Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Agatha All Along: A spin off from Wandavision, I was interested to see this for a couple of reasons; firstly, Wandavision was genuinely original and so I was keen to see what they did next. Secondly, with Joe Locke and Kathryn Hahn leading I thought this had a lot of potential. I wasn't at all disappointed. . I really enjoyed the opening episode with Agatha as a character in a police procedural, enjoying making a bit of fun of the various detective tropes whilst also taking it pretty seriously and still moving the narrative along. This time I was looking out for the tricks though, and spotted the bleeding through of the 'real world' and discrepancies quicker than if I had come into it cold. I understand that this is the first properly queer Marvel project and that was also presented as an integral part of the characters and their storylines, rather than something remarkable, so much so that I hadn't even noticed until I read some reviews pointing it out. It was both funny and tragic, moving easily between the two, and every line in this was doing something important. The characters felt fully realised and as a piece that needed a strong ensemble, the whole cast delivered seamlessly and, more importantly for a fantasy show, believable. Kathryn Hahn leaps out of the screen in every scene, but she was well matched by Joe Locke in his first screen work since Heartstopper. And then the surrounding ensemble including Patti LuPone and Aubrey Plaza all constantly took this the the edge of too much but never falling over - fabulous work from all of them. I am not familiar with Marvel lore, so I probably missed a lot in terms of easter eggs, but this was top class telly anyway. There are rumours of a second series... fingers crossed
A star studded and OTT reworking of Greek myths with a charismatic but terrifying Jeff Goldblum as Zeus becoming more frantic and monstrous and unable to find his chill as he fails to keep everyone in line to follow his every whim. I loved everything about this as the myths were brought to life in the 21st century. Full of bling, loud, funny and ruthless, but also carefully plotted with threads woven intricately through each episode and sensitivity in the various love stories too. The central story is of Eurydice and Orpheus, but that doesn't mean that many other threads aren't explored too. We have Prometheus played by Stephen Dillane acting as the narrator here too, Billie Piper as Cassandra, David Thewless as Hades, and Janet McTeer as Hera, Zeus's wife and sister (the Greeks weren't afraid of a little incest) and Eddie Izard as one of the Fates, but probably my favourite character is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) who acts as Orpheus's and Eurydice's facilitator, much to Zeus's chagrin. Anyway, the whole thing is a joy, but in an inexplicable move, Netflix has decided not to commission a second series despite the material ready for the taking.
I was very excited about this adaptation and loved the first series that appeared last year. The second series is still running as I write this and overall I am still enjoying this adaptation of Hugh Howeys books about survivors in a post apocalyptic world, living in underground silo under an oppressive regime which doesn’t let anyone know anything about the before times. It’s a great story and we are now following our heroine Juliette in another silo, as well as the ongoing events in her home silo, but I am finding Juliette’s time with Solo in the new silo pretty slow going. I don't think we needed pretty much a whole episode of her wandering around in the dark, despite the great CGI. The silos are still nicely realised although someone pointed out on social media recently that in the books it takes days to get from the bottom to the top of the silo so there is definitely something off with the scale. Despite the setting, this is a gripping action thriller full of political intrigue, with a population trying to break free, and even though I know what happens I am still following avidly.
Sunny: Suzie (Rashida Jones), an American woman living in near future Japan has lost her Japanese husband Masa, and son Zen in a plane crash at the start of the first episode, and as some kind of compensation, a colleague of her husband delivers her a home robot called Sunny. Suzie, who is a bit of a technophobe, believed her husband was a refrigeration engineer, but as she discovers that the robot has been especially programmed for her, she begins to believe there was more to her husband than she thought, and there is plenty of mystery over the plane crash too. Over the rest of the series we go on a bloody rollercoaster ride with Suzie as she tries to understand what happened to her husband and son and begins to develop an odd couple friendship with Sunny. This is a strange combination of odd couple/comedy/violence/sci-fi/ crime thriller/drama. During the middle I lost patience a bit with it as it meandered about with lots of really complicated plot points, but then it sort of snapped back into action in the final few episodes when Sunny begins considering their own morality and right to exist alongside the plot picking up again. In between the plot silliness there were themes of grief and loneliness, and an interesting glimpse into Japanese culture as it turns out that Masa had previously lived as hikikomori, a sort of withdrawal from society. This is all mixed in alongside a pretty blood soaked consideration of whether AI is always a good thing or not, plus a bit of hacking. I loved the mother in law Noriko (Judy Ongg) and the cocktail waitress Mixxy , and the terrifying blond gang boss Hime who was properly psychopathically scary. There was a twist at the end which suggests to me a second series is planned, and I will be up for watching this strange mix again, despite its flaws, particularly as I began to like Sunny a lot too.
