TV drama
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome back to Guy Ritchie’s Geezerworld, familiar from such slices of lurid villainhood as Lock, Stock…, RocknRolla and The Gentlemen (the movie). The Gentlemen (the TV series) takes some cues from the similarly-named big-screen event from 2019, but becomes its own distinctive self as it unwinds across eight episodes.Mind you, it does display signs of mild schizophrenia. The first two episodes punch the clock at just over an hour, but then the running times throttle back to around the 40-minute mark. It’s as if Ritchie and his collaborators, who include co-writer Matthew Read and several Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This three-part drama arrives trailing clouds of big-byline glory. Michael Sheen directed and produced it (as well as making fleeting appearances on screen), James Graham wrote it and documentary-maker Adam Curtis co-produced it.But what is it? Part social commentary, part Welsh myth and part travelogue, it tells the story of a family from Port Talbot, the Driscolls, who get caught up in a cataclysmic industrial dispute at the steelworks and end up going on the run. In an ironic and not very subtle inversion of the never-ending saga of Channel boat crossings, they flee across the Welsh border Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new arrangements with the Batuks, the Turkish family who are the source of all the local drug supplies. Snag is, the Turks want the Kinsellas to repay Cunningham’s outstanding debt to them of €70m. Oh, and another thing – they want the head of Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), since he killed a senior member of the Batuk clan.Difficult decisions have to be made Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The frocks, the pearls, the chicest branding of any perfume in the world… Sorry, this is not what The New Look is about, for those who swooned at the V&A’s recent Chanel exhibition. The title promises a different focus, on the designer who in 1947 was credited with the “new look” in his first solo collection: Christian Dior. His creations were intended to make France dream again after the miseries of the four-year Nazi occupation. Corsets were resurrected, waistlines cinched-in, full skirts swirled in sumptuous fabrics. The look spoke of a romantic elegance lost during the war years Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German fighters, and the front half of their B-17 bomber looks like an abattoir. His pilot looks ahead with a thousand-yard stare, and says “don’t tell your guys anything, they’ll figure it out.”And history does indeed repeat itself after Bucky’s compadres from 100th Bomb Group catch up with him at their airfield at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, having flown in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to find a new way to package a drama about that perennially popular topic, the dark side of policing, but Criminal Record at least gets its ducks in a row with some strong writing by Paul Rutman and a strength-in-depth cast. Peter Capaldi (pictured below) is in chilling form as the Hackney-based DCI Daniel Hegarty, a veteran detective who evidently knows where a lot of bodies are buried. When he starts getting inquiries about a decade-old murder case from the comparatively junior DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), it looks like a mild irritation he can merely brush off.Naturally that Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There isn’t a troupe officially called the Worshipful Company of British Character Actors, but there probably should be, given the sterling service it does for the nation, acting in prestige TV dramas based on real events. Toby Jones and Monica Dolan regularly top the bill in this genre, as they do in ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office.This level of star casting says a lot about the aims of this four-parter. It’s in the same vein as true-crime docudramas such as Appropriate Adult and The Sixth Commandment, but with its eye fixed on a wider, mass audience. The incendiary story it tells — of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was barely a month ago that screenwriters Jack and Harry Williams astounded viewers with Boat Story. Now they’re back with a sequel (or maybe just a continuation) of The Tourist, which debuted a year ago with its mind-bending story of the amnesiac Elliot Stanley (Jamie Dornan), who found himself all at sea in the Australian outback.Now, Elliot is travelling the world with girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), but they’re diverted from a railway journey to Cambodia by a mysterious letter, which prompts them to travel to Elliot’s native Ireland in search of his real identity. Of which, so Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV viewers can hardly complain about a lack of choice these days, though they might baulk at funding an ever-lengthening list of subscriptions.There are some who argue, for example, that it’s worth paying for Apple TV+ solely to gain access to the excellent Slow Horses, whose third series has just concluded. Others may contend that you should stump up for Disney+ to see Only Murders in the Building, a delicious flashback to old Broadway and elegant Forties-style film comedies.Despite all that, you could still have spent the year enjoying a selection of admirable dramas from good old BBC One. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Well at least they haven’t changed the identity of the killer this time around, but the BBC’s new version of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel has been modified in other ways. Screenwriter Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meenu Gaur have opted to move the story into the mid-1950s, introducing themes of racism, class prejudice and capitalist exploitation. And you thought it was just a tidy little whodunnit.Labouring under this narrative burden is the protagonist Luke Fitzwilliam, who Christie wrote as a retired colonial policeman. Here, he’s reborn as a regional attache from Nigeria who’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having previously brought us adaptations of M R James’s ghost stories, reviving the BBC tradition inaugurated by Lawrence Gordon Clark in the 1970s, Mark Gatiss has now turned to a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle for his annual Christmas chiller. With its cast of upper-crust academics amid the shadowy staircases and wood-panelled studies of Old College, Oxford in the 1880s, it makes a fine addition to the canon.Recruiting a stalwart cast was a wise precaution. Kit Harington is at centre stage as Abercrombie Smith, who is studying medicine and seems assured of an illustrious career. Though, Read more ...