TV
Adam Sweeting
Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Lindsay Duncan, CBE, might be British acting royalty, yet her character as gangster matriarch in Charlotte Regan’s BBC-drama series Mint is anything but noble. Being flamboyant, fiery and unapologetic even in her Seventies, her character Ollie's certainly not your typical granny either, as her granddaughter Shannon (Emma Laird) has come to realise a long time ago. The series centres around Shannon, who is the daughter of the new Godfather of Grangemouth, Dylan (Sam Riley), Ollie's son. He now runs the dark and dirty family business that his ruthless father Andy (Clive Russell) once built Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.The setup is simple: two casino employees are, separately, skimming the takings, one to save her family from potential homelessness, the other to pay off loan-shark debts. Then it gets complicated. Their paths inevitably are on a collision course, both with each other and with the police and the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Filmmaker Charlotte Regan has been moving steadily up the creative ladder with music videos, short films and her 2023 feature debut Scrapper, which made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival. Now she takes a crack at a major drama for the BBC with Mint, whose eight 30-minute episodes describe a tale of young love, family dysfunction and gang violence.At its core is the Glasgow crime dynasty headed by Dylan (Sam Riley), who has been maintaining the thuggish legacy of his appalling father Andy (Clive Russell), but now seems to be wearying of the struggle to keep the operation afloat. Andy, now Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.Yet Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac has as many rain clouds over his head in sunny St Helier as Dougie Henshall’s melancholy Jimmy Perez in windy Lerwick, another single father with a demanding job and a teenage daughter to raise. Not the least of Bergerac’s problems is his simmering alcoholism, which his sporadic attendance of AA meetings can’t wholly suppress. This is a more pitiable hero than Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was back in 2019 when The Capture made its debut on BBC One, with writer Ben Chanan skilfully exploiting the sinister potential of deep-fake technology and ubiquitous mass surveillance conducted by the authorities. But if it seemed like sci-fi at the beginning, the new third series lands in a world where ever-evolving gadgetry has made all this stuff not just entirely feasible but almost commonplace. In the opening episode we got a quick warm-up about the marvels of identity-snatching and image manipulation in a scene at Heathrow airport where a suspect kept changing his appearance Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.Jon Hamm returns to reprise his role of Andrew “Coop” Cooper, the former Manhattan financier who was axed from his job and is now pursuing an imaginative new career in burglary, while trying to be a responsible father Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The title doesn’t refer to a void into which detectives disappear, but to Harry Hole, the fictional Norwegian sleuth created by novelist Jo Nesbø. Netflix’s nine-part series is derived from his book The Devil’s Star, adapted by the author himself. Getting the casting of the tormented but insightful Hole right is crucial, and they’ve done themselves some favours here by picking Tobias Santelmann for the job.Grizzled but capable of empathy, and ruggedly single-minded enough to ignore the threats and scepticism of senior officers, Hole is a classic bloody-minded loner, and Santelmann Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards does what it says on the tin. We watch the fêted newsreader from initial online contact with a 17-year-old from Cardiff - called “Ryan Davies“ here - to his arrest three years later, his sense of omnipotence shattered. Edwards’s family are noises off, and his work is represented by one BBC producer; only Ryan’s life is explored in any depth.This partial view is understandable given that Mark Burt’s screenplay is based on exclusive chats with the real Ryan, his family and friends, but not on material provided by Edwards and his family. ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The stern and glowering demeanour of David Morrissey’s character, Michael Polly, looms over this six-part drama like the embodiment of a malignant fate. Polly is the headmaster of St Bartholomew’s private school in Bristol, a vintage establishment replete with cloisters, venerable and palatial buildings and playing fields that seem to stretch for miles (Downside School in Somerset was the actual shooting location.)You might say Polly is married to his job, because he runs the school with a devotion that borders on the fanatical. As well as being the stone-faced figurehead of the establishment Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Another day, another few million bucks for Taylor Sheridan. Hot on the heels of Marshals, his latest Yellowstone spin-off, his inexorable march through the TV schedules continues with this saga of the Clyburn family. Previously they called New York home, but thanks to a sudden catastrophe they find themselves moving to the huge spaces and epic scenery of Montana's Madison River Valley. You could call it melodrama, and at times it threatens to go the whole hog and turn into soap, but The Madison does have the gift of watchability. It also delivers a hefty jolt of star power, in the shape Read more ...