Television

What a year it’s been for sex on TV. As we emerge blinking from the annual glut of televisual entertainment, I can’t get over how far we’ve come. Bridgerton, Babylon Berlin, Lady Chatterley… everybody’s at it, with no period in history so tragic that a few cheap thrills can’t be extracted from it. If you’d have told the teenage me that in my lifetime I’d see a comedian with breasts playing a piano with a penis on television, I’d have very much approved; having seen Jordan Gray do so on Channel 4’s Friday Night Live last year, I wish I hadn’t. Sex on TV has been such a long, strange

The Last of Us may be remembered as the point when Hollywood’s approach to video game adaptations finally changed. In this, it’s as significant a creative development as Jon Favreau’s Iron Man was in creating a new formula for Marvel superhero movies. The series, which began on Sky Atlantic last week, is set 20 years after a fungal pandemic wiped out modern civilisation. Joel (Pedro Pascal) is a smuggler hired to get 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of a quarantine zone and across a post-apocalyptic America. It’s based on a 2013 video game developed by Naughty Dog. For decades, moviemakers have struggled to create live-action films based on the intellectual property of

At the end of the Frasier theme song, its star Kelsey Grammer always sang the words: ‘Frasier has left the building!’ And when the show finished in 2004, it felt as if Frasier, Niles, Daphne, Martin, Roz and the rest had indeed left the building. In truth, the popular programme did not end in glory. Ever since Niles and Daphne had become a couple, ending its greatest running joke, there was a sense of past glories being retrodden. By the time Daphne’s siblings appeared with the strangest ‘British’ accents ever known, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Frasier’s departure was past due. It is therefore both surprising and alarming that rumours of

The Offer (Paramount Plus) Even when you know the ending, this ten-part drama about the making of The Godfather, seen from the perspective of novice producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller), is outrageously gripping, gorgeously evocative of louche, cocktail-drenched late 1960s Hollywood, wittily scripted and superbly acted. Matthew Goode is especially watchable as superproducer Robert Evans. And this mostly true story has so many eye-popping moments – often involving the real mafia who at first resisted, then supported the movie – it feels more like the raciest and most implausible fiction. Reacher (Amazon) Yes, the entire concept is the most preposterous tosh: incredibly tall, handsome loner from military background travels

Has a certain media mogul had a visit from three ghosts recently? I only ask as this year’s Sky Christmas schedule is so packed with treats and big-hitters that it can’t possibly be explained by hard-nosed commercialism. An outbreak of sudden seasonal generosity seems to be the only explanation. Whatever has triggered Sky’s largesse, the result is a little something for everyone – including those of us best described as jaded anti-Christmas types. I was particularly pleased to see the return of Billie Piper in the deliciously sardonic I Hate Suzie. From Succession writer Lucy Prebble, it’s the chaos comedy that makes Fleabag feel like Emily in Paris. If you

When you’re sitting on the sofa in the week ahead, stupefied into submission by food and alcohol and relatives and God knows what else, you’ll be tempted to watch something that will divert you from the gluttony. And, yes, the likes of Elf, It’s A Wonderful Life and Love Actually are all available, as they were last year. But maybe you’ll want to watch something that is not just entertaining but that makes the viewer think. Something that also has a provocative religious theme that is, if not quite the three wise men and the star of Bethlehem, as relevant this time of year as it ever is. Step forward the third series of His

When the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips married the rugby player Mike Tindall in 2011, the shallower among us wondered what she saw in him. We’re not wondering now. Watching the monstrous regiment of muppets and divas competing in the latest series of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and seeing Tindall’s equable nature – highlighted by the incompetent creative men who surround him, be they pop stars, actors or alleged comedians – makes it clear that the uncomplicated man is the smart woman’s choice. Tindall seems tremendously capable – an overlooked virtue in a romantic partner, and one that comes to the fore during the hard times. He’s like a human Swiss

‘Isn’t Naples beautiful? I’ve always dreamt about it. I always wanted this city all for myself; I didn’t want to share it… I alone deserved it because of everything I lost and I would have done anything to get it.’ So says Ciro Di Marzio – nicknamed ‘the immortal’ because he has survived so much mafia bloodletting – in the hit TV crime drama Gomorrah.   He is not talking about the churches or castles, the arcades or theatres or museums. He may have been out on the bay at night when the words are uttered, but the Naples he knows, grew up in and by then controls is the Naples of

As the credits rolled on the series finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, things got awkward. My partner turned to me to express his excitement for series two – just as I realised with absolute certainty that I couldn’t, in good conscience, watch the show again. My reaction came as a shock – to both of us. Hours earlier, I’d been champing at the bit to see the final instalment. Yes, the Amazon Prime programme has been widely panned by critics for everything from the CGI to the ‘colour-blind’ casting, but we’d loved it. In fact, it’s the first full series we’ve made it through

