Category Archives: Drama

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.”

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‘Downton Abbey is ludicrous’: the biggest TV hits we’ve never seen – until now

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Continuing our series on a year of bumper pandemic viewing, our critics finally watch the shows that had passed them by, from Downton to Twin Peaks

As with my experience of so many modern cultural touchstones, I first came to 24 via a Simpsons parody. Being only seven years old in 2001, when the 24-episode “real time” thriller first aired, my knowledge of Kiefer Sutherland’s exhausting counter-terror mission to stop the assassination of a presidential hopeful came from a 2007 Simpsons episode starring Lisa and Bart in a split-screen chase to hold off the detonation of a powerful stink bomb at Springfield Elementary.

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‘We needed to rescue the nation from despair’: culture’s year of Covid

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Comedians went virtual, Ai Weiwei went to Portugal – and Bake Off pledged the show would go on. In the first of a two-part series, cultural figures look back on a year that shook their industry

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Keeping an eye on the force: life in the real Line of Duty

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As the popular BBC drama returns, a former crime reporter takes a look at the reality of fighting police corruption

Last week, an officer from South Wales police received formal notification that they were under investigation regarding their dealings with a man who had been arrested and held overnight in a cell in Cardiff.

The suspect had been released from custody the following morning then found dead shortly afterwards. The investigation is to focus on whether the level of force used by the officer was “necessary, proportionate and reasonable” in the circumstances.

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The Sopranos: David Chase and mobster Johnny Sack on how they made a TV classic

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‘Fox turned down the first draft because I didn’t put any murders in it. People watch mob shows because they like to see murders’

I was still writing the pilot episode when Steven Van Zandt – who would go on to play strip-club owner and second-in-command Silvio Dante – came to read for the part of Tony Soprano. I thought: “With Steven, it could be more like The Simpsons: more comedy, less nasty bits, more absurd.” But once we hired Jim Gandolfini for Tony, it all went back to where it started.

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Kelly Macdonald: ‘I’m beyond sex scenes now. I just play detectives’

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She shot to fame in Trainspotting, and has starred in Gosford Park, Boardwalk Empire and even as a Disney princess. So why did the Scottish actor panic about her new role in Line Of Duty?

Kelly Macdonald’s roles are typically quiet, fraught with internal conflict and entailing journeys that are more reflective than active. As a grieving mother in The Child In Time, a gangster’s wife in Boardwalk Empire and the titular role in The Girl In The Cafe, the 45-year-old has, over the last 25 years, become known for the kind of thoughtful performances signified by the image of a woman staring out of a window. All of which makes our encounter today doubly surprising; that Macdonald, appearing via Zoom from her home in Glasgow, is here to talk about Line Of Duty, possibly the least reflective TV show ever made. And that she is a complete hoot.

Her role in Line Of Duty has, over the course of the show’s six seasons, become a coveted one in British telly – that of the guest star brought on as a no-good cop to be investigated by AC-12, the show’s now iconic anti-corruption unit. (Previous incumbents in the just-how-bent-is-she role include Keeley Hawes and Thandie Newton.) Line Of Duty’s twists are legendary, and the embargos fierce, and, following the rollercoaster of season five – in which we grappled, briefly, with the possibility that Supt Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) himself was bent – we meet Macdonald in season six as DCI Jo Davidson, getting stuck into a case. And that is pretty much all, ahead of transmission, the BBC will permit either of us to reveal, which makes Macdonald crack up every time she thinks of it. “It’s hilarious that they sent me a list of things I’m not to talk about, when I can’t remember any of it.”

