TV
Adam Sweeting
Marcella’s writer Hans Rosenfeldt was the creator of Scandi classic TV drama The Bridge, the one that made detectives with emotional disorders the flavour du jour, but you do have to wonder what kind of police force would continue to employ DS Marcella Backland (Anna Friel). On a good day she’s merely rude, argumentative, whiny and confrontational. But on a bad day she goes batshit-crazy and starts assaulting people, such as her about-to-be-ex husband’s about-to-be-wife, then looks all panicky and claims she can’t remember what happened.Despite having a long-term history of these blackouts, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
While this well-crafted documentary chose to open with footage of the stars and glitz of the American awards ceremonies, the focus of Working with Weinstein (Channel 4) was almost entirely on Harvey Weinstein’s involvement over more than 30 years in British cinema. Instead of rehashing the allegations made by Hollywood actresses, it dug deep into the distress the producer inflicted on the young British women who came to work for him.They dreamt of a career in the UK film industry, only to find themselves sexually assaulted, shamed and driven out of the business by abuse and blackmail. Laura Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week brings a tale of two comedies. Both half-hour sitcoms are about widowed mothers with grown-up sons still at home. Each woman has an unattached admirer. Both shows star fine comic actresses who learned much of their craft in the films of Mike Leigh. And the new series started two days apart. On BBC One was Hold the Sunset. Back for a second series on BBC Two was Mum.I greeted the arrival of the former with a review to which John Cleese, who stars as the admirer of Alison Steadman, took great exception on Twitter. Humour is of course subjective. But commenters under theartsdesk’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You need to be of a certain vintage to have any memory of the traditional suburban family sitcom. Like the Raleigh Chopper and the Betamax video, like amateur athletics and glamrock and key parties, it is an extinct cultural artefact. What did for it? The internet, mainly, and the kids not watching scheduled telly any more, and maybe the rise of stand-up. After one episode of Hold the Sunset (BBC One), the suburban family sitcom is still dead. It’s as dead as a well-known parrot whose demise was pronounced by John Cleese. Mystifyingly, Cleese has chosen this moment to return to sitcom for the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The plan to bring drama back to Saturday nights on BBC One enjoyed mixed success with Hard Sun, but now threatens to slide over a cliff with this trip back to the Homeric era. In the era of Game of Thrones and now Britannia, you can see why somebody fancied having a go at the swords-sandals-and-sorcery of the Trojan War. The question is, how?A dash of instant lustre has been added in the shape of screenwriter David Farr, who also wrote the much-admired adaptation of The Night Manager. However, early enthusiasm is liable to fade in the face of the beige-ish characterisations and mundane Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When you’re hot, you’re hot. In the past two years Mike Bartlett has had the following works staged or broadcast: Wild, a play about Edward Snowden at Hampstead Theatre; Albion, a three-hour neo-Chekhovian state-of-the-nation play at the Almeida; an episode of Doctor Who, a TV version of his play King Charles III, 10 hours of Doctor Foster, and now the hospital drama Trauma on ITV. Of the last three he was also executive producer, as he is of Press, a six-hour BBC One drama he’s been writing about the newspaper industry.It’s an astonishing rate of productivity, to compare with the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It says something about the state of television that sooner or later every actor has to play a cop or a spy. Latest in line is Carey Mulligan, starring as DI Kip Glaspie in David Hare’s new four-parter Collateral.This is, on the face of it, a thriller. The wheels of detection spun into action after the puzzling death of Abdullah Asif, a pizza delivery man who’d just delivered a quattro formaggi to harassed mother of two, Karen Mars (Billie Piper). Karen indignantly pointed out that the pizza in question lacked its requested additional topping, though this did not prove to be the motive for Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...
Owen Richards
When first announced, Derry Girls seemed a strange prospect. Derry during The Troubles wasn’t an obvious choice for a sitcom; neither was writer Lisa McGee, whose only previous comedy outing London Irish was slammed for negative stereotyping. Not many would have predicted one of the funniest new shows of the year, but that’s what we got.In last night’s final episode, Erin seized control of the school’s magazine after the editor was struck down by illness. Abandoned by the team for her brazen opportunism (and basic lack of decency), she formed a ragtag editorship from the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It was both astonishing and depressingly unsurprising that Suffragette, Sarah Gavron’s feature about the insurgent foot soldiers of the campaign for women’s suffrage, was the first fictionalised film specifically about the movement. There are more films about the miners’ strike – which clearly tells us something.It’s no surprise that literature has fared far better, since, in the words of Virginia Woolf, all one needs is a “room of one’s own” in order to think and to write. Often we see the movement featured as a side story of a male-focused storyline, such as the television adaptation of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 11 seasons of Frasier, John Mahoney played Marty Crane, a cussed blue-collar ex-cop who couldn’t quite understand how his loins came to produce two prissily cultured psychiatrists. His ally in straight-talking was his physiotherapist Daphne, whose fish-out-of-water flat-cap vowels were apparently the result of a gap in the scriptwriters’ field of knowledge. “When they wrote that Daphne is a working girl from Manchester," explained Mahoney, "they had no idea what that meant. The accent really threw them." It wasn't apparent from his Midwestern growl, but Mahoney was the one who was able to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Happily, there’s hope for Spiral junkies – as series six ends, we bring you news that series seven has just gone into production. This is just as well, because these last dozen episodes have been an object lesson in how to make TV drama for the mind and body, nimbly evading cop show genre-pitfalls to bring us carefully-shaded characters operating within a Venn diagram of overlapping grey areas. Big kudos, yet again, to showrunner Anne Landois.Looking back at publicity photos from previous series of Spiral (the first one was shown on BBC Four in 2006), it’s shocking to see how much the cast Read more ...