There on my television screen, in a somewhat surreal sequence, was Boris Johnson contemplating the women in his life. And suddenly before me appeared the famous Wyatt features: first eyes, then a nose and then a mouth, right into camera. Medium-range shot and then a close-up. Ah, we had faces then. And then I looked harder, and my blood turned to Freon. It was just a large photograph of me stuck on a 10ft projector screen. Couldn’t those cheapskates at Sky have got a goddamn actress instead of a Polaroid?  As it turns out, This England, the Kenneth Branagh series about my old friend Boris, is more Psycho than psychodrama. Someone

You almost have to feel sorry for Sky. After spending 18 months building up to their big Boris Johnson drama, they end up releasing it at exactly the same time that British politics enters its own cliffhanger mode with drama that could rival any season finale. This England – which tells the story of the start of Johnson’s premiership and the first wave of the Covid crisis – begins tonight on Sky Atlantic, starring Kenneth Branagh as Johnson and Ophelia Lovibond as Carrie. But should Sky have known better than to air it now? Generally the best real-life dramas follow a simple rule of thumb: time is on your side. Rather

Why is Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings show taking so much flak? The way I see it, there are two (mostly separate) factors at play: Tolkien fandom and race. First, Tolkien fandom. Despite the best efforts of the Tolkien Society to ‘queer’ Tolkien studies, the Inkling’s biggest admirers tend to be Christians on the cultural and political right. Most of this crowd (aside from those who think hating universally beloved things is a good substitute for a personality) loved Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. His adaptation of The Hobbit, which took plenty of liberties in order to stretch about 300 pages into three feature films, was less

If you were one of the many millions who watched Top Gun: Maverick this year, it may have been a pleasant surprise to see Jon Hamm in the (admittedly thankless) role of Vice Admiral Simpson, who has to look stern and angry at the various transgressions committed by Tom Cruise’s protagonist. Hamm has been cornering the market in these sorts of roles thanks to his appearance of square-jawed rectitude. He is a natural fit for FBI agents, police detectives, and, indeed, vice admirals. But it was a different kind of vice altogether that he followed in his best-known and most beloved role, that of the dynamically charismatic – yet entirely

‘What did the rampant chimp have to do with any of it?’ I squawked in bewildered disappointment to a friend at the end of Nope, the long-awaited third film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele. I had hastened in great excitement to see Nope on the first day of its cinema release, hoping for a work that would rival Peele’s sparkling debut Get Out in its idiosyncratic mash-up of razor-sharp social commentary and horror. Instead, I paid £14.20 to sit through 130 minutes of barely explained peril that were resolved in a manner that was even less clear. Peele, I concluded sadly, had crossed over to the dark side of artists

On a recent trip from London to New Delhi, I found out that an acquaintance I see once or twice a year had pulled out of her wedding just 24 hours before the ceremony. An almighty row? Infidelity? Good old-fashioned cold feet? No – her family had simply decided they weren’t happy with the groom and decided to pull the plug. Welcome to the world of arranged marriages. As a woman who was born and grew up in India, arranged marriages – those planned and agreed by the families of the couple, rather than due to the romantic inclinations of the couple themselves – have never made sense to me.

‘Who are these people and why should we care about them?’ This is the most important question any screenwriter must ask before committing pen to paper. Sadly it’s a question I failed to come anywhere near answering during the interminable ‘realism’ of the BBC’s much discussed (and much praised) Marriage. Sean Bean and Nicola Walker play Ian and Emma, an uptight midlife couple caught in the tedium of marital graft after 27 years together. The four-part ‘drama’ has been widely commended for showing the profound inanity of ordinary people’s domestic lives. While I consider myself to be pretty ordinary, I failed to recognise either of these dullards as anything other

She’s got all the trappings of superstardom: killer looks, a clutch of awards and £4.5 million in the bank. But mention ‘Jodie Comer’ to your friends and you’re bound to get a few blank stares. The British actress, best known for playing super-stylish assassin Villanelle in the BBC series Killing Eve, has yet to become a household name. And, like many in her growing legion of fans, I want to know why. This month I saw Jodie, 29, in Prima Facie, her debut West End play. It’s a masterpiece of a monologue in which she confronts gruelling issues including sexual assault, misogyny and bias in the criminal justice system –

From time to time, Netflix’s marketing brains like to get a bit cute with the company’s past. ‘Don’t give up on your dreams – we started with DVDs,’ read one recent viral post. But while the streaming giant happily references its most famous transition, it’s much more coy (and probably wisely) when it comes to its latest one. It isn’t hard to see that 2022 Netflix is a very different beast to the one most of us signed up for. If you joined Netflix during its peak – e.g. somewhere in the long window between House of Cards and Tiger King – you would have likely bought into the idea