Television
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…
When piracy meets protest
Sometimes there are advantages to being ill-informed. Knowing embarrassingly little about why 30 Greenpeace activists were jailed in Russia in…
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.…
Why did C.J. Sansom approve this moronic Disney+ Shardlake adaptation?
What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake?…
Sordid, ugly and threadbare: Jimmy Carr – Natural Born Killer reviewed
Here’s an offensive joke: ‘Jimmy Carr gets paid to do a Netflix special.’ All right, it’s not original – I…
Danny Dyer’s new C4 programme is deeply odd
Who do you think said the following on TV this week: ‘I love being around gay men – seeing a…
Grey, gloomy, and utterly joyless: Ripley reviewed
If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture…
Compelling and somewhat heartbreaking: Girls State, on Apple TV+, reviewed
Here’s a fun thought experiment: instead of entrusting the future of American democracy to one of two old men, what…
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…
