TV drama
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
Is there no limit to the number of times the comic book heroes and villains from Marvel and DC can be recycled? HBO’s The Penguin (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a spin-off from Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman, which starred Robert Pattinson in the title role and Colin Farrell as Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka The Penguin.Farrell’s Penguin returns here as the star of his own show, though his extraordinary physical transformation makes him utterly unrecognisable.The usually rather handsome Irish actor is reborn as a grotesque and malevolent gargoyle, his face pudgy and puckered, cursed with a painful Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Let the train take the strain”, as the old advertising slogan urged us. The train in this six-part drama has to soak up a whole world of strain, as it’s taken over by cyber-hijackers who demand a huge ransom before they’ll consider relinquishing their technological grip.The train is called "The Heart of Britain", and it’s the night sleeper service from Glasgow to Euston. Some viewers may detect resemblances between this and Idris Elba’s Apple TV plane-drama Hijack, or (in a more rail-orientated vein) Snowpiercer, but Nightsleeper does at least have the distinction – well, kind of – of being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand, The Perfect Couple is an expensively-dressed fable about a lavish wedding in Nantucket, the desirable island paradise off Cape Cod, which on this evidence is an enclave of conspicuous wealth and gross moral turpitude. The tale is an Americanised version of the good old country house mystery, and behind the superficial veneer of fabulous homes and expensive boats lurks a hinterland of avarice and cruel intentions.At the core of the action is best-selling novelist and matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury, played by an imperious Nicole Kidman with maximum Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
News reaches us that Gary Oldman has mysteriously been vetoed from playing George Smiley in a new film version of Smiley’s People, despite his Oscar-nominated performance as John le Carre’s wiley spymaster in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Oldman’s people have described this decision as “the damnedest thing”.But never mind that now, because Oldman is back to play Jackson Lamb in the latest instalment of Slow Horses. Indeed, perhaps it’s this performance which has soured the le Carre estate’s view of him, since Lamb is a bit like Smiley’s portrait in the attic, growing increasingly Read more ...
theartsdesk Q&A: David Morrissey on (among other things) the return of 'Sherwood' and 'Daddy Issues'
Adam Sweeting
Without ever getting embroiled in tabloid mayhem, even if he has confessed that he’d like to have a go on Strictly, David Morrissey has patiently turned himself into a quiet superstar.Having cut his acting teeth as a teenager at the Everyman Theatre in his home town of Liverpool (where he was born in June 1964), Morrissey has amassed a huge list of credits on stage and in TV and film, and if you can judge an actor by the writers, directors and fellow-thesps he’s worked with, Morrissey has achieved triple-A status. Mind you, one of his proudest achievements was being invited by his beloved Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of James Graham’s Sherwood, shown in June 2022, introduced us to the Nottinghamshire town of Ashfield, a former mining community devastated by pit closures and the miserable aftermath of the 1984 miners’ strike. The town was torn by personal and political feuds, and the murder of former miner Gary Jackson was like throwing gasoline on long-smouldering embers.As this second series opens, we find a few things have changed. DCS Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has now stepped aside from the police to head the new Violence Intervention Team, which aims to provide support networks Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Laura Lippman’s source novel for Apple’s new drama became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2019, and director Alma Har’el’s screen realisation has fashioned it into an absorbing dive into various social, racial and political aspects of mid-Sixties America.Set in Baltimore, the story is filtered through separate though overlapping perspectives, personified by the twinned leading characters Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman, in her first TV role) and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram).Maddie is a Jewish housewife and mother from suburban Pikesville, who seems, superficially, to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Any show making its debut in the midst of Wimbledon and the Euro-football, plus a spectacular performance by Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone, is likely to be gasping for air, and BBC Two’s ditzy new cop series didn’t so much charge out of the blocks as trip over them. Masterminded by Ben Schiffer, the eight-part series is based on Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels, which are much loved by their readers.I wouldn’t bet on them feeling the same about the TV version. The plot-driving device is the arrival in Istanbul of Detective Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai from Killing Eve), who finds himself Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a former schoolteacher now scraping a nocturnal living as a cab driver in Liverpool (you’d never guess the show was filmed in Dublin). A haunted and lonely character, broken by his failed marriage, he becomes fixated with the small-hours radio talk show hosted by Lawrence Brightway (Sean Pertwee, pictured below), whose relaxed, sandpapery voice makes Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Scott Turow published his cunningly-wrought legal thriller in 1987, and Alan J Pakula’s powerful movie version, starring Harrison Ford, appeared in 1990. Enough time has elapsed, perhaps, for Apple TV’s revised version of Presumed Innocent for the streaming age.There’s plenty to like about this eight-episode reincarnation, which casts Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead role of Rusty Sabich, a Chicago prosecutor who seems to have enough on his plate coping with the poisonous internal politics of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, even before he has to undergo the ordeal of being tried for an Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head. It’s here that the brilliant puppeteer Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch) has masterminded his children’s TV puppet show Good Day Sunshine, which bears a striking resemblance to such Jim Henson creations as Sesame Street and The Muppets.You might think that Vincent would be happy with his life, since he’s hailed as a genius in his field and Good Morning Sunshine isn’t just a TV Read more ...