Sky atlantic

Wonderfully naturalistic and intriguingly odd: BBC2’s The Gallows Pole reviewed

In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After all, he made his name with the film This Is England and its three rightly acclaimed TV sequels, about a group of working-class folks struggling to survive against the heartless backdrop of that reliable old enemy: Thatcher’s Britain. Now, he’s giving us a costume drama set in 18th-century Yorkshire. In fact, though, it didn’t take long to realise that Meadows’s departure mightn’t be as radical as advertised – because the programme could easily have been entitled This Was England. Wednesday’s opening episode even began with a series of captions making

Touchingly free of cynicism: C4’s Somewhere Boy reviewed

At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following his father’s suicide – and what she, the police and social services regard as a lifetime of abuse. Since he was small, Danny’s father, Sam, had forbidden him from going outside, telling him the world was full of monsters who’d kill him if he did. He’d therefore grown up listening to old songs and watching old films – all the while believing that his beloved dad was keeping him safe. Yet once Danny was installed in Sue’s house, sharing a bedroom with his cousin Aaron, it soon became clear that

The makers of Fauda have another hit on their hands: Sky Atlantic’s Munich Games reviewed

You’d have to pay me an awful lot more than I get for this column to review Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. As I write, it’s the number one trending show on Netflix, but the most I’m prepared to stomach is that snatch of footage you get forced to watch (because of Netflix’s impertinent and intrusive automatic play function) if you linger over the title image for too long. It shows two cops at an interview desk gradually revealing to Dahmer’s increasingly aghast dad (Richard Jenkins) that his son Jeffrey might not be quite the straight upstanding citizen he imagined. Dahmer murdered – and often dismembered and sometimes ate –

Shaping up nicely for some truly epic bloodletting: House of the Dragon reviewed

House of the Dragon got off to a pretty uninspirational start, I thought: no major characters brought to a shocking and premature end; no bone-chilling spookiness like that White Walker opening scene in the frozen woods; far too much dreary, half-inaudible talking round long tables in ill-lit halls. If this hadn’t been the long-awaited prequel to Game of Thrones, I doubt I would have bothered watching the second episode. But I did and guess what? More dank, chiaroscuro interiors; more old men out of Shakespeare history plays mumbling into their beards; more complicated, almost-impossible-to-follow-unless-you’ve-read-the-books disquisition on inheritance, lineage and succession. The difference is, though, that by this point you’ve had

Amusing and entertaining – though not very taxing: Amazon Prime’s Reacher reviewed

Jack Reacher is back on the screen and aficionados of the hugely successful Lee Child airport thrillers in which he appears must be hugely relieved. This time he is played not by pint-sized Tom Cruise but by someone much closer to his 6ft 5ins height: a musclebound giant called Alan Ritchson. Not having read any of Child’s 100 million-selling oeuvre (probably because I’m bitterly envious: he’s a Midlands-born ex-media type, like me, but has a slightly larger bank balance), I can’t tell you how true to the original Ritchson is. But he plays him as if he’s on the autistic spectrum — a loner uncomfortable with too much dialogue or

A dog’s breakfast but I’m rather enjoying it: Sky Atlantic’s Yellowjackets reviewed

It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the Flies horror scenario, perhaps including cannibalism and ritualistic tribal sacrifice. All of which might explain why the forty-something women we meet today are so raddled, bitter, secretive, paranoid and messed up. Perhaps the biggest red flag is the dread memories it invokes of Lost, the plane crash TV series that ran in the Noughties for

James Delingpole

Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision. I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all

A highly polished exercise in treading water: Season 3 of Succession reviewed

At one point in an early Simpsons, Homer comes across an old issue of TV Guide, and finds the listing for the sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. ‘Gomer upsets Sergeant Carter,’ he reads — adding with a fond chuckle, ‘I’ll never forget that episode.’ Even for British viewers unfamiliar with the show, the joke is clear: that’s what happens in every episode. Sad to say, this popped into my head while watching the first in the new series of Succession. The acting, script and direction are as brilliant as ever. Nonetheless, once Logan Roy began yet again to dangle the possibility of becoming the next CEO of his media empire before

Up there with Succession and Chernobyl: The White Lotus, Sky Atlantic, reviewed

Every now and then, you see a new series — Succession, say, or Chernobyl or To the Lake — which reminds you why you watch TV. The latest such joy is The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), a darkly comic satirical drama created, written and directed by Mike White. White seems to be a curious and engaging character with lots of hinterland. His father used to be a speechwriter for ‘religious right’ preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (and later came out as gay). He wrote the charming comedy School of Rock because, though not himself a rock fan, his friend Jack Black wanted an excuse to perform all his favourite

Latest proof that western civilisation is over: Sky Atlantic’s Domina reviewed

I’ve been looking at the reviews so far of Sky’s new Romans series Domina and none seems to have noticed the most salient point: it’s crap. This is almost more depressing than the fact that the series got made in the first place, for what it suggests is this: our culture is now so debased that even our arbiters of taste can no longer tell the difference between quality and mediocrity. Domina follows the story of Julius Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian, from when he was a member of the triumvirate to his apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. You’d think you couldn’t possibly go wrong with such fascinating historical material, rich with gore,