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I wish I knew how to quit You: our writers’ favourite TV hate-watches

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Which shows are so bad they’re addictive? From You, to Made in Chelsea and the hideously self-unaware The Newsroom

It’s rare for a show with so few redeeming features to become a hit, and yet Netflix’s You has done just that, with tens of millions of viewers following the disturbing exploits of Penn Badgley’s holier-than-thou-drifter, and the beautiful female objects of his obsession. Joe Goldberg is a Nice Guy, so nice in fact that he owns a huge glass cage in which he traps anyone who stands in between him and his sociopathic whims. He worms his way into the life of his first victim, Beck, by stalking her on social media. It’s the kind of plot that could, in a more serious production, scare viewers into not diarising their movements on Instagram, but – told from Joe’s perspective – becomes something more akin to a Joker-esque incel manifesto.

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‘People want imperfection’: Hiam Abbass on Succession, Ramy and playing complex women

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She is enigmatic Marcia Roy in Succession, but as the Egyptian-American mother in the award-winning Ramy, she’s a hoot. The Palestinian actor examines her many-layered roles

You would be hard pressed to find two TV characters in 2021 with less in common than Marcia Roy and Maysa Hassan. The former is the enigmatic, sophisticated wife of billionaire patriarch Logan Roy in the HBO hit Succession. While the series is dominated by huge personalities, she is a mysterious presence – albeit one who is despised by Logan’s children. The latter, on the other hand, is an open book – the unfiltered, sometimes offensively so, Egyptian-American mother of the title character in the Golden Globe-winning comedy Ramy.

But they are played by the same actor, Hiam Abbass, whose ability to switch from calamity to calm speaks to a varied career across theatre, cinema and, latterly, award-winning television series. Though she has lived in Paris since the late 80s, the Palestinian actor was born in Nazareth, Israel, and started her career with the then-burgeoning Palestinian National Theatre, El-Hakawati. Though the company toured Europe, it was far from an easy existence back at home. “The Israeli authorities didn’t like all of the activities happening at our theatre,” explains Abbass, a warm presence who is fluent in English, Arabic, French and Hebrew. “They would come in and close it down. Part of my work there was dealing with how, politically, we could stay open. Travelling to Europe opened my eyes a little to the possibility of breathing some different air. It was hard to work all the time to justify your being.”

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It’s a Sin: ”There is such a raw truth to it”

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How well does the Russell T Davies drama capture the 1980s Aids crisis? Influential queer figures who lived through it and in its wake – including Owen Jones, Rev Richard Coles, Lisa Power and Marc Thompson – give their verdicts

A joyful yet devastating series centred on a group of friends whose lives are changed irrevocably by the HIV/Aids epidemic, It’s a Sin is not only the most talked-about TV show of 2021 so far, but also Channel 4’s most watched drama series in its history. Russell T Davies’s 80s-set series has started conversations around Britain about the realities, both political and personal, of living through the HIV/Aids crisis, led to an increase in people getting tested for HIV, and helped raise awareness about preventive medication (PrEP) and the effective treatment now available for people living with the virus.

To discuss these topics, we convened a roundtable discussion with influential queer figures who lived through the crisis, and those who have grown up in its wake. Taking part in the conversation are Lisa Power, a co-founder of LGBT charity Stonewall who also volunteered for Switchboard during the Aids crisis; the Rev Richard Coles, the vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire and former member of the pop group the Communards; Marc Thompson, an HIV activist, the director of the Love Tank CIC and the co-founder of PrEPster; Guardian columnist and author Owen Jones; Omari Douglas, who plays the character Roscoe in It’s a Sin; and Jason Okundaye, a writer and the co-founder of Black & Gay, back in the day, a digital archive honouring and remembering black queer life in Britain.

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From The Sopranos to Twin Peaks: the best TV isn’t timely – it’s prescient

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The popularity of classic shows in the past year is about more than nostalgia – what pulls us back in is their relevance to today

At least Covid struck during the age of “peak TV”. After all, were this not a time when the shows being piped into our living rooms were better, smarter, starrier, more plentiful and more readily available than ever before, what would we have done to stay on an even keel through a year in lockdown?

