Bertaut1

Starts very strong but the narrative weakens as the show progresses Starting as a grim police procedural, the show takes a left turn in the third episode, before diving head-first into the supernatural in the sixth and seventh. And do these two tones mix well? Kind of. The early episodes are the strongest, and as the hokey horror elements start to take over, the foreboding portentousness of those beautifully constructed episodes gives way to Stephen King-isms. Relatable themes such as guilt and the paralysis of grief are dropped in favour of larger (and thus more abstract) issues such as the infectious nature of evil and the ability of ordinary people to band together in extraordinary circumstances (as I said, it's King-101). But for all that, I enjoyed the show. I hadn't read the novel, and so I was genuinely invested in finding out where all of everything led. And even though the journey (the early stages, in particular), proved more interesting than the destination, it was a journey that I don't regret taking. Cherokee City, Georgia. When the badly mutilated corpse of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in the woods, homicide detective Ralph Anderson (the always excellent Ben Mendelsohn) immediately launches an investigation. Within a few hours, it appears the murderer has been identified, with multiple witnesses reporting seeing local little league coach and school teacher Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) covered in blood near the scene of the crime. When physical evidence and surveillance footage further point to Terry's guilt, a bull-headed Ralph has Terry arrested in front of the whole town. As Terry's wife, Glory, (a suitably frazzled Julianne Nicholson) and his lawyer, Howie Solomon (Bill Camp; as good as he always is), scramble to understand what has happened, Terry maintains his innocence, saying he was at a teaching conference in another state on the day of the murder, a claim soon backed up by irrefutable evidence. But how can one person be in two places at once? Airing on HBO, and based on the 2018 novel by Stephen King, the show was adapted for TV by novelist Richard Price. Showrunners/executive producers include Price and Jason Bateman (who also co-stars and directs the first two episodes, establishing the Ozark-esque aesthetic template). Novelist Dennis Lehane also contributes scripts for two of the later episodes. If the show has a singular standout element (aside from the excellent ensemble cast), it's the aesthetic design. Bateman establishes a dark and gritty tone in the first two episodes, imbuing every shot with a foreboding sense of unease. Shadows abound; bright colours are muted, with greys and washed-out blues dominating; characters are often shown isolated in long shot, framed in doorways, or pushed into corners; depth of field is often extremely shallow; camera movements are methodical and slow; there's even a split-diopter used at one point. The show looks every inch an HBO prestige crime drama. There are also some nice directorial flourishes. For example, in the last episode (directed by Andrew Bernstein), as the good guys are moving through a cave, they pass a body of water and we see the villain's eyes non-diegetically reflected in the water, taking up almost all of the screen's real-estate. It's not subtle, but it looks good. Perhaps the most noticeable aesthetic element is the discordant score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, which helps the atmosphere, tone, and pacing immeasurably. Music cues are often just one deep note, held and elongated for up to two or three seconds. Oftentimes, entire scenes will be scored to these singular notes, giving whatever is on screen a sense of portentousness beyond the visual. For all its aesthetic gymnastics, however, the show does have problems. For one thing, it's too long; eight episodes would have been more than sufficient to tell this story. There's also the genre-mixing issue. What starts as a tough cop investigating a grisly murder morphs into a quirky paranormal sleuth chasing down an ancient evil, and as these two vie for space, neither genre feels fully developed. The early episodes are creepy and unnerving, but as the show goes on, the horror becomes broader and less effective. Another thing that bothered me was that the first solid transition into the supernatural is based on a coincidence so preposterous that I was convinced the show would return to it to offer an explanation (it does not). There's also the merry band of blue-collar salt-of-the-Earth types who band together to face something beyond any one of them, a trope that King has done to death. All in all though, I enjoyed The Outsider for the most part. It has significant problems, but it does a lot right. The aesthetics and acting help a hell of a lot, and although it's far from the best King adaptation (that would remain The Green Mile), it's a damn sight better than recent efforts such as the two It films and (shudder) The Dark Tower.

