Category Archives: Drama

The Wire star Michael K Williams dies aged 54

Posted on by

The actor was best known for his role as Omar Little in the HBO series, and also starred in Boardwalk Empire

The actor Michael K Williams, best known for his role as Omar Little in The Wire, has died at the age of 54.

Confirming his death to the Hollywood Reporter, Williams’s representative said that it was “with deep sorrow that the family announces the passing of Emmy-nominated actor Michael Kenneth Williams. They ask for your privacy while grieving this unsurmountable loss.”

Continue reading...

Life, death and gabagool: how The Sopranos explains everything

Posted on by

Ahead of the release of prequel The Many Saints of Newark, a look at how David Chase’s classic mob drama saw the world in a grain of parmigiano

In 1999, a 40-year old Italian-American man started a course of therapy and created a new template for prestige television. The Sopranos, David Chase’s smash-hit TV series, was about the nasty inner workings of the DiMeo crime family. It was also about a mafioso’s midlife crisis, his children and his marriage, his debilitating anxiety and lurid nightmares.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

Continue reading...

The Handmaid’s Tale: will the TV hit break its cycle of cruelty?

Posted on by

Season four of the drama based on Margaret Atwood’s novel has seen Elisabeth Moss’s June in near-constant peril. However, it seems her latent rage could be the thing that sets her free

I find myself wondering why I am still so invested in The Handmaid’s Tale on a weekly basis, as the camera slowly closes in on Elisabeth Moss’s face, her character June pained and broken by cruelty after cruelty. The apocalyptic drama is coming to the end of its fourth run, and when this season began, it found itself boxed into an inevitable corner. How could it sustain the story far beyond Margaret Atwood’s novel, without keeping its characters in a cage, and becoming an unrewarding display of relentless misery?

It had begun to go around in circles. June would defy the rules, escape the authorities, get captured, undergo torture, and then begin the whole cycle again. It made it hard for viewers to feel satisfaction in her victories. What was the point in rooting for her, if she would inevitably end up back at the start?

Continue reading...

The White Lotus review – a magnificently monstrous look at how the other half live

Posted on by

Rich guests – including a spaced-out Jennifer Coolidge – rub shoulders with downtrodden workers on a holiday from hell, in Mike White’s superb satire about inequality

The White Lotus is Big Little Lies with another two and a half turns of the screw – an equally sumptuously set miniseries with a mystery fatality at its heart. But this time, its subject is the monstrousness of affluence rather than mere snobbery.

We open with newlywed Shane (Jake Lacy) batting away questions from a friendly couple in an airport departure lounge about where his wife is, as he gazes down at cargo labelled “Human remains” that is being loaded on to their flight. Then we flash back a week to his arrival (with his starry-eyed wife Rachel – Alexandra Daddario) at the exclusive White Lotus spa in Hawaii, as part of a similarly Waspy group of guests.

Continue reading...

Modesty pouches and masturbation montages: the making of Sex Education

Posted on by

The rude, raucous and revolutionary comedy is back for another term. The stars and creators reveal how it became one of Netflix’s biggest British hits

Sex Education is back with a bang. Several, in fact. The Netflix hit’s third series starts with an epic sex montage. There’s sex in a car; in a living room; in a variety of teenage bedrooms. There are casual encounters, committed relationships, sex together, alone, virtually, playing the drums and with a sci-fi theme. It is a symphony of shags, an opera of orgasms, all set to the thumping beat of the Rubinoos’ I Think We’re Alone Now. As the old saying goes, there’s nowt so queer as folk, and Sex Education is determined to prove it.

The Netflix comedy-drama only began in 2019, but thanks to its cross-generational, multinational appeal, it already seems like part of the cultural landscape. The funny, frank, flamboyant show about teenage life, sex and identity is an awards magnet and has made stars of its young cast, who now front fashion campaigns and appear regularly on stage and cinema screens. Gillian Anderson and Asa Butterfield star as mother and son Jean and Otis Milburn, who live in an enviable, chalet-style house overlooking the gorgeous Wye valley.

Continue reading...

I Am Victoria review – a masterclass in what pushes a woman to the edge

Posted on by

In the new series of Dominic Savage’s searingly truthful dramas, Suranne Jones plays a mother trying to do it all … and hurtling towards a meltdown

Two years ago, Channel 4 gave us the novel – not unprecedented, but still novel – series I Am … It comprised three dramas created, written and directed by Dominic Savage, who devised the stories with three female actors. I Am Nicola starred Vicky McClure as a woman realising she is in a coercively controlling relationship and trying to find a way out. Samantha Morton was the protagonist in I Am Kirsty, hemmed in by poverty and predated upon for all the vulnerabilities that go with that. Gemma Chan was in I Am Hannah, about a young woman appraising everyone’s interest in her biological clock.

