TV
Adam Sweeting
Since it debuted in November last year, Apple TV+ has barely made a dent in a market largely shaped by Netflix, but this eight-part adaptation of William Landay’s bestselling novel is a decisive step in the right direction. It’s a mixture of courtroom drama, murder mystery and psychological thriller, and if it sometimes falls back on familiar genre-ish cliches, the show can boast some fine performances and possesses the critical ingredient of watchability. Once you start, you’ll feel compelled to know how it ends (and the TV version has a significantly different ending from the book).Casting Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Do TV companies get some sort of financial incentive to use the phrase “A Very British…” in their programme titles? This now-meaningless descriptor has been applied to airlines, brothels, political coups, the Renaissance, Margaret Thatcher, sex scandals, Brexit and lord knows what else. When you can’t think of an original title, you know what to do.As for Best Western hotels, this company is so Very British that its new UK CEO is a former Aussie Rules football player, Rob Paterson. One of his early key decisions was to outsource the company’s call centre to Italy because most people now book Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly famously commented that football is far more serious than a matter of life and death. This couldn’t quite be said of Harry Redknapp’s renewed adventures of footballers reunited (ITV), yet behind its jokey facade of a bunch of Nineties-era England veterans drinking their way across Europe, Harry’s Heroes is strangely poignant and delivers some painful emotional truths. The cameras follow Harry as he tries to prepare his squad for a re-match against their German counterparts (England beat them in last year’s first series), but the real story is the Read more ...
India Lewis
The most obvious comparison for The Changin’ Times of Ike White (BBC Four) is 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man, with its story of a potential star having vanished into thin air at the brink of fame and fortune. The documentary began in the usual way of music biopics, with talking heads listening rapturously to the musician in question, then archive footage.However, although the first heads are true musos (drummers for Stevie Wonder and Sly and the Family Stone) the majority of the voices in this programme were those of wives and girlfriends, characteristic of its whole tone. Because he had a Read more ...
David Nice
If you're catering for wish fulfilment, you might as well go the whole hog. Some say that Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, in their latest peachy extravaganza, aim no higher than the cheesier fantasies of the late 1940s Hollywood they take into neverland. But there are two key aspects to consider, beyond the always tasteful cinematography, the fashions and the ever-present pastichey music. One is a true ensemble of 10 fine characterisations, roles for four oldies plus six young to youngish and decidedly glamorous aspirants. The other is that so much of Hollywood then created escapism in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s hit comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix) ended its fourth series in January last year, but this belated interactive special suggested there could be new life in it yet. Summarising Unbreakable… is possible but almost meaningless – “after 15 years imprisoned in an Indiana doomsday cult, Kimmy moves to New York, makes some very eccentric friends and becomes an inspirational children’s author” – but the infinite elasticity of the concept means that anything can happen.And so it proved here, as we rejoined Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) as she prepared to marry Prince Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted by writer-director Derek Cianfrance from Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel, this HBO production (on Sky Atlantic) presents a huge canvas for Mark Ruffalo, who plays the twin brothers Dominick and Thomas Birdsey. He had a particular interest in I Know This Much Is True, since his own brother was murdered in Los Angeles in 2008. If nothing else he deserves accolades for sheer fortitude. Thomas is a paranoid schizophrenic who suffers increasingly traumatic episodes, while Dominick’s life is lived in the shadow of his brother’s illness and what it costs him to try to protect him.The depths of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Meanwhile back in the Dark Ages, Uhtred (son of Uhtred) is still seeking to reclaim his ancestral seat of Bebbanburg and manoeuvre through the treacherous currents of Saxon politics. The big question was, how would this fourth season manage in the aftermath of the death of King Alfred?The king’s death has not only deprived us of David Dawson’s superb performance, but removes the yin and yang of the Alfred-Uhtred struggle which was one of the main drivers for the first three seasons. The exasperatingly pious and unforgiving Alfred was very difficult to like, and he could hardly stand up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The odd-couple comedy duo is a time-tested concept, and Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan have discovered a chemistry that works. Rob is the giggling excitable one, while Romesh, aided by a sleepy right eye which conveys a sense of harsh judgmentalism, adds a blast of deadpan scepticism.Previously, the pair have squared up to such topics as Usain Bolt, fashion and country music, but they started this second series (Sky 1) with a leap off a very high cliff. They decided they were going to perform in a ballet, and persuaded Birmingham Royal Ballet to let them have a go at appearing in Swan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Christopher Eccleston isn’t the easiest actor to love, because he gives the impression he’ll reach through the screen and grab you by the throat if you don’t appreciate his ferocious thespian intensity, but with the role of Maurice Scott in The A Word (BBC One), he’s found the perfect vehicle for his particular set of skills. Loud, bossy and as subtle as a category 5 hurricane, Maurice is the show’s big-hearted patriarch.For this opener to series 3 of Peter Bowker’s drama about families dealing with autism (and many other things), Maurice seized centre stage as his Lake District home became Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
After a season that sought to redefine what Westworld could become, the finale exposed the confused arc, before limping towards an emotionally weak ending. This season began by recoding itself into something schlockier, more high-octane, and arguably more mainstream than before – somewhere between a Jason Bourne film and The Matrix. Whether a glossy, high budget HBO show (on Sky Atlantic) could ever be classed as anything other than mainstream is a fair question, and the feature-length finale was no different. If Game of Thrones taught us anything, it was Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Back in the day, the weekend started with Ready Steady Go. Now Friday evenings are once more essential viewing, and not just because we’re all locked down. While the endless ToTP reruns are often no more than bad-taste wallpaper, the music documentaries are consistently high quality.This week the camera, or perhaps the spotlight, fell on The Shadows, “the British guitar band that sparked a revolution” as Gina McKee’s voiceover to The Shadows at Sixty informed us with little or no exaggeration. Spoken of in the same breath as Cliff Richard, the original British rock idol whom they backed, The Read more ...