Starts very strong but the narrative weakens as the show progresses Starting as a grim police procedural, the show takes a left turn in the third episode, before diving head-first into the supernatural in the sixth and seventh. And do these two tones mix well? Kind of. The early episodes are the strongest, and as the hokey horror elements start to take over, the foreboding portentousness of those beautifully constructed episodes gives way to Stephen King-isms. Relatable themes such as guilt and the paralysis of grief are dropped in favour of larger (and thus more abstract) issues such as the infectious nature of evil and the ability of ordinary people to band together in extraordinary circumstances (as I said, it's King-101). But for all that, I enjoyed the show. I hadn't read the novel, and so I was genuinely invested in finding out where all of everything led. And even though the journey (the early stages, in particular), proved more interesting than the destination, it was a journey that I don't regret taking. Cherokee City, Georgia. When the badly mutilated corpse of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in the woods, homicide detective Ralph Anderson (the always excellent Ben Mendelsohn) immediately launches an investigation. Within a few hours, it appears the murderer has been identified, with multiple witnesses reporting seeing local little league coach and school teacher Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) covered in blood near the scene of the crime. When physical evidence and surveillance footage further point to Terry's guilt, a bull-headed Ralph has Terry arrested in front of the whole town. As Terry's wife, Glory, (a suitably frazzled Julianne Nicholson) and his lawyer, Howie Solomon (Bill Camp; as good as he always is), scramble to understand what has happened, Terry maintains his innocence, saying he was at a teaching conference in another state on the day of the murder, a claim soon backed up by irrefutable evidence. But how can one person be in two places at once? Airing on HBO, and based on the 2018 novel by Stephen King, the show was adapted for TV by novelist Richard Price. Showrunners/executive producers include Price and Jason Bateman (who also co-stars and directs the first two episodes, establishing the Ozark-esque aesthetic template). Novelist Dennis Lehane also contributes scripts for two of the later episodes. If the show has a singular standout element (aside from the excellent ensemble cast), it's the aesthetic design. Bateman establishes a dark and gritty tone in the first two episodes, imbuing every shot with a foreboding sense of unease. Shadows abound; bright colours are muted, with greys and washed-out blues dominating; characters are often shown isolated in long shot, framed in doorways, or pushed into corners; depth of field is often extremely shallow; camera movements are methodical and slow; there's even a split-diopter used at one point. The show looks every inch an HBO prestige crime drama. There are also some nice directorial flourishes. For example, in the last episode (directed by Andrew Bernstein), as the good guys are moving through a cave, they pass a body of water and we see the villain's eyes non-diegetically reflected in the water, taking up almost all of the screen's real-estate. It's not subtle, but it looks good. Perhaps the most noticeable aesthetic element is the discordant score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, which helps the atmosphere, tone, and pacing immeasurably. Music cues are often just one deep note, held and elongated for up to two or three seconds. Oftentimes, entire scenes will be scored to these singular notes, giving whatever is on screen a sense of portentousness beyond the visual. For all its aesthetic gymnastics, however, the show does have problems. For one thing, it's too long; eight episodes would have been more than sufficient to tell this story. There's also the genre-mixing issue. What starts as a tough cop investigating a grisly murder morphs into a quirky paranormal sleuth chasing down an ancient evil, and as these two vie for space, neither genre feels fully developed. The early episodes are creepy and unnerving, but as the show goes on, the horror becomes broader and less effective. Another thing that bothered me was that the first solid transition into the supernatural is based on a coincidence so preposterous that I was convinced the show would return to it to offer an explanation (it does not). There's also the merry band of blue-collar salt-of-the-Earth types who band together to face something beyond any one of them, a trope that King has done to death. All in all though, I enjoyed The Outsider for the most part. It has significant problems, but it does a lot right. The aesthetics and acting help a hell of a lot, and although it's far from the best King adaptation (that would remain The Green Mile), it's a damn sight better than recent efforts such as the two It films and (shudder) The Dark Tower.

