ITV
Adam Sweeting
Scripted by Belfast-born playwright David Ireland, Coldwater is a smart and addictive thriller, which manages to squeeze some fresh twists out of its murderous narrative. It also benefits hugely from an excellent cast firing on all cylinders, while also reaping the benefits of its Scottish rural locations.But our story begins in London, where the anti-hero, John (Andrew Lincoln), suffers a traumatic event at the local school playground. He watches a woman being violently assaulted by a raging maniac, but can’t bring himself to rush to her rescue. Instead he freezes, panics, and then runs away Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’ll have absorbed key strands of The Sweeney‘s DNA even if you’ve never watched an episode, ITV’s groundbreaking police drama having had an impact and influence far bigger than its creators could ever have imagined. Writer Ian Kennedy Martin had met the young John Thaw in the 1960s and was keen to work with him again, penning a 90-minute script about a maverick detective inspector for Thames Television’s Armchair Cinema slot in 1974.Production company Euston Films saw the idea’s potential, and production on a 13-part Sweeney series began before Regan was even broadcast. That 90-minute Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
ITV continues its passion for docudramas about injustice, which you can’t blame it for after the rip-roaring success of Mr Bates vs the Post Office. The issue in I Fought the Law is, from one angle, of national (even International) importance, though compared to the persecution of hundreds of innocent postmasters, some of whom committed suicide, its cause is a rarer bird.The person fighting the law is Ann Ming (Sheridan Smith), a feisty mother from Billingham, near Middlesbrough, whose daughter Julie, her oldest child, goes missing in 1989. It takes over two months for her body to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you compiled a list of favourite TV series from the last couple of decades, you’d find that Zoë Telford has appeared in most of them. The Thick of It, Foyle’s War, Ashes to Ashes, Sherlock, Silent Witness, Unforgotten, Grantchester, Vera… they all appear on her on CV, with many more besides. She’s put in her time on ITV’s Agatha Christie beat, playing Emily Trefusis in the Miss Marple story, The Sittaford Mystery, and appearing as Rosalie Otterbourne in the Hercule Poirot favourite, Death on the Nile. In 2008 she played Abigail Thomas, the assistant private secretary to King Richard IV, in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following on from the first series of Malpractice in 2023, this second season again probes into issues of medical malfeasance and institutional corruption, in an environment where patient care frequently comes second to internal politics and self-preservation. The protagonist first time around was Niamh Algar’s Dr Lucinda Edwards, but this time it’s Tom Hughes as Dr James Ford, who works as a psychiatric registrar at the fictional Queen Mother’s University Hospital.Writer Grace Ofori-Attah had personal experience as an NHS psychiatrist, which has undoubtedly helped to lend the show a sense of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the story of a relationship between Joe Burt (David Wenham), apparently a divorced business entrepreneur and farmer forever juggling a variety of property schemes and financial deals, and 50-ish food journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time not writing very much for her newspaper.They first meet via a dating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If nothing else, ITV’s new thriller Out There is a fabulous advertisement for the Welsh countryside. Many scenes were shot in Brecon and the Black Mountains, amid acres of wild, rambling moorland and majestic hillsides. But it’s not always a happy place. Here, farmer Nathan Williams (Martin Clunes) is trying to hang on to his family business, but profits are low, overheads are high, and the recently widowed Nathan isn’t as young as he used to be.The dire state of the rural economy is rammed home when his friend and neighbour, Owen Thomas, succumbs to depression, locks himself in his barn and Read more ...
theartsdesk
They say cinema is dying (you never know, they may be wrong), but you can’t help noticing the stampede of movie stars towards TV and streaming. Many of 2024’s most memorable shows had a big-screen name attached, even if it was impossible to be entirely certain that it really was Colin Farrell inside all those prosthetics as he romped his way through the gripping second season of The Penguin (Sky Atlantic).Then we had Eddie Redmayne as the titular character in Sky Atlantic’s rather ponderous revamp of The Day of the Jackal (“The Day of the Jackal feels like a month,” as one sceptic noted), Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re looking for an advertisement for how crime doesn’t pay, Joan will do very nicely. Written by Anna Symon, this six-part series is based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief Joan Hannington, whose light-fingered accomplishments earned her notoriety back in the Eighties. Some apparently referred to her as “The Godmother”, though they don’t here.Stepping boldly and brassily into the lead role is Sophie Turner (who, once upon a time, played Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones). We first meet her when she’s living with Gary, a brutal, womanising thug who she eventually decides to leave Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Aircraft hijacking is a ghoulishly popular theme in films and TV, but Red Eye brings a slightly different twist to the perils of air travel. This time, North China Air’s Flight 357, from London to Beijing, hasn’t been hijacked, but it has become the scene of a string of inexplicable murders, carried out by unknown assassin(s) as it cruises at 40,000 feet.At the centre of the drama is Dr Matthew Nolan (Richard Armitage), a vascular surgeon who has been attending a medical conference in Beijing. However, the usual litany of talks, meet-and-greets and 47-course meals is rudely interrupted by Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The screenwriting debut of actor Andrew Buchan, Passenger ends up resembling a bunch of ingredients looking for a cake. While characters come out with such meta-observations as “this isn’t Twin Peaks” and “this isn’t Broadchurch” – Buchan having been one of the stars of Broadchurch – Passenger contains echoes of both of them, and rather louder ones of Happy Valley.Set in the fictional small town of Chadder Vale on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, it’s a tale about the friendships and antagonisms of a closely-knit community which seems to have a sinister cloud hanging over it. More than once Read more ...