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Adam Sweeting
It’s eight years since Richard Armitage’s character Lucas North died in Spooks, but now Armitage is back undercover as CIA agent Daniel Miller in Berlin Station. Mind you, it’s already been touch and go – Miller was shot in in Berlin’s Potzdamer Platz in a flash-forward opening sequence, but apparently not fatally.Miller has arrived in Berlin from his previous job in Panama, where his assiduous online detective work had unearthed telltale clues about the activities of Thomas Shaw, a Snowden-style whistle-blower who’s been leaking CIA secrets to the German press. Miller reckoned he’d Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sara Lund and Saga Norén have a lot to answer for. Their adventures in the murk of murder as they grapple with their own dysfunctional psychology entranced audiences who don’t speak a scrap of Danish or Swedish. The search has since gone on for other gripping instances of Nordic noir. How long can it be before we accept that The Killing and The Bridge both had ingredients that aren’t easily reassembled?The "Walter Presents" strand has coughed up all sorts of potential replacements, while BBC Four continues to pan for gold on Saturday nights. There’s already been one Swedish drama premiering Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's amazing that they've managed to sustain The Good Wife over seven series and 156 episodes which have, by and large, maintained a standard of writing and acting which can stand toe to toe with anything else on TV. Apparently it's now being dubbed "television's last great drama" in some quarters, not just because of its quality but also because it aired not on some boutique cable channel or on-demand subscription service but on the mainstream CBS network. You don't miss 'em until they're gone, and all that.That said, this final series has sometimes felt as though its creators were a little Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This concluding mini-series starring the sorrowful Swede began with a bizarre misfire set in South Africa, but redeemed itself with a finale imbued with persuasively Wallander-ish characteristics. The light was grey, flat and menacing. Landscape shots stretched lugubriously as far as the eye could see, encompassing forbidding lakes, shivering forests and damp fields.Meanwhile, Wallander himself was steadily falling apart. This closing story, "The Troubled Man" (★★★★), reached back into the Cold War past and the ambivalent obscurities of espionage and subterfuge, which writer Peter Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Any drama in which a crazed crone stares silently at an urn containing the ashes of her murdered husband is not afraid of raising Shakespeare’s ghost. It doesn’t matter that Gunnar was a philanderer who foolishly went sailing with his lover’s husband – his widow still grieves for him even though he died at the end of the last century. Having scattered his ashes in the sea, Mildred the Mad (Johanna Ringbom) immediately ties herself to an anchor and goes overboard. Her companion in the boat, Jonna, who as a child witnessed her father kill Gunnar, once again does nothing.Ten weeks ago Thicker Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Diversity has replaced perversity as a staple of modern drama. Whereas once upon a time an unenlightened viewer might cry – on seeing two men kiss – that they were going to leave the country before homosexuality became compulsory, a scene of mixed-race rutting can still ruffle a dodo’s feathers today. Monday’s episode of Marcella, for example, with Nicholas Pinnock’s bare buttocks pumping away on top of Anna Friel, ploughed a new furrow on peak-time ITV.The fifth episode of Blue Eyes opens with an idyllic scene in which a white mother, Asian father and two cute kids enjoy a sunlit breakfast. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Seventh series (★★★★) of the superior legal drama (still perversely tucked away on the obscurantist More4), and Alicia Florrick is having to get back to legal basics. Having been blown up by a political landmine in series six, as she made an ill-fated attempt to become State's Attorney, she's now trying to start her own law firm from home and scuffling for work.Thus she found herself on the cab-rank of hard-bitten bar attorneys down at the bond court, waiting to be lobbed a sheaf of the day's drink-and-drugs cases by the abrasive Judge Schakowsky (Christopher McDonald). Some comic value was Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The 1965 film The Heroes of Telemark, documenting the Allies' mission to stop the Nazis from going nuclear, is to historical accuracy what David Starkey is to tact. Or common decency. The Saboteurs however, a Norwegian/Danish/British TV co-production, seems to be keener to explore the truth behind the mission. Or at least as much of it as is known.After the first episode’s slow, measured pace, we began the second in a secret military base in Scotland with a stronger sense of urgency. If we had any doubts as to just how urgent things were, these were soon quashed as the entire plan was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Since Nashville and country music are one giant soap opera, it's amazing nobody turned Tennessee's Music City into a TV series before. No matter. Here we are with series two, and it's as deliriously cheesy and melodramatic as ever.The first series ended with veteran country star Rayna James (Connie Britton) and her alcoholic guitarist/former lover Deacon Claybourne hurtling into a cataclysmic car crash. Series two opened amid the wreckage and the squeaking of tortured metal, with flashbacks to when Deacon and Rayna were young and in lurve (bravo for a splendid decades-rewinding job by the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
No definitive answers to what was "the best" of 2013 of course, and I daresay opinions will differ wildly. For instance, despite the plaudits showered on it elsewhere, I felt that Broadchurch stretched itself too thin after showing initial promise. An increasingly acute allergy to serial killer dramas meant I couldn't get too involved with Tony Grisoni's Southcliffe, let alone The Fall, with its extended, voyeuristic murder scenes. Being Netflix-free (he confesses sheepishly), I haven't caught up with House of Cards yet, or the conclusion of Breaking Bad, but obviously a profound shift in our Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You've got a political scandal, so who ya gonna call? It had better be Olivia Pope, whose company Pope & Associates specialises in protecting the image and interest of the power-elite, frequently (though not exclusively) within the Washington DC Beltway.Olivia (a crisp, crunchy and aerodynamically power-dressed Kerry Washington) has serious crisis management credentials, having been Communications Director at the White House. Indeed, her connections reach right to the top, since she's also the ex-lover of President Fitzgerald Grant (Tony Goldwyn). In fact not all that ex, since the Prez Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Being a woman soldier in the Afghan army must rate among the world’s “least wanted” jobs, if only 14 applicants came forward for 150 places in the year’s intake covered in Afghan Army Girls. It apparently took a year’s negotiations to get a single camera allowed in to follow them over their six months' training, and even then some on the course insisted on having their faces blanked (understandable, when the Taliban threaten retaliation). After all that trouble, but more importantly because it spoke a real quiet truth, this insightful film from photojournalist Lalage Snow surely deserved a Read more ...