Riveting and heart-wrenching: BBC1’s Time reviewed
‘Only with women’ is a phrase used by more cynical TV types for a show that takes something that’s been…
Only goodwill will get you through this reboot: Paramount+’s Frasier reviewed
Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving…
Shocking: Channel 4’s Partygate reviewed
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…
A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was
Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…
Subtle, psychologically twisty drama: BBC3’s Bad Behaviour reviewed
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed
The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…
Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed
In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…
Time to take your meds, Kanye
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
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…
Watching Queen Cleopatra felt like witnessing the death of scholarship
The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of…
Despite the lack of sex, stick with it: Paramount Plus’s Fatal Attraction reviewed
With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…
Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed
By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…
Makes a change to see such reassuringly competent policemen: ITV1’s Grace reviewed
Sunday-night dramas on the two main terrestrial channels definitely aren’t what they used to be. Not so long ago, you…
Watch some liars claim that youth and beauty don’t go together
Back in 1990, Grandpa from The Simpsons wrote a letter of protest to TV-makers. ‘I am disgusted with the way…
Riveting and titillating: BBC2’s Parole reviewed
There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it…
Bravely shows that depressed people can be quite annoying: The Son reviewed
For my money – and lots of other people’s – Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father was pretty much a…
Joking aside
Nick Hornby’s 2014 novel Funny Girl was both a heartfelt defence and a convincing example of what popular entertainment can…
Has Salman Rushdie become his own pastiche?
Salman Rushdie returns to India with a full-throated mix of history, magic realism and dazzling storytelling, says James Walton
A ‘look at these funny people’ doc that could have been presented by any TV hack: Grayson Perry’s Full English reviewed
For around a decade now, Grayson Perry has been making reliably thoughtful and entertaining documentary series about such things as…
Guiltily compelling: Spector, on Sky Documentaries, reviewed
On 3 February 2003, the emergency services in Los Angeles received a call. ‘I’m Phil Spector’s driver,’ a voice told…
Irresistible: Sky Max’s Christmas Carole reviewed
What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…
