son Gaius (Tom Glynn-Carey, pictured below) and Marcus Antonius (Liam Garrigan) are revolting, and also planning a power grab. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The issue of public inquiries into the conduct of the military is in the headlines again, with a current focus on Northern Ireland, but at the centre of screenwriter Robert Jones’s Danny Boy was the attempt to find British soldiers guilty of war crimes in Iraq. The Battle of Danny Boy (it was the name of an Army checkpoint) took place on 14 May 2004, when a British patrol was ambushed by fighters of the so-called Mahdi Army.After allegations were made that British troops had murdered 20 Iraqi prisoners and tortured others, the Al-Sweady Public Inquiry was set up to investigate. One of the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come. Adapted and directed by the actress Emily Mortimer, who has given herself a plum supporting role as an errant mother known as "the Bolter", the between-the-war three-parter is off to a galloping and giddy start, as if taking its cue from the breathless Linda (Lily James) at its ever-pulsating heart. The course of true love may not run smooth, to co-opt a line from a Read more ...
David Nice
“You have to be careful you’re not judging the piece,” cautioned a pearl-necklaced Nicholas Daniel, great oboist and winner of the 1980 BBC Young Musician (of the Year, as it then was). Yet while the work, Japanese composer and marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe’s Prism Concerto for the instrument she's done so much to pioneer, was infinitely the most fascinating of the evening’s three, so too was the performance by 17-year-old Fang Zhang. Sometimes flash can win over more interior qualities, but this unpredictable tour de force had everything.What a long time it took, though, to get to the musical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERSHalf the fun of this series of Line of Duty has been the crescendo of conspiracy theories surrounding it, fuelled by the way creator Jed Mercurio has skilfully kept tapping into the LoD mythology built up over the preceding five seasons. Craig Parkinson, aka the evil Dot Cottan from earlier series, has been hosting the Obsessed With… Line of Duty podcast, exploring secrets, theories and myths surrounding the show.With the air dripping with fear and paranoia, almost everyone has been fingered as being the potential Napoleon of Crime known as the Fourth Man (or woman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome to Commonworld, in the year 2143. It’s been built above the ruins of the old world, and the opening sequence of Sky One’s new interstellar thriller showed us the crumbling remains of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral mouldering beneath glittering futuristic super-scrapers and sweeping skyways. Thanks to rising water levels, London has become an island.It looks good, and while there’s nothing here that’s going to out-imagine Blade Runner or the new generation of Star Treks, it’s only fairly recently that you’d find such advanced CGI in a TV show. Whizzing through this exciting Read more ...