TV
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…
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…
Beyond the cringe
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from…
Arresting visual spectacle and superb fight scenes: Netflix’s One Piece reviewed
What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close.…
Aussie rules
Why is Australian MasterChef so much better than the English version? You’d think, with a population less than a third…
Purest hokum
Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in…
The last laugh
Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Richard Lewis talks to Ben Lazarus about addiction, his Parkinson’s diagnosis – and his friendship with Larry David
Jesus returns
Some years ago, Mark Millar (the creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman, etc.) hit on yet another brilliant conceit for one of…
Death by a thousand cuts
I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…
Rewriting history
If you don’t subscribe to every last detail of the LGBTQ+ agenda, then basically you are a Nazi. This was…
Time to start popping the pills
No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…
Split decision
In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court,…
Let’s twist again
Imagine if you had the power always to tell whether or not someone was lying. You’d have it made, wouldn’t…
This was England
In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After…
Inside story
Back once more to our favourite unhappy place: the dystopian future. And yet again it seems that the authorities have…
Me and Mr Jones
Adam Sweeting talks to the documentary-maker Nick Broomfield about the forgotten Rolling Stone
Dog days of the USSR
Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the…