I loved it, but this is the definition of "not for everyone" Created by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker, and directed by Refn, Too Old To Die Young is Refn sans restrictions. If you thought Only God Forgives was slow and plodding, all style and no substance, and pretentiously self-indulgent, then TOTDY is not for you. Running for 13 hours across the course of 10 episodes, Refn regards it as "a 13-hour movie" and insists that it is not a television show. Either way, I loved it. The aesthetic is exceptional, the quirks are pure surrealism, the humour is spot on, the violence (particularly the sexual violence) is sudden and barbaric, but never gratuitous or pointless, and the themes are fascinating. This isn't going to turn a single person into a Refn fan. Indeed, it will probably alienate some of his more casual fans, as it tests the limits of what even the most artistically open-minded viewer will watch on their television screens. That said, if you're on-board, you're in for an unforgettable ride. Martin Jones (Miles Teller) and his partner Larry (Lance Gross) are two uniformed LA cops on patrol. After sexually harassing and extorting a young woman because he can, Larry is taking a selfie for his mistress, when Jesus Rojas (an exceptional Augusto Aguilera) shoots him in the back of the head. And from that opening scene springs the story, which introduces us to local crime boss Damian (Babs Olusanmokun), Martin's 18-year-old girlfriend Janey (Nell Tiger Free), her billionaire father Theo (a completely insane William Baldwin), former FBI agent Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), his associate Diana (Jena Malone), and Yaritza (a stunning, scene-stealing Cristina Rodlo), a young woman with a penchant for sexual domination who claims to be the High Priestess of Death. The most obvious aesthetic elements of the show are the cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego García and the editing by Matthew Newman. The first episode, and several of the later episodes, are bathed in neon, with vibrant reds, purples, oranges, blues, and greens saturating the screen. The second episode then is set in Mexico and is a complete contrast to the first, almost over-exposed, with whites popping and bleeding into any nearby blacks. Additionally, every shot feels deliberate, meticulously composed, important, like every element of the composition is saying something of significance; for example, whether the camera moves or not offers a commentary on the content of the scene. And scenes go on for a loooooong time; most run at least two beats beyond where the natural end would seem to be, with long silences and languidly-paced, emotionlessly delivered dialogue. This all creates a sense of extreme awkwardness that makes the viewer restless and uncomfortable, which, of course, is precisely the point. This lethargic sense is helped immensely by the editing, which is almost imperceptible. It feels like the show was edited before it was shot; every cut feels measured, happening where it does because that's the only place it could happen. I'd be shocked to learn that a lot of coverage was shot to be assembled in the editing room later; it's too tight for that. Coupled with this, the sound design by Paul Hackner is unique. For interiors, there is often no ambient room noise and because there are such long pauses in the dialogue, the silence is oppressive. It has the effect of suggesting the characters aren't in the room, making it feel almost ethereal and hypnotic. And what is all of this in service of? What is Refn saying? The main theme is very straightforward – toxic masculinity and the commodification of the female, in particular the sexual commodification. TOTDY is a show wherein many of the female characters are looked upon by men as objects to be used rather than as people with their own agency. In one particular scene, a porn director washes down a young woman with a hose, the way one might wash down a horse after a race. When the show begins, it seems to commit the same sin, as none of the females have much in the way of vibrancy, and all are defined based upon their relationships with men. It's only as the characters of Diana, Janey, and Yaritza assume centre stage that we realise this isn't a show about men. Paedophiles, racists, misogynists, murderers, people traffickers, a father who unashamedly hints at incest – it's quite a collective of male bottom feeders to pitch against the female characters. All in all, I loved the show. But there's no denying that the very things which some people embrace and celebrate, will drive others up the wall. And certainly, it's not hard to imagine a hell of a lot of people watching for 20 minutes before hastily changing the channel and deeming the whole enterprise the "worst show ever." Amazon has allowed Refn to indulge in everything that his detractors criticise and his fans laud, and the result is either a travesty or masterpiece, depending on your perspective.

