TV drama
Adam Sweeting
This latest outing from the astonishingly prolific Jack and Harry Williams (The Missing, Baptiste, The Widow, Strangers etc) gives itself a huge leg-up by exploiting the epic lonely spaces of the Australian Outback.The opening sequence of episode one was a blinder, a self-contained mini-drama about a motorist stopping at a decrepit service station to use the facilities, then finding himself pursued by a malevolent articulated truck, looming ever larger in his rearview mirror as he sings along to "Bette Davis Eyes" on the car radio.The cat-and-mouse pursuit was shot with filmic grandeur, as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title might provoke a quick double-take. Wasn’t A Very British Scandal that series about Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott, starring Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw?Duh, of course not! That was A Very English Scandal (though both of them are produced by Blueprint Pictures). But was it really a great idea to tag this plushly-produced, starrily-cast, historically-based three-parter as though it’s just the latest product to trundle off a televisual production line? We look forward to the box set where it’s bundled in with A Very English Education, A Very British Brothel, A Very British Hotel Chain Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Would you be willing to play the guinea pig in a designer-superhome created by a deranged architect? That is one question posed by this four-part drama (adapted by JP Delaney from his own novel), a kind of haunted house mystery underpinned by the damaged psychological states of its protagonists.David Oleyowo plays Edward Monkford, the architect in question, whose minimalistic and futuristic creation at One Folgate Street becomes the setting in which themes of compulsion, obsession and deception are played out in an atmosphere of steadily-gathering menace. Orbiting around Edward and his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2014, Susan and Christopher Edwards were jailed for a minimum of 25 years for the killing of Susan’s parents, William and Patricia Wycherley. They’d been shot dead in 1998, and lay buried in their garden at 2 Blenheim Close, Mansfield for 15 years.Susan and Christopher had successfully maintained the fiction that the Wycherleys were still alive, but taking extended holidays, by writing greeting cards to relatives or keeping in touch with their GP’s surgery on their behalf. The killings might never have come to light had the Department for Work and Pensions not written to William Wycherley Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a dramatic fiction adapted from the novel by Imran Mahmood, and Hero’s decision to defend himself at his own murder trial found him standing up in court and giving an actorly rendition of his own version of the plot.I liked it better than the prosecution’s version – is the law really just a story-telling contest? – even though Hero seemed to be Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“Drug companies are supposed to be honest,” says a lady from the Department of Justice, explaining why the US Food and Drug Administration had been treating the pharmaceutical industry with a light, indeed barely detectable, regulatory touch.Dopesick is the story of how the chickens came home to roost when the unscrupulous drugs monolith Purdue launched its painkilling drug OxyContin on an unsuspecting American public, and from the mid-1990s into the 2000s set in motion one of the most devastating health scandals in medical history.Based on the book by Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This latest offering from the ubiquitous World Productions (creators of Line of Duty, the farcical but strangely popular Vigil, Bodyguard etc etc) is a whodunnit, a howdunnit and a whydunnit, as it explores the mysterious disappearance and death of university student Hannah Ellis. Thanks to a smart and sometimes blackly-comic script by Ben Richards, Showtrial is a notch or two above a lot of the cut-and-paste dramas that have been clogging the schedules lately, and even goes so far as to credit the viewer with being able to discern that there may be more to somebody’s personality than its Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Treading in the footsteps of Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, Bertie Carvel is a making a decent (albeit soporific) stab at embodying P D James’s introspective detective Adam Dalgliesh, though you have to wonder if he’s getting the help he needs from Channel 5. This current series of three two-part stories over consecutive nights is designed to grab two bites of the audience cherry, but would surely have greater impact and more narrative coherence as three two-hour slots. It never did Poirot or Morse any harm.The problem is the commercial TV hour, which gets you about 47 minutes of programme Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s difficult to know how seriously to take Temple, Sky Max’s outlandish medical thriller about surgeon Dr Daniel Milton and his gothicky secret clinic, hidden under Temple tube station in London. In the first series, he miraculously managed to save his wife Beth (Catherine McCormack) from a terminal case of a mystery disease (despite the fact that he’d already delivered the eulogy at her funeral), but not without committing a few grossly unethical acts along the way. In this second series, flocks of chickens are coming home to roost.The best thing about it, apart from its lovingly-shot Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The population of the Shetland archipelago is only about 23,000 (similar to Broadstairs or Amersham), though judging by the adventures of DI Jimmy Perez, an extraordinarily large percentage of them harbour dark secrets or murderous tendencies. BBC One's sixth series of Shetland (scripted by David Kane, since the original Ann Cleeves novels have long since been used up) finds Perez world-wearier than ever, as he probes into the steadily darkening circumstances surrounding the murder of local lawyer Alex Galbraith.The original appeal of Shetland was the way its human dramas were entwined with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Conceived on a global scale to depict the enormity of an alien menace from outer space, Apple's new series Invasion has grand ambitions, but crash-lands like a pile of space junk. After a few hours of this, waiting for something to happen, you’ll be yearning for a trawl through Netflix or Walter Presents.Created by Simon Kinberg and Davis Weil, with a reported budget of $200m, Invasion seeks to depict the consequences of its unearthly incursion by showing the varying fates of a contrasting group of characters. In Afghanistan, we hook up with a squad of US soldiers led by bullish, rifle-waving Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 5’ s decision to remake James Herriot’s much-loved Yorkshire vet stories was an inspired one, and this second series has effortlessly carried on the mood of gentle observation, nostalgia and slapstick comedy amid scintillating Yorkshire Dales scenery. A teeming cast of dogs, cats, horses, cows and chickens is permanently on call to provide fuel for the adventures of Herriot and the Farnon veterinary dynasty.Much of the time, the second series has merely rung a few changes on the formula perfected last time around, but fans of the show (and of Herriot’s original books) won’t mind. Read more ...