Pretty much what we did anyway, it turns out. Because the viewing trend of the past 12 months, which few saw coming, has been a clamour for the classics. At a time when there is more box-fresh prestige entertainment than you can shake a battered remote at, viewers on both sides of the Atlantic decided instead to reacquaint themselves with old friends: Rodney Trotter, Jerry Seinfeld and, overwhelmingly, Tony Soprano.

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Lupin’s Omar Sy: ‘We wanted to show what the French are capable of’

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The actor stars in Netflix’s biggest French-language hit as a gentleman thief. He and the director, Louis Leterrier, explain how the drama drew in 70 million fans worldwide

“We wanted to show what the French were capable of in terms of making a series, but frankly we didn’t expect it to do what it has.” Omar Sy, the star of the latest Netflix smash hit, Lupin, is speaking over the phone from Senegal. The line between London and Dakar isn’t great, but the charm that has helped his slick, charismatic character – a modern day gentleman thief – connect with audiences around the world is still evident.

Streaming services have been the dominant source of cultural output in the past year, so the chances are that you have at least heard of Lupin, even if you haven’t got round to bingeing Netflix’s biggest French language hit to date. Ranking in the Top 10 on the platform in multiple countries – climbing to No 2 in the UK and the US – as well as being projected to have reached 70 million households in the first month of streaming, Lupin is a family-friendly show – perhaps one of the elements that has given it an edge over the likes of Bridgerton and The Queen’s Gambit.

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How France’s Lupin became the surprise Netflix hit of the season

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The charming series combines Ocean’s Eleven’s slickness with the implausibility of National Treasure to become the first French series to crack the US top 10

The greatest trick by Lupin, a new French series on Netflix, is disguising substantiveness in plain sight. The show, created by the British showrunner George Kay and inspired by the beloved French character Arsène Lupin, packages over 115 years of inspiration (dating back to the character’s invention by writer Maurice Leblanc in 1905) in a slick, swift escape easily binged in a day. Its star, the French actor Omar Sy, towers over his scene partners, perpetually unreadable yet brimming with charisma; his character, Assane Diop, is a con man with a heart of gold able to turn his outsized presence into an uncatchable master of deception.

Related: Call My Agent: get au fait with the smash hit French comedy-drama

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Bridgerton author Julia Quinn: ‘I’ve been dinged by the accuracy police – but it’s fantasy!’

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Her ‘hot and crazy’ novels about feisty women bedding rakish aristocrats have become a Netflix sensation. The writer talks about literary snobs, colour-conscious casting and the curse of Jane Austen

“People look down on romance novels,” says Julia Quinn. “We’re the ugly stepchild of the publishing industry – even though romance novels make so much money for publishers that they’re able to take chances on poetry, literary fiction and other things that don’t really make money.”

This is why Quinn never dreamed that any of her novels – Regency romances in which smart, witty women fall for handsome titled men – would ever make the leap to TV. She was happy with her regular slot at the top of the bestseller lists, if a little irked at the way the genre is looked down on by more literary types. “I dream big, I do,” says Quinn, speaking from her home in Seattle. “But nobody had ever done it, nobody had ever shown any signs of wanting to. And not just my books, but the genre as a whole. If somebody wanted to do a period piece, they wanted to do Jane Austen again.”

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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Speaking with the Serpent: my encounters with serial killer Charles Sobhraj

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The notorious murderer who preyed on 70s backpackers is the subject of a new BBC drama. Our writer recalls his bizarre meetings with a charmer and psychopath

At the beginning of The Serpent, the new BBC drama series based on the exploits of a real-life serial killer, a title page declares: “In 1997 an American TV crew tracked Charles Sobhraj down to Paris where he was living as a free man.”

The ABC team were not the only ones back then to speak to Sobhraj, who was suspected of committing at least 12 murders. I too made the journey to Paris and managed to arrange an interview for the Observer with the Vietnamese-Indian Frenchman. He had just been released from jail in India, where he had spent 20 years on various charges (but not for any of the murders for which he was alleged to be responsible).

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