TV drama
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Not just one, but two Santas in this agreeable seasonal romp. It’s set in small-town Northern Ireland, where single mum Patricia (Laura Donnelly) is struggling to bring up her two young sons, Mikey (Bamber Todd) and Sean (Joshua McLees). Her job at the Stuff for a Pound shop is barely keeping food on the family table, her boss Mr Brady (Lloyd Hutchinson) is a bully and a liar, and her son Mikey is exhibiting anti-social tendencies (by blowing up the school Christmas tree, for instance).A wonderful life it isn’t, but it suddenly becomes a bit more exciting when the local Ballycopse Bank is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The original title of this French crime drama was Pax Massilia, a reference to the classical roots of its setting in what is now known as Marseille. Dating back to the 6th Century BC, it’s supposedly the oldest city in France. An atmospheric mix of architectural styles, dramatic views, a Mediterranean climate and multiple ethnicities, it makes the perfect stage for this fast-paced and sometimes horrifically violent thriller.It’s directed by Olivier Marchal, an ex-cop whose CV includes Braquo and 36 Quai des Orfèvres. And while the eternal struggle between police and thieves is hardly the most Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Stranger Things has shown us over four seasons that the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down can be the seat of many things: terror, mystery, camaraderie, compassion. As it turns out, it can spawn great theatre, too, for Stephen Daldry’s much-anticipated stage production of the prequel to the Netflix mega-hit has finally summoned its demonic energy to take the West End by storm.In this intensely cinematic and technically stunning show, a spirited ensemble breathes ambitious life into a villain origin story that feels at once epic and intimate – and with no shortage of wow factors. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its first series in 2021, Vigil delivered a claustrophobic though frequently absurd tale of murder and Russian spies aboard a British nuclear submarine. This time around it’s the RAF under the spotlight, though its name has mysteriously been changed to the British Air Force.Is this a sly attempt to erase the monarchy, or perhaps a legal tactic to avoid problems with depicting the real air force? Specifically, we’re dealing here with the drone operations of the BAF (as nobody refers to it), both in Scotland and at its Al Shawka base in the little-known Middle Eastern country of Wudyan. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture and gripped by organised crime.Written by Peter McKenna and co-created by Ciaran Donnelly, Kin is the story of the Kinsella family and their fractious partnership with ominous crime lord Eamon Cunningham (Ciaran Hinds). The Kinsellas make their living by selling drugs supplied by Cunningham, so they’re at his beck and call. It’s a master-and- Read more ...