I loved it, but this is the definition of "not for everyone" Created by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker, and directed by Refn, Too Old To Die Young is Refn sans restrictions. If you thought Only God Forgives was slow and plodding, all style and no substance, and pretentiously self-indulgent, then TOTDY is not for you. Running for 13 hours across the course of 10 episodes, Refn regards it as "a 13-hour movie" and insists that it is not a television show. Either way, I loved it. The aesthetic is exceptional, the quirks are pure surrealism, the humour is spot on, the violence (particularly the sexual violence) is sudden and barbaric, but never gratuitous or pointless, and the themes are fascinating. This isn't going to turn a single person into a Refn fan. Indeed, it will probably alienate some of his more casual fans, as it tests the limits of what even the most artistically open-minded viewer will watch on their television screens. That said, if you're on-board, you're in for an unforgettable ride. Martin Jones (Miles Teller) and his partner Larry (Lance Gross) are two uniformed LA cops on patrol. After sexually harassing and extorting a young woman because he can, Larry is taking a selfie for his mistress, when Jesus Rojas (an exceptional Augusto Aguilera) shoots him in the back of the head. And from that opening scene springs the story, which introduces us to local crime boss Damian (Babs Olusanmokun), Martin's 18-year-old girlfriend Janey (Nell Tiger Free), her billionaire father Theo (a completely insane William Baldwin), former FBI agent Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), his associate Diana (Jena Malone), and Yaritza (a stunning, scene-stealing Cristina Rodlo), a young woman with a penchant for sexual domination who claims to be the High Priestess of Death. The most obvious aesthetic elements of the show are the cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego García and the editing by Matthew Newman. The first episode, and several of the later episodes, are bathed in neon, with vibrant reds, purples, oranges, blues, and greens saturating the screen. The second episode then is set in Mexico and is a complete contrast to the first, almost over-exposed, with whites popping and bleeding into any nearby blacks. Additionally, every shot feels deliberate, meticulously composed, important, like every element of the composition is saying something of significance; for example, whether the camera moves or not offers a commentary on the content of the scene. And scenes go on for a loooooong time; most run at least two beats beyond where the natural end would seem to be, with long silences and languidly-paced, emotionlessly delivered dialogue. This all creates a sense of extreme awkwardness that makes the viewer restless and uncomfortable, which, of course, is precisely the point. This lethargic sense is helped immensely by the editing, which is almost imperceptible. It feels like the show was edited before it was shot; every cut feels measured, happening where it does because that's the only place it could happen. I'd be shocked to learn that a lot of coverage was shot to be assembled in the editing room later; it's too tight for that. Coupled with this, the sound design by Paul Hackner is unique. For interiors, there is often no ambient room noise and because there are such long pauses in the dialogue, the silence is oppressive. It has the effect of suggesting the characters aren't in the room, making it feel almost ethereal and hypnotic. And what is all of this in service of? What is Refn saying? The main theme is very straightforward – toxic masculinity and the commodification of the female, in particular the sexual commodification. TOTDY is a show wherein many of the female characters are looked upon by men as objects to be used rather than as people with their own agency. In one particular scene, a porn director washes down a young woman with a hose, the way one might wash down a horse after a race. When the show begins, it seems to commit the same sin, as none of the females have much in the way of vibrancy, and all are defined based upon their relationships with men. It's only as the characters of Diana, Janey, and Yaritza assume centre stage that we realise this isn't a show about men. Paedophiles, racists, misogynists, murderers, people traffickers, a father who unashamedly hints at incest – it's quite a collective of male bottom feeders to pitch against the female characters. All in all, I loved the show. But there's no denying that the very things which some people embrace and celebrate, will drive others up the wall. And certainly, it's not hard to imagine a hell of a lot of people watching for 20 minutes before hastily changing the channel and deeming the whole enterprise the "worst show ever." Amazon has allowed Refn to indulge in everything that his detractors criticise and his fans laud, and the result is either a travesty or masterpiece, depending on your perspective.