Romantic Comedy/Drama
Mr Loverman: A beautiful family drama spanning over 60 years based on the novel by Bernadine Evaristo, I loved every bit of this series. This stars Lenny James as Barry, Mr Loverman himself, alongside Sharon D Clarke as his long suffering wife Carmel, and Ariyon Bakare as Morris, his soulmate and secret lover since their teenage years in Antigua where they grew up together. Taking us through the decades as the characters move to London and then deal with changing cultural mores and growing families and friendship groups, it felt spot on in terms of costume, cultural references and particularly the music; I added more than a couple of songs to my Spotify during the series. At its heart is a love story being kept secret (and we see why, through the attitudes of family, friends and strangers to any hint of queerness), but we also see the corrosive effects that the secret has not only on the lovers themselves but also the families around them. The dialogue was written so beautifully that I don't know that anyone could mess it up, but the cast took it and ran with it anyway giving such detailed performances. I had my heart in my mouth and tears in my eyes for most of the final episode. Lovely.... this one should be winning stuff in the awards season.
I've written a much longer review over
here, but in summary, this intricately wrought story continues to deliver. This time, the story arc about Charlie's eating disorder which has been developing from series 1 finally becomes central, sensitively portraying illness and recovery. The scenes dealing with the illness were carefully put together, and it was good to see a portrayal which wasn't focused on a young woman wanting to be slim, which far too often is the storyline we see on screen. Joe Locke did an amazing and subtle job here and I hope he gets a few nods when the award season gets going. And then, the long awaited sex scenes happened, and they were as Heartstoppery a thing as you could imagine, not being about the sex but intimacy, consent, communication and even recovery, using the sex scenes to draw a line under Charlie's illness arc. As this is so understated and aimed at teens I think this show often flies under the radar, but I love it.
Nobody wants this: A romcom written by Erin Foster and loosely based on her own story of falling in love with a jewish man as a non-jew. In this fictionalised version the stakes are raised by making the jewish man a rabbi too. The first couple of episodes, with a meet cute and getting to know the various families went along at a fair pace and I really enjoyed them, full of smart, scabrous and snappy jokes that landed pretty well. I may be cold-hearted, but for me it dipped a bit in the middle with some fairly manufactured plot points and some cliched renditions of various stereotypes that I thought it could easily have left behind. But just when I was ready to write it off, it picked up again and the stakes felt high enough for me to care.
The main characters are largely well written and Kristen Bell (Joanne) and Adam Brody (Noah) do have that elusive chemistry which makes us root for them, as well as being individually and jointly pretty funny. I also loved the dynamic between Kristen Bell's character Joanne, and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) who run a sex and relationships podcast 'Dildo's and Dildon'ts' and I hope that they continue that into the already commissioned series 2. Although it won't be one of my best ever romcoms, it's sweet and funny so I can see why it sat in the Netflix charts for so long.
My Lady Jane: Who would have thought that the tragic story of Lady Jane Grey, Queen for nine days before being executed, could spark such a fun few hours of magical fantasy telly. In this adaptation Jane avoids being crowned or executed by running away to avoid being married to an undesirable Lord Dudley by her money grabbing parents. I gather this is all based on a book (by Jodie Meadows) but this seems to me to very much its own thing adapted by Gemma Burgess. It has all the key characters, including Edward VI, Elizabeth and Bloody Mary, but takes them off into a magical alternative reality. Going from mildly chaotic to completely batshit crazy in the flap of an owl's wing, Jane defies her destiny by escaping with the help of some shape shifting animals, and a stellar cast including Dominic Cooper, Anna Chancellor, Rob Brydon, and perhaps my favourite, Kevin Eldon. I think the trick is not to try to understand or rationalise the plot, but just go with it, This is completely bonkers but really captured my heart.
