tv reviews
Adam Sweeting

Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.

Helen Hawkins

The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.

Adam Sweeting

The title doesn’t refer to a void into which detectives disappear, but to Harry Hole, the fictional Norwegian sleuth created by novelist Jo Nesbø. Netflix’s nine-part series is derived from his book The Devil’s Star, adapted by the author himself. Getting the casting of the tormented but insightful Hole right is crucial, and they’ve done themselves some favours here by picking Tobias Santelmann for the job.

Helen Hawkins

The Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards does what it says on the tin. We watch the fêted newsreader from initial online contact with a 17-year-old from Cardiff - called “Ryan Davies“ here - to his arrest three years later, his sense of omnipotence shattered. Edwards’s family are noises off, and his work is represented by one BBC producer; only Ryan’s life is explored in any depth.

Adam Sweeting

The stern and glowering demeanour of David Morrissey’s character, Michael Polly, looms over this six-part drama like the embodiment of a malignant fate. Polly is the headmaster of St Bartholomew’s private school in Bristol, a vintage establishment replete with cloisters, venerable and palatial buildings and playing fields that seem to stretch for miles (Downside School in Somerset was the actual shooting location.)

Adam Sweeting

Another day, another few million bucks for Taylor Sheridan. Hot on the heels of Marshals, his latest Yellowstone spin-off, his inexorable march through the TV schedules continues with this saga of the Clyburn family. 

Adam Sweeting

Berlin always makes a flavourful setting for labyrinthine stories of betrayal and deception (see Le Carre and Len Deighton for further details), and it doesn’t disappoint in this absorbing German-made thriller. Writer Paul Coates and director Lennart Ruff have constructed a taut and twisty narrative that gradually pulls together various themes dating back many years, set in a cool and chilly-looking Berlin.The city’s notorious Wall has ceased to exist, but ghosts and murky echoes from the old East-West past still haunt the protagonists.

Adam Sweeting

It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers. This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines.

Adam Sweeting

The brainchild of Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, this is a strange and tortuous tale which defies easy categorisation. There’s plenty of humour in it but it isn’t a comedy, and it also lays out a long trail of tragedy and pain spanning generations. You might argue that there’s a bit of redemption on offer, but then again you might not.

Adam Sweeting

In his illustrious career, director Michael Waldman has profiled all manner of divas, from Elizabeth Taylor and Lord Byron to Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Louboutin. So why not Tony Blair?