There were moments when polemic overwhelmed the storytelling, but overall (and the Nicola instalment in particular) they were strikingly truthful stories told in a strikingly truthful way. I loved what they did and what they represented – a fine, new way to get women’s real lives and experiences on screen. Savage seemed to have got himself brilliantly out of the way, committed himself fully to that goal and succeeded.

Continue reading...

First image revealed of Imelda Staunton as the Queen in The Crown

Posted on by

Actor best known for Vera Drake takes over from Olivia Colman for fifth series about the UK royal family

The first image of Imelda Staunton in character as the Queen in season five of The Crown has been revealed.

Staunton has taken over from the Golden Globe winner Olivia Colman, as the fresh series ushers in a new era for the royal family. Netflix gave fans a first glimpse of Staunton as the monarch while she was still filming the next instalment of the Netflix show.

Continue reading...

Idris Elba: ‘I used work to exorcise my demons’

Posted on by

The actor was working as a bouncer when he got a small part in a new show called The Wire. Two decades on, he’s a blockbuster fixture. The Suicide Squad star talks about fighting for his big break, losing his dad, and why acting helped him out of a ‘dark, weird junction’

“I appreciate my quiet time, I really do,” Idris Elba tells me, “but I didn’t choose a career in quiet time.” At 48, his life seems relentlessly full of activity, projects, causes, releases. He’s the star of an imminent summer blockbuster, The Suicide Squad. He’s a rapper who releases music online at a rate of about a track a month. He hosts a podcast. He’s just released a new line of T-shirts. Earlier in 2021, Elba signed a deal with HarperCollins to write children’s books. He and his wife, the Canadian model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, have recently been petitioning world leaders (France’s, Belgium’s) on behalf of rural farmers in Africa. The couple have also co- designed a Louboutin sandal. When Elba sits down to chat to me over Zoom, it’s during a break between night shoots on a new movie he’s making, and I’m tempted to tell him to forget about it; shut the laptop; sleep.

Is he someone who hates sitting still?

Continue reading...

Fiona Shaw: ‘I got to Hollywood at 28 and they said: You’re very old’

Posted on by

The thrilling star of stage continues her TV takeover. As she joins mercilessly dark drama Baptiste, Shaw talks about Fleabag, American burnout – and marriage as a cure for chaos

There is a man outside, doing something to the windows of Fiona Shaw’s house in London, and he appears to be following her from room to room. No sooner has she laughed, apologised, picked up her laptop (we’re speaking on Zoom) and sought peace elsewhere than – scrape, tap – the top of a ladder appears again, and his face looms behind her.

No wonder. I feel like following Shaw around everywhere too. She is such fun, bracing company. She can swing from references to Freud to word-perfect renditions of Yeats lines learned in childhood, and makes some lovely observations: describing lunch with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she says the Fleabag creator is “like April or May. She’s blossoming on all fronts, all her fingers are light green.” Even the man working on Shaw’s windows is likened to something out of Rapunzel. She seems to delight in everything.

Continue reading...

Sweet Tooth: the prescient pandemic hit bringing joy to the masses

Posted on by

Centred on a killer virus, Sweet Tooth could have been the most troubling TV to watch during Covid. Instead, as its creators and star Nonso Anozie attest, the Netflix show has become a smash because it’s so redemptive – and happy

The pandemic might not be over yet, but you can already trace a line through the culture it has produced. The overenthusiastic “let’s put on a show!” mania of cast reunions filmed over Zoom quickly gave way to the gnawing listlessness depicted in Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside. Another part of the line, however, happened by accident.

Netflix’s Sweet Tooth is a series about a devastating global pandemic that kills millions of people and resets humanity. It was filmed last summer, in that brief golden gulp between Covid lockdowns. However, Sweet Tooth wasn’t rush-produced to reflect the situation; instead, it is based on a decade-old graphic novel and has been in development for five years.

Continue reading...

Mischa Barton on success, paparazzi and survival: ‘I’m not broken’

Posted on by

As party girl Marissa in The OC, Barton found fame at a time when young female stars were being hounded by the press. She talks about strength, resilience and her battle against revenge porn

For some actors, the roles they have played stick to them like shadows, long after they should have been left behind. Just ask Mischa Barton. It is 15 years since she starred as Marissa Cooper in the teen drama The OC, and yet still she can’t shake her off. When Barton appeared in the reality show The Hills in 2019 – inspired by The OC’s privileged young Californians but featuring real-life people – she was supposed to be herself, but the producers expected Cooper. “It is the constant mistake,” she says wryly. “They were even calling me by my character name. Seriously? Like, this far down the line they can’t get my name right?”