One Day: Another adaptation of this bestselling book, I liked this better than the film, probably because there was more time to flesh out the characters than is possible in a couple of hours. This time the leads are played by Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall and they do a great job in making us believe in this up and down love story between two people who on paper don't have anything in common. The conceit in this story being that we just drop in on them one day each year, that day being 15th July the day that they first met. As well as being about the love story, the novel also makes me think about the minutiae of every day life that makes up the whole of our lives, and this version did a very good job of bringing that through too, snapshots in time showing what is there but perhaps passes without us noticing until it is too late.
Drama and Action/Thrillers
Slow Horses season 4: Well this is more of the same but not in a bad way, as this series based around a bunch of spooks pushed out to Slough House in disgrace. Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb obviously continues to be simultaneously a slob and deviously clever in his cynicism, and the rest of the cast spend their time running alongside the packed narrative, and that's a lot of running! Kristen Scott Thomas continues to be cool in her manipulation of everyone around her, whilst River continues to be over excitable and getting into entertaining scrapes. And they haven't forgotten the humour too, with Joanna Scanlan and James Callis bringing at least a smirk to my face every time they are on screen. The thing about the show in general is that nothing and nobody is as they seem, with glimpses of hidden depths in character as well as storylines, and so it always bears really close watching for the character arcs too. I haven't read the books so I can't be relaxed when it looks like key characters are being bumped off, and so I spend a lot of my time muttering wtf to myself. Series 5 is coming next year, and I worry we are getting too close to the end.
In recent years Death in Paradise has cornered the British market in prime time comic cosy crime, so it was great to see a new entrant into this market. This time David Mitchell in his best pedantic, irritable introvert mode, but with a soft heart. plays a crossword setter dropped into the role of murder investigator when his identical twin brother, a police detective, goes missing. It's great fun, and the puzzles each week, in best murder mystery tradition, are impossible to solve until the last important clue drops in the final quarter. The joy here really is in watching Mitchell do his thing, particularly in partnership with Anna Maxwell Martin who plays his sister-in-law. They both add a lovely bit of class and depth to something which on paper is pretty formulaic. So, much better than it has any right to be and I will be back for the second season.
Douglas is Cancelled - Written by Steven Moffat, this is a roller coaster ride through culture wars, #metoo and cancel culture and more. With genial Hugh Bonneville as the breakfast time host Douglas, with the much younger and prettier co-anchor Madeline (Karen Gillan), relationships on and off screen become complicated when it is reported that Douglas said something sexist at a party. Teasing out all the different forces that pounce on a story like this and run with it to meet their agendas, whether 'woke' or 'anti-woke' or something else, this kept guessing till pretty much the end. Some of this is a bit clunky (I read somewhere it was originally going to be a stage play, and I can see that, particularly in some of the dialogue) but the leads in this played us so well that I was absolutely hooked. And actually, having seen Greg Wallace's behaviour over the past few weeks, some of Douglas's responses to be being accused seem to be pretty mild. I loved the scenes where we finally understand what is going on with Madeline, played so subtly by Gillan, and in the end it was quite nuanced so that I found myself mulling over previous scenes to reframe them with my later knowledge.
Coming quite late in the year, this was a late entrant but a must-see. With Ben Whishaw partnering Keira Knightley as a pair of spooks at Christmas, it really was irresistable. With a convoluted plot that I am not sure I fully grasped but joyously pulpy and packed full of black humour, with lots of running around, shooting, fighting and blood, killing off characters left right and centre, this was Die Hard for the modern day. The calibre of the actors shows in this, and I am seated for more of Sarah Lancashire as the steely spy boss, Whishaw as the sensitive assassin still pining after the boyfriend he had to leave many years before, partnering Knightley as the agent in deep cover as the wife of a politician. It's not quite as classy as Slow Horses, and the comedy is much broader, but it absolutely won me over, and I hope that they can keep up this pace for a second season without it getting just silly
The Diplomat: Shiny show about a woman being sent to the UK as American Ambassador, despite her husband having the experience and gloss. I didn't watch the first series when it came out so binged season 1 and 2 over a week or two. It has Rory Kinnear as the British prime minister, a populist rightwing politician, and he is pompous and insecure, dangerously sharp and also incompetent in seemingly equal measures, and I loved every scene that he was in. In fact though this was interestingly astute in a sort of light West Wing way about real politics and agendas, sitting alongside bombings, slightly silly intrigues and romantic sub-plots. The addition of Allison Janney as the US Vice President really ramped up the classiness for season 2 and I am already looking forward to season 3.
