TV
Leavisites should stay away: Sky’s Bad Tidings reviewed
Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing…
Dune: Prophecy is much worse than you will believe possible
Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune:…
We’re wrong to mock Do They Know It’s Christmas?
‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do…
Top tosh: The Diplomat reviewed
The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of…
Spy-drama porn: Sky’s The Day of the Jackal reviewed
All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three…
You’ll even hate the cat: Disclaimer, on Apple TV+, reviewed
Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking…
A fashion series made by people who hate fashion: Apple TV+’s La Maison reviewed
I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama…
Have today’s TV dramatists completely given up on plausibility?
In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable…
Like The Joker, but less pretentious: The Penguin reviewed
Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner…
Easy-on-the-eye tosh: Netflix’s The Perfect Couple reviewed
The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of…
Sick, cynical and irresistible: Netflix’s Kaos reviewed
Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt…
Must-watch TV: Apple TV+’s Pachinko reviewed
Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out…
Why are these dead-eyed K-pop groups represented as some kind of ideal?
On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world…
About as edgy as Banksy: Joe Rogan’s Netflix special reviewed
My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s…
Ambitious, bold and confusing: BBC4’s Corridors of Power – Should America Police the World? reviewed
Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away.…
Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Am I slightly psychopathic to be so obsessed with gangster TV?
Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top…
Utterly bog-standard: BBC2’s The Turkish Detective reviewed
A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama.…
If you can stand the stress, The Bear is still possibly the best thing on TV
The Bear has been called ‘the most stressful thing on TV’ and I think that’s probably a fair description. It’s…
Why you should never watch sci-fi series on streaming channels
Jason Dessen, the hero (and, as you’ll discover shortly, anti-hero) of Apple TV’s latest sci-fi caper Dark Matter, is a…
How a TikTok dance craze turned into a brainwashing cult
Because you don’t – I hope – use TikTok you will never have heard of the Wilking sisters. But back…
BBC1’s new Rebus is the kind of TV detective they just don’t make any more
Imagine a new series of Morse in which the real-ale-quaffing, jag-driving opera buff is turned into a speed-snorting mod on…
Nowhere near as miserable as I remember it: The Beatles – Let It Be reviewed
Beatles lore has long held that the film Let It Be was a depressing portrait of the band falling apart.…
