TV
Adam Sweeting
A dictionary definition of adolescence is “the transitional phase of growth and development between childhood and adulthood”, but in this four-part drama it looks more like a nightmare zone of uncontrolled rage, anxiety and sexual confusion.Created and co-written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (also one of its stars), Adolescence is the story of how 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for the murder of Katie, a fellow-pupil at Bruntwood Academy in an unspecified Yorkshire town.Obviously this hurls his parents, Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), into a state of blind panic and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The story of Ruth Ellis’s execution in 1955 has found its own macabre niche in British folklore, and has been been the subject of several film, stage and TV treatments. Perhaps the most memorable of these was Mike Newell’s 1985 film Dance with a Stranger, in which Miranda Richardson played Ellis.For ITV1’s new four-part drama, Kelly Jones has based her screenplay on Carol Ann Lee’s book A Fine Day for a Hanging: the Real Ruth Ellis Story, and it brings a heavy-calibre cast to bear on the story of the woman who shot dead her lover, David Blakely, outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead. Toby Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The BBC’s latest “cool” Agatha Christie adaptation has many hallmarks of the decidedly dark ones that were considered prestige Christmas treats until recently. But although it’s lovely to look at, it’s low on chills and thrills.The 1944 Agatha Christie novel it’s based on, later a play, has been given a makeover by Rachel Bennette, whose reworking winds back the clock to the mid-1930s. We get the usual moody coastal setting with raging seas and lowering skies, and gloomy interiors that are so underlit you can’t see what’s happening at crucial points. Sunny south Devon this is not. But the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They stopped making the BBC’s original Bergerac in 1991, so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature. John Nettles became closely identified with the titular detective Jim Bergerac before he decamped to Midsomer, murder capital of the world, and has declared himself impressed with Damien Molony’s performance as the born-again sleuth (pictured below, Molony picks up the baton from Nettles).So, we’re back among the picturesque architecture, broad sandy beaches and French-sounding place names of Jersey, where we find Chief Inspector Bergerac in a troubled frame of mind.His wife Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Steven Knight is beginning to resemble the British version of Taylor Sheridan. While Sheridan has been saturating our screens with Yellowstone, 1923, Landman etc, Knight has been reeling off Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes and even the story of opera star Maria Callas.With A Thousand Blows, Knight has travelled back to Victorian London in the 1880s, the era of Jack the Ripper, for a lurid exploration of the city’s foul-smelling underworld of crime, corruption and illegal boxing rackets. His chief protagonists are boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham, pictured below, making a deft Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The return of Mike White’s hit series can be celebrated for one major reason: its extraordinary music. That may sound like a minor reason, but this third iteration of the show confirms that the show's sound world is key to its success.Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer has, in each season, created uniquely bewitching sounds that are variously sinister, playful and melodramatic. Inventively using pan pipes and flutes plus a menagerie of feral noises and vocals, fleshed out with synthesizers, this audio backdrop mirror the location, its fauna as well as its musical traditions. Over the opening Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition.Constructed on the fraught and frequently hostile relationship between septuagenarian superstar Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and her young and ambitious scriptwriter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), Hacks is a forensic examination of the showbiz life and the showbiz business. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous actors, though its gung-ho depiction of the heroics of American special forces during the appalling Somalian civil war always felt a little uncomfortable.A quarter of a century later, Netflix’s three-part series Surviving Black Hawk Down, directed by Jack Macinnes and produced by Ridley Scott Associates, attempts to paint a more even-handed picture. It’s a documentary-style account of events, told by some of the real participants, interspersed with action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s been 50 years since the USA bowed to the inevitable and pulled out of Vietnam, in the midst of harrowing scenes of anguish and chaos. Apple’s new six-part documentary series doesn’t bring any astounding new revelations about America’s traumatic South-East Asian adventure, but by picking out individual stories to illustrate different phases of the conflict between March 1965 and April 1975, it brings some human insight into what lay behind the hideous casualty figures and TV footage of helicopters, firefights, terrorised civilians and aircraft dropping napalm.Constructed from a mass of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest from the This Is Us creator, Dan Fogelman, is a futuristic take on relationships among survivors once Earth has suffered an extinction event, a popular concept in these troubled times. Except that it starts out by following an equally popular narrative track, the classic locked-door whodunit. Where is this heading? After watching the first three episodes released so far by Disney+, I honestly can’t tell.We are in what seems to be a fairly upscale American suburb. An athletic Black man (Sterling K Brown) we have watched wake up, get dressed and go running checks in with Read more ...