The Jetty - A slow burn of a thriller about a woman uncovering layers upon layer of coverup and self delusions about what really happened years before, I was alternately engaged and irritated with this. Jenna Coleman is a woman in a man's world and the men are mean, obstructive and sometimes downright threatening. But too often the narrative veered off into poor side avenues that didn't really go anywhere, or was just annoying. Why was the podcasting campaigner so keen not to share her evidence with anyone? I never really understood it. So, nice try, and I did watch it to the end, but then the final episode ended up exasperating me all over again, so I'm not giving it top marks
Baby Reindeer: I knew that there was a lot of hype about this but had no idea of what to expect. The start is a bit comedy/drama-ish in tone, and so I settled down for some light viewing... then of course it turned a lot darker, and it was absolutely gripping if also horrific. Stating absolutely at the start that this was a true story (not a story based on real events), I spent a lot of time wondering how they had got it past the lawyers. I know that the stalker character has since stood up to sue Netflix, but what about the abuser? Leaving this aside, this was gruelling for all sorts of reasons including the exploration of Richard Gadd's character, playing himself, but seemingly pulling no punches, particularly in exploring his guilt as a victim, wondering if he did anything to invite the abuse/stalking. Fabulous performances from the main leads, particularly Jessica Gunning. Sensationalist and also irresistable.
Bad Sisters: I loved the first series, which had a really satisfying conclusion so I wasn't at all convinced that I wanted a second series, but of course I wasn't going to ignore it. I loved the addition of Fiona Shaw to the cast, who was both monstrous and funny, and of course, all of the actors are top quality. What this couldn't do though was create the outrageousness, complexity and comic blackness of the first series. So, although this was fine, it never hit the joyous feeling from the first series of when a plot point drops into its slot like clockwork with a loud clunk. The last episode did hit nicely though, frenetic and funny and tense, pulling the strands together pretty well so that I did feel satisfied by the end.
The Bear: I'm not much of a foodie, or very interested in Masterchef etc, and so the previous series took me by surprise in how much I love this unfolding story about a restauranteur, his family and other professionals which is often billed as a comedy even though it's really bleak, dealing with death, despair and failure as a constant theme alongside the perfectionism and gorgeous looking food. The third series picks up after the end of season 2 when Carmy had a meltdown and pretty much scuppered his key relationships. This season is less tightly structured but there were still some lovingly crafted episodes which had me hanging onto every word and move. The actors are still all at the top of their game, although once again Jamie Lee Curtis stole the show, and I really enjoyed everything about the 'Ice-chips' episode in the hospital, although the kitchen meltdown in season 2 continues to have my heart. I also liked the counterpoints between the different professionals, all perfectionists in different ways, and where that takes them, particularly when it focuses on a character in minute detail, as in the episode Napkins where we get Tina's back story. I found the ending of the series really frustrating though as they left us pretty much with the storyline largely unfinished. I hope that they round some of this up satisfyingly in season 4 rather than drag it out for too long.
Ripley: I almost forgot about this one as it came out early in the year, but I loved this black and white version, and Andrew Scott's portrayal as a constantly grumpy conman. Noir at every turn with rain whenever possible but every single shot looking absolutely gorgeous, I have to go back and watch the Matt Damon version again, but I don't remember loving it as much as this. Andrew Scott's Ripley is an enigma, we don't ever get to understand his motivations really, apart from getting that he seems really fed up whenever he isn't being deliberately charming. I liked Johnny Flynn's Dickie too; is it just me or does he seem a bit more rounded in this version? I read somewhere that Scott was ill and fed up while filming this, and maybe that fed into his portrayal - whatever the reason it worked for me. And one final reason to love this, it has a cat that absolutely steals the show too.
Mary and George: Based around the story of George Villiers, long thought to be a lover of James 1st, Julianne Moore as Mary, mother to George, has a ball as the parent who works out how to monetise her son at court, once it becomes clear that daughters are not going to catch this King's eye. Nicholas Galzatine plays George, as a young man moulded by his mother to serve the family fortunes with subtlety and not a little humour. This has Bridgerton levels of raunchiness, mixed with the murderous intrigue of 17th century court life, a bit like another variation of The Favourite or The Great, but very much its own thing. Everyone in this looks like they are having a lot of fun, and I did too.
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