Terrifying and sobering – as exceptional a piece of television narrative as you're ever likely to see Created, written, and executive produced by Craig Mazin, Chernobyl is directed by Johan Renck as part-horror movie, part-cautionary tale, and part-political treatise. It presents a terrifying, nightmare vision of how bad things can get when hard scientific facts are made subservient to political agendas, and governments strive to undermine not only scientific expertise but the very nature of truth itself (the Soviet Union was a big fan of "alternative facts" long before the GOP). Chernobyl begins and ends by asking the viewer to ponder the cost of cumulative nation-wide lies. However, it's just as interested in celebrating the heroes as it is assigning blame. April 26, 1986, 1:23am; near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, Reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant explodes, sending out masses of radioactive material. As the Central Committee tries to keep a lid on things, a commission is assembled to investigate the disaster. The commission's head is Boris Shcherbina (a career-best performance from Stellan Skarsgård), Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a devout party-man. The commission's scientific expert is Valery Legasov (a mesmerising Jared Harris), deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, who immediately realises that the accident is much more serious than the government are saying. Thematically, Chernobyl is not subtle. The opening line is "What is the cost of lies?", and this issue is front and centre for the entire five episodes. The show presents the Soviet Union as a place where lying and statecraft were one and the same, and in so doing, it illustrates what can happen when institutions of government put political ideology above objective facts, when egotistical politicians disregard everything that experts are telling them in favour of their own ill-informed theories (sound familiar?). The first episode in particular gives us some fine illustrations of a system obsessed with committees, bureaucracy, and secrecy, all built upon an unnecessarily complicated and rigid hierarchy. However, if there's an overriding mindset amongst the Soviet people, it's a sense of civic duty, borne **** belief in socialism and total trust in the Central Committee. Not all characters share this trust, but enough of them do to make it a trope. And for the most part, the show presents this sense of duty to the State as deeply honourable, worthy **** deal of respect. How the State elicits, manipulates and exploits these feelings is being criticised, not the feelings themselves – a vital distinction. Aesthetically, Chernobyl opens with the explosion, throwing the audience into the chaos and confusion. However, rather than placing us in the control room at the moment of the explosion, we see it through the closed window of a character who doesn't even notice it happening until the shockwave hits a couple of seconds later. It's a wholly unexpected way to begin, presenting a massive real-life disaster not from the perspective of spectacle, but from a subjective human perspective. This immediately sets up the show's interest in people. The helicopter crash seen in the trailer is shot the same way - focusing on human reactions to the crash rather than the crash itself. As for the cinematography generally, Jakob Ihre shoots everything unfussily, with no real visual gymnastics. However, there are still moments of stark beauty and great artistry. The second episode ends with a dialogueless scene that Michael Mann would be proud of and also features perhaps the single most extraordinary shot in the series – a high elevation shot of Pripyat looking down at the residents being evacuated onto a fleet of buses. In the background, the power plant can be seen still burning, whilst the people and the plant are bifurcated by the flats in which they used to live. This is as good an example of thematic photography as you're likely to find. As for problems, well, the characters are a little too black and white – the 'good' characters are practically saintly, and the 'bad' characters are almost pure evil. And there's not a lot of ground in between. At its core, the show is most interested in what happens when governments stop listening to science, when every smart person in the room is telling a leader one thing, and he or she decides to ignore it based on nothing other than ideology or ego (and yes, Trump's attitude to the ever-worsening global climate crisis is very much the target). An exceptional piece of television in pretty much every way, Chernobyl is as terrifying as it is compelling, as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening. And all of this is not even to mention the dogs. I'm just not ready to talk about the dogs.

Terrifying and sobering – as exceptional a piece of television narