Category Archive: TV SERIES
The Following Events Are Based On a Pack of Lies
(Foxtel Go. Binge) (2023) Creators: Ginny Skinner, Penelope Skinner; Directed by Robbie McKillop and Nicole Charles. The name and set-up of this sleek five-part ITV series leave the viewer suspecting a twist at the end. So that the reader will not be disappointed, we will tell you that the twist never comes. The narrative is pretty straightforward, if not always credible. But that’s ok. This is bite-sized entertainment of the fairly predictable, non-demanding type, with fairy-tale themes. While pushing her bike around Oxford wearing a peculiar, self-designed red cape, our heroine, middle-aged sad-sack Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton) spots her Big…
Continue Reading →Happy Valley : BBC One
No-one does grief and resentment like Sarah Lancashire. (See Last Tango in Halifax, BBC One 2012, series 3, episodes 3 & 4). After Happy Valley this sterling actor can add loathing, despair and massive disappointment to her CV. Indeed, no-one in Happy Valley experiences much of anything else. The West Yorkshire grit, damp, poverty, addiction, disease, treachery and crime with which they all live is made palpable and visceral in this most excellent 3 series show. The only person to escape the poverty bit at least, is the one rich man in the village (see The Vicar of Dibley) –…
Continue Reading →The White Lotus, Series 2, episodes 1 – 6 (director and writer Mike White) 2022
Those who were charmed and a little shocked by the intrigues of the first series of HBO’s The White Lotus, might come to series two with the wrong expectations. This series, set in a sumptuous Sicilian hotel in the eponymous chain, has little charm, but plenty of shocks. It looks beautiful, some of the clothes are beautiful – although we’d like to know what Hayley Lu Richardson did to upset the the wardrobe, hair and makeup departments so much. Sadly, Murray Bartlett’s marvellous manager character did not survive series one, but the manager of this White Lotus, lovelorn, man-hating Valentina…
Continue Reading →The Descent of Comedy
Oh dear. Shaun Micallef was once a genius of the Theatre of Embarrassment. But if you’re going to “go political” in comedy, you need to visit a plague on all houses. Not merely pander to the cognitive elites, smug in their infallible bubbles. Alas, he’s now the Australian Stephen Colbert.
Continue Reading →Better Call Saul (Finale Season)
(Stan, 2022) This sublime series, from one, two, three, four and five, a pre-cursor to Breaking Bad, is wrapping things up. Series Six hurtles toward dark places with all the terrifying speed of a runaway train, conducted by Edgar Allan Poe. This is a slow train wreck coming: we know that split-personality-Saul, Honourable killer Mike, and Super Polite and Super Evil Gus, make it into the made-earlier-but-set-later series, but what of Nacho, Howard, the dreadful Lalo and – of course – Kym? It’s just the best thing on TV in many, many years…
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