Television

Shocking: Channel 4’s Partygate reviewed

7 October 2023 9:00 am

If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…

Arresting visual spectacle and superb fight scenes: Netflix’s One Piece reviewed

30 September 2023 9:00 am

What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close.…

A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was

23 September 2023 9:00 am

Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…

Why I’m addicted to Australian MasterChef

16 September 2023 9:00 am

Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third…

Subtle, psychologically twisty drama: BBC3’s Bad Behaviour reviewed

9 September 2023 9:00 am

Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…

Enthralling: BBC4’s Colosseum reviewed

26 August 2023 9:00 am

In the year 2023, the Neo-Roman Empire was at the height of its powers. A potentially restive populace was kept…

Bags of charm and a gripping plot: Netflix’s The Chosen One reviewed

19 August 2023 9:00 am

Some years ago, Mark Millar (the creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman, etc.) hit on yet another brilliant conceit for one of…

Much of the mysteriousness is inadvertent: ITV’s The Reunion reviewed

12 August 2023 9:00 am

The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the…

A welcome antidote to UK crime drama: Netflix’s Kohrra reviewed

5 August 2023 9:00 am

It has been quite some time since I’ve been able to bear watching UK crime drama. All right, I do…

University Challenge deserves Amol Rajan

29 July 2023 9:00 am

I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…

Rewriting history

22 July 2023 9:00 am

If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…

Too in thrall to today’s dogmas: ITV1’s A Spy Among Friends reviewed

15 July 2023 9:00 am

In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the…

Ugly, mechanical, soulless: Apple TV+’s Hijack reviewed

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Idris Elba would have made a perfect James Bond. Not the James Bond that we knew and loved when he…

Time to take your meds, Kanye

1 July 2023 9:00 am

No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…

Netflix has struck gold: Tour de France: Unchained reviewed

24 June 2023 9:00 am

I’m ideologically opposed to bicycles for all the obvious reasons: they don’t have lovely big nostrils which you can blow…

One of the best (if not the jolliest) TV dramas of 2023: BBC1’s Best Interests reviewed

17 June 2023 9:00 am

In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…

Gratuitously twisty, turny nonsense: Sky Max’s Poker Face reviewed

10 June 2023 9:00 am

Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…

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

3 June 2023 9:00 am

In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…

Spooky, classy dystopian sci-fi: Apple TV+’s Silo reviewed

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…

Watching Queen Cleopatra felt like witnessing the death of scholarship

20 May 2023 9:00 am

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

6 May 2023 9:00 am

With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for…

Purest fantasy but you’ll love it: Tetris reviewed

29 April 2023 9:00 am

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…

Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed

22 April 2023 9:00 am

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…

One of the best things you’ll see on TV this year: Netflix’s War Sailor reviewed

15 April 2023 9:00 am

War Sailor (Krigsseileren), a three-part drama on Netflix about the Norwegian merchant navy in the second world war, is one…

Felt like the product of a night in the pub: BBC1’s Great Expectations reviewed

8 April 2023 9:00 am

By now a genuinely radical way to turn a Victorian novel into a TV drama would be to take that…