wed 01/05/2024

tv

Servant, Apple TV+ review - shocks, shivers and black humour in missing-baby saga

Adam Sweeting

The oeuvre of M Night Shyamalan has tended to veer between unsettling creepiness and sometimes hilarious misfires, but, working as Executive Producer with screenwriter Tony Basgallop, he’s hit the spot with this unnerving series for Apple TV +.

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Finding Alice, ITV review - thriller, comedy or melodrama?

Adam Sweeting

Or, What The Durrells Did Next.

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Spiral, Series 8, BBC Four review - dark days in the City of Light

Adam Sweeting

The discovery of a grotesque murder is the traditional way to begin a new series of Spiral, and this time around the cadaver belonged to a young Moroccan boy, nicknamed Shkun. He’d been beaten to death with an iron bar and stuffed into a laundromat washing machine.

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Steve McQueen: The Lost Movie, Sky Documentaries review - the classic motor racing film that never was

Adam Sweeting

The motor racing passion of movie star Steve McQueen is well documented, from his motorcycling exploits in The Great Escape to the rubber-burning car chase around San Francisco in Bullitt to his weird but mesmeric sports car odyssey Le Mans. Less widely known, however, was his plan to shoot a movie about Formula One during the mid-Sixties.

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The Great, Channel 4 review - Russian history gets a whirl in the fictional blender

Adam Sweeting

History ain’t what it used to be, not on television at any rate. Recently we’ve witnessed the ongoing furore about the factual accuracy or otherwise of The Crown, while Bridgerton has cheekily galloped bareback over the conventional cliches of telly costume dramas.

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The Serpent, BBC One review - tracking down the hippie-trail murderer

Markie Robson-Scott

“They’re only rich assholes.

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Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks, BBC One review - a perfectly predictable romp

Laura De Lisle

The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) has a simple routine: she gets up at the same time every day, tramps out for her allotted hour of exercise, and spends the rest of the day staring out of the window, yearning for freedom. Sound familiar? That’s a bit worrying, she’s in prison. 

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Best of 2020: TV

theartsdesk

Okay, so some people taught themselves the violin or wrote a novel, but under this year’s circumstances, it was inevitable that television (terrestrial, cable, online or otherwise) was going to clean up.

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Black Narcissus, BBC One review - a haunting in the Himalayas

Saskia Baron

It’s dangerous territory, remaking a classic British film as a TV mini-series. In 1947 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created Black Narcissus, a heady adaptation of Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, they never set foot in the Himalayas.

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Roald and Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse, Sky One review – twinkly tale for troubled times

Joseph Walsh

They say "never meet your heroes". That may be true, but it forms the premise of a new TV drama concerning two of the worlds most famous childrens authors – Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl – who encounter each other at opposite ends of their life. 

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