Quietly radiates a wholly justified confidence: BBC 1’s The Pact reviewed

There was certainly no lack of variety among new TV dramas this week, with a standard British thriller up against more glamorous American competition in the shape of some extravagant Victorian sci-fi and an adaption by an Oscar-winning director of a Pulitzer-winning novel. (All three, mind you, did naturally feature a one-dimensional white bloke as the embodiment of sexist and/or racist villainy.) The surprising thing at this stage is that it’s the plucky British show that looks most promising. The Pact began, like many a thriller before it, with a frightened woman running through some dark woods. So far we still don’t know why — unless it was just force

A very watchable doc cashing in on Line of Duty: BBC2’s Bent Coppers reviewed

If you’re after an exciting, twisty programme about police corruption that doesn’t also feel a bit like sitting an exam in Line of Duty studies, then Bent Coppers: Crossing the Line of Duty could well hit the spot. As both the timing and subtitle not so much suggest as bellow, this three-part documentary series is an obvious attempt to cash in on its fictional counterpart. Happily, though, it’s a successful one. In Wednesday’s second episode the focus was on 1970s Soho, where the most reliable way to make a fortune was by opening what the narrator Philip Glenister called, in suitably 1970s argot, ‘dirty bookshops’. Of course, there were certain

Intelligence-insulting schlock: Sky Atlantic’s Your Honor reviewed

I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the dark side by extraordinary and compelling circumstances designed to make the viewer go: ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’ The problem with the compelling circumstances in this case is that they feel so desperately contrived. Cranston plays a priggishly upright New Orleans judge who radiates implausible goodness and rectitude. We first glimpse this during the case of a trial of a black woman accused by police of concealing drugs in an intimate part of her anatomy. A white cop, sweating integrity, swears on the witness stand that

How stupid do the script writers of Sky’s Devils think we are?

Here’s a worried question I want to plant in your head: when is TV drama going to start depicting the world we actually live in, where almost everyone wears masks, even outdoors? The current state of affairs — watching people on screen in familiar locations interacting closely, as we used to, and not wearing face-coverings — is a bit jarring. But it’s greatly preferable to the alternative: mumbled lines even more unintelligible than they are usually, smiles and teeth and noses and lips hidden behind a rag — and concealed with them not just beauty or character but half the means our faces use to convey emotion. I wonder, though,

Impossibly exciting: Sky Atlantic’s ZeroZeroZero reviewed

ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time favourite TV drama Gomorrah. What I love about Gomorrah is its utter ruthlessness and total artistic integrity. It’s set amid the warring drugs factions of the Neopolitan mafia (the Camorra) and never at any point do you feel that authenticity is being sacrificed for reasons of marketability or politically correct sensitivities or narrative arc. Not without reason has it been called the series ‘where characters die before they become characters’. Saviano himself has paid a terrible price for his honesty. He grew up among those Neapolitan gangs — ‘I saw

Is The Undoing properly great or just a run-of-mill thriller with a brilliant casting director?

There must be some people somewhere who vaguely know their own spouses — but if so, they don’t tend to appear in domestic-based thrillers. Last week when Sky Atlantic’s The Undoing began, Jonathan and Grace Fraser (Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) seemed to have the happiest of middle-aged marriages. They still laughed at each other’s jokes. They still kept each other fully informed about the kind of day they’d had at work: he as a kindly child oncologist, she as an unfailingly wise therapist. Not only did they still have sex, but when they did, it wasn’t always in bed. True, they weren’t wholly without their problems. Their loving son

The TV we feared they’d never dare make any more: The Singapore Grip reviewed

‘Art is dead,’ declared Mark Steyn recently. He was referring to the new rules — copied from the Baftas — whereby to qualify for the Oscars your movie must have the correct quota of gay/ethnic minority/transgender/etc people. This, he argued, will lead to the kind of leaden, politicised, phoney art we associate with communist regimes in the Soviet era and which, not so long ago, we used to find eminently mockable. If British and American producers want to lose money on TV shows and movies that no one wants to watch, then good luck to them. All that matters is that there’ll be enough brave dissenters out there to say:

A convincing and hair-raising depiction of showbiz at its most luridly weird: I Hate Suzie reviewed

Fifteen minutes into the first episode of I Hate Suzie, main character Suzie Pickles was doing a photoshoot in her country cottage for Esquire magazine. ‘We don’t know what we’re looking for right now,’ the photographer told her. ‘We’re just going to cycle through some feelings and see where we are.’ What he didn’t know, but we did, was quite how many feelings Suzie (Billie Piper) had already had to cycle through by then. The programme began with her thrilled to hear that she’d bagged a Disney film role and cracking open the champagne. A few minutes later, she learned that some sex photos of her had been hacked and

Michaela Coel’s dazzling finale reminds me of Philip Roth: I May Destroy You reviewed

It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently very fashionable indeed) and the late Philip Roth (increasingly discredited as an embodiment of all those phallocentric white guys who once ruled American fiction merely because they were great writers). Nonetheless, this week’s television made it hard not to. On Tuesday night, as an adaptation of Roth’s The Plot Against America began on Sky Atlantic, Coel’s I May Destroy You was serving up a dazzling final episode that confirmed how Rothian the series has been. For one thing, the main character Arabella, played by Coel herself, was — like many

A documentary about the M25 that will make your heart soar

When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to feel your heart soar. Nor would you necessarily expect what follows to be full of wonders of all kinds — natural, historical, literary and scientific. Yet this is exactly what happened in BBC Four’s The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, presented by Helen Macdonald. Macdonald is best known for her 2014 bestseller H is for Hawk, which mixed memoir and falconry with a biography of the author T.H. White. In Tuesday’s programme, she was on similarly genre-blending form as she set off on a television journey that, in a rare