TV drama
David Benedict
“Take your pick. Who shall we talk to first?” DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and DS Miller (Olivia Colman) had their three prime suspects waiting for them in custody. The fact that none of them proved to be the guilty party was what was wrong not only with their investigation but with the construction of the third and final series of the dramatically serious, but seriously uneven, Broadchurch (ITV).On the absolute plus side was the handling of the subject matter. Following extensive consultation and research with women’s organisations and other bodies working in the area of rape, the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a long time coming, but Homeland’s sixth series at last awoke from its early-season slumbers to put on a late surge over the closing episodes. For a while, it had seemed that the story was barely advancing at all, as the screen was self-indulgently hogged by Carrie Mathison’s emotional life, particularly her anguish over her daughter being taken into care. Yet by the end, she found herself in the teeth of the hurricane as the USA was threatened by a brutal coup d'état.Homeland has always been about the personal cost of undercover work, where commitment to the greater cause tends to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We’re three films into Rowan Atkinson’s tenure as Inspector Maigret and so far he’s barely twitched a facial muscle. Gone are the eye bulges and nostril flares, the rubbery pouts. There’s sometimes a hint of a frown, the odd twinge in a wrinkle around the eyes, but Atkinson’s performance continues mainly to be about keeping his cards superglued to his chest. Gnomic is about the size of it.The murder Maigret was investigating in Maigret's Night at the Crossroads (ITV) was of a Jewish jewel fence called Goldberg who, we later discovered, was recklessly eager to pull off one last high-yield deal Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Devised and written by John Ridley, the Oscar-winning writer of 12 Years a Slave, Guerrilla (Sky Atlantic) takes us back to London, 1971. The story is set among a group of black activists agitating against racism and police brutality, and the city is portrayed as a shabby, smouldering dystopia about to erupt into apocalyptic violence.Was this really how it was? I suspect not, even though the show brandishes the 1971 Immigration Act as a kind of state-sponsored manifesto of race hatred. What the Milwaukee-born Ridley seems to have done is transplant the Chicago riots of 1968 and an American Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Sunshine, sex and oodles of style: Vera (ITV) has no truck with any of them and is therefore unusual among Sunday evening dramas. There’s no escaping its mission to prove it’s grimy up north.The Blanket Mire, the fourth and final mystery of this seventh series, began with grey skies and torrential rain. A team of geologists, floundering in mud, unearthed a human arm. It belonged to an 18-year-old girl who has been missing for six weeks.There was no shortage of suspects: a dumped boyfriend, a handsome ex-soldier (Jonjo O’Neill, pictured right), the lead singer of a local band and a field of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of The Last Kingdom in 2015 kicked off with a blockbuster episode which managed to encompass savage violence, dynastic rivalry and a speedy tour of the state of Britain in the ninth century, while allowing the central protagonist, Uhtred, to grow from boy to man. It was a virtuoso feat, and one which the opener of series two couldn’t quite repeat.But have no fear. The new series has been steadily building momentum, and with this explosive fourth episode it once again looked like one of the very best things on television. It was here that Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon), the Saxon- Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Like many first novels, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall has a strong whiff of autobiography. It is a revenge comedy in which Waugh – like Kingsley Amis after him in Lucky Jim – transmutes his miserable experiences of teaching in Wales into savage farce.BBC One's dramatisation begins in Oxford, 1928. Paul Pennyfeather (Jack Whitehall), a milk-and-water theology scholar, is sent down from Scone College (full of fruitcakes), for “indecent behaviour”. His crime? To run into braying members of the Bollinger Club who, having already defenestrated a pig’s head (Oink! Oink!), proceed to debag him. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We like to think of Georgian England as a wellspring of elegance: the Chippendale chair and the Wedgwood teapot, the landscaped vista and the neoclassical townhouse. But, as subversively embodied in the mock heroic couplet, the seemly Age of Reason had a seamy underbelly. There was order, but also ordure.Take Harris’s Life of Covent Garden Ladies, published in 1789 and updated four years later, advised on the services available to gentlemen of leisure. Miss All-s-n of No 4 Glanville Street, it reported, is “now just in her prime… rising seventeen… can trot, amble, & even gallop, if Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Now promoted to the exhilarating landscapes of BBC One as a reward for previous good behaviour, Line of Duty set off at a scorching pace into the murky shadowland where crime, punishment, ambition and corruption mingle treacherously. Stretching back to Lennie James’s DCI Gates in the first series, the show has a great tradition of hiring guest stars and then treating them very badly indeed. For this fourth season, it’s Thandie Newton as DCI Roz Huntley, who’s been looking for a breakthrough in an ongoing investigation called Operation Trapdoor.So far this has encompassed one dead woman and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It happened in Monterey, but we’re not entirely sure what yet. Adapted from the novel by Australian writer Liane Moriarty, with the action transplanted from a small town in Oz to the splendid oceanside scenery of Monterey, California, Big Little Lies oozes Hollywood pedigree. It’s co-executive produced by two of its stars, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and is written and created by David E Kelley (LA Law, Ally McBeal). It looks all set to flare up into a scorching tale of betrayal, jealousy and rivalry between a closely-knit but fatally unstable group of characters.This opening episode Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
At the end of last year’s third series of Line of Duty, we saw the back of the reprehensible Dot “The Caddy” Cottan, and with the much-abused Keeley Hawes consigned to the show’s morgue of deceased leading characters it felt as though important matters had come to a close. I was dubious about LoD when it began in 2012, but what has gradually become apparent is that its mastermind Jed Mercurio (pictured below) has been playing a long, labyrinthine game. Now the fourth series is upon us – promoted to BBC One from BBC Two – and judging by the first episode, it has the potential to be another Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The prequel is here to stay. In the end every popular TV drama flogs itself to death. The star wants out, or the writer dies, or the original source material runs dry, or the public falls asleep. And there’s nowhere else to go. Nowhere, that is, apart from back in time. Hence the retro-fitted Endeavour and Gotham and Better Call Saul. In these risk-averse times, the execs enjoy the reassurance that the hard yards of establishing a character have already been gained. It (sort of) worked for Morse. How about the other great ITV cop of the last 30 years?Jane Tennison in the early 1990s was the Read more ...