The parallels, though, are irresistible. Marissa was a troubled party girl with a love of fashion who met a tragic end. Mischa (even their names are similar) was also a troubled party girl with a love of fashion, whose life at times seemed out of control. There was the extreme fame, the breakdown, the reported threats of suicide, estrangement from her parents and a “revenge porn” court case. Barton has weathered it all with a sense of humour and now, at 35, a bit of perspective.

Continue reading...

The Handmaid’s Tale season four review – hope at last in the most harrowing show on TV

Posted on by

Elisabeth Moss has always made this impressive if horrifying TV. But as the new series turns June into queen of the rebels, it has a shot of new life

I am not sure if “enjoyment” is quite the right word in relation to watching The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). It has been, at various points over the last three seasons, either a harrowing slog or an extremely harrowing slog. But at its best, it is impressive, inventive drama that pushes unfamiliar buttons with great skill. It had a magnificent, haunting first season, which largely stuck to the plot of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, but afterwards it struggled under the weight of its own misery. June (Elisabeth Moss) escaped from Gilead, and was captured, ad infinitum, which made it feel like a gruesome hall of mirrors in which hope was pointless. It made me wonder whether continuing to watch was pointless, too. But a diversion into global politics gave it a shot of new life, and season four continues to explore new ground. It needed it, and it works.

The lengthy recap at the beginning is useful, given that the pandemic delayed production. According to its showrunner, Bruce Miller, the logistics of shooting in Canada also had a direct effect on shaping the story. June organised a cohort of rebels, pulling together an underground network of Marthas and Handmaids, to smuggle 86 children out of Gilead, saving them from life under a brutal regime. The Waterfords have been arrested by the Canadian government and are in captivity, but at the end of season three, it looked as though June may have run out of luck. Still, without her, this is Handmaids’ Tales, rather than The Handmaid’s Tale. If the question is, how much more can one woman endure, then the answer comes quickly: using no anaesthetic, Janine cauterises the shotgun wound in June’s abdomen with a red-hot poker. Welcome to season four.

Continue reading...

David Schwimmer: ‘I was a roller-skating waiter’

Posted on by

The actor, 54, on childhood activism, studying drama at Oxford, bringing up his daughter and learning to fight the good fight

My parents are my heroes. I marvel how they were able to work as young lawyers while keeping family as a priority. They raised my sister and me with a hyper-awareness of justice, equality and gay rights. I have memories of protesting on picket lines. It really informed my worldview and perspective.

I wanted to be a surgeon. I was fascinated by the human body: I knew everything about the lymphatic, the vascular and the skeletal systems. I was a big science geek, but I found that I could talk to more girls in acting class than in the science lab. So that kind of derailed my medical career.

Continue reading...

My husband’s death inspired It’s a Sin scene, says Russell T Davies

Posted on by

In new Guardian podcast, TV dramatist tells Grace Dent about writing Colin’s final hours

Russell T Davies, the writer of It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of show’s characters, was partly based on the death of his partner.

Speaking to the food writer Grace Dent on a new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, which launches on Tuesday, Davies said he had drawn on the experience of watching his husband, Andrew Smith, die from brain cancer in 2018 to write the scenes featuring Colin’s death.

Continue reading...

Christina Hendricks: ‘We were critically acclaimed – and everyone wanted to ask me about my bra’

Posted on by

The star of Good Girls discusses Mad Men, sexual harassment and squaring her glamorous reputation with her ‘weird, goofy’ personality

Christina Hendricks appears on our video call with the most dramatic backdrop. Art deco gold peacocks bedeck a black wall, making her look, as she has so often in her career, a bit too good to be human. Perfectly poised, perfectly framed, perfectly lit, she is more like a dreamy vision of what humans look like. “I, erm, like your wall,” I say, pointlessly. She flashes a smile, as if to say: “Obviously.”

We are here primarily to discuss the comedy-drama series Good Girls, the fourth season of which will resume in the US this month after a midseason break. The elevator pitch would be Breaking Bad for girls: three suburban women, each hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, unite to embark on a life of cack-handed crime, only to discover they are good at it. The ensemble – Hendricks, Mae Whitman, who plays her sister, and Retta, their friend – works strikingly well, their pacey comic rapport instilling a sense of perpetual motion. You just can’t imagine Good Girls ending. Every time a plot line seems to be reaching its climax, something worse – and funnier – happens.

Continue reading...

Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown – style icon of the pandemic

Posted on by

The Pennsylvania detective’s unvarnished realness has hit a fashion nerve with viewers

The style icon everyone is talking about wears drab flannel shirts with flat shoes and crumpled jeans. She has frown lines and dark roots. She might wear mascara if she’s going out to eat but if she’s going to work she doesn’t bother. As a Pennsylvania detective in Mare of Easttown, the Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet bucks the trend for high fashion on the small screen that has given us a string of glossy shows such as Succession, Queen’s Gambit and Halston, with a character whose unvarnished realness has hit a nerve.

A grizzled detective with a complicated personal life; a naked female corpse; a sleepy small town squirrelled with secrets. The set-up of HBO’s hit show, Mare of Easttown is familiar TV fare, but the transformation of serial Vogue cover star Kate Winslet into Mare Sheehan provides an unexpected plot twist. Nowhere to be seen are the blow-dries of Big Little Lies or the silk blouses and velvet coats of The Undoing. Instead, the first episode sees Detective Sheehan dressed in nondescript denim and sack-adjacent plaid, one woolly-socked foot up on her kitchen table, drinking a bottle of beer while using a bag of frozen oven chips as an improvised ice pack for a sprained ankle.

Continue reading...

‘Tarnished for ever’: why don’t great TV shows ever end well?

Posted on by

Line of Duty, Game of Thrones, Lost, Dexter ... so much TV goes from fan favourite to laughing stock the second its finale ends. Has any show ever stuck the landing?

If Sunday night’s Line of Duty really was the last ever, there’s a sense that the entire programme has been tarnished by its finale.

Because that’s what happens with TV shows. Think of Game of Thrones. Think how rapturously it was received for years, and how it was all undone by the abject gormlessness of its final episode. Think of Dexter, and how a once wildly successful series became a laughing stock as the final credits rolled. Think of Lost, and how a divisive finale sent Damon Lindelof into such a funk that his next show ended up being an explicit meditation on the depressive nature of grief. Screw up the landing and the whole thing goes to hell.

Continue reading...

‘Beyond Fleabag’: fresh female genius lights up this year’s Bafta TV nominations

Posted on by

With daring shows such as I May Destroy You and I Hate Suzie, there’s much to celebrate. But ITV will rightly feel aggrieved as Quiz and Des miss out

The good news is that the 2021 British Academy television awards recognise – as these trophies have not always done – glittering fresh genius where it appears.

Two daringly written and visualised dramas with first-person titles that include an aggressive verb – the BBC’s I May Destroy You and Sky Atlantic’s I Hate Suzie – receive eight and five nominations respectively. Each is driven by an exceptional creative talent in, respectively, Michaela Coel and Billie Piper. Both series explore the psychology and experience of younger women in a graphic and tragi-comic detail going beyond even Fleabag, a pioneer in that direction.

Continue reading...

‘The butt of all jokes’: why TV needs to ditch stale immigrant stories

Posted on by

The lead character in United States of Al is a bumbling, one-dimensional cliche whose sole purpose is helping his white peers. How sad that shows like this still get made

It feels sad, amid a wave of such positive, nuanced, complex depictions of immigrants on TV, that United States of Al had to launch this month in the US.

“How do you say: ‘We’re so happy to see you’ in … what language do they speak in Afghanistan? Afghanistanish?” is the first line of the new show, about an American war veteran whose Afghan friend, Al, comes to live with him in the US.

Continue reading...

‘I miss the English bants’: Parminder Nagra on ER, Bend It Like Beckham and new sci-fi Intergalactic

Posted on by

She went from Leicester to Los Angeles – and is now bound for outer space. But Intergalactic, which was filmed in Manchester, has made the British star want to return home

I can’t tell if the pained expression on Parminder Nagra’s face is because of the bad Zoom connection or the words I can’t help blurting out the moment she appears on my screen. She’s sitting at a table in her home in Los Angeles, the California sun streaming through sash windows into a sitting room dotted with keepsakes from her many films, and all I can think to say is: “I can’t believe I’m talking to Jess from Bend It Like Beckham! I loved that film!”

We’re meant to be discussing the actor’s new role in Intergalactic, a dystopian sci-fi drama about a group of female high-security prisoners who hijack a spaceship and set off in pursuit of freedom. But instead we’re discussing the role Nagra took on almost 20 years ago, playing Jess, a teenager who discovers herself on the football pitch, while navigating her Indian heritage and British life. Is it annoying that people still talk about Bend It? “No,” says Nagra, “because it’s such a huge part of my life. I’ve just gotten older. I keep thinking people are going to think I still look the same, when I don’t. But I’m still proud of the film. It’s probably what I’m most recognised for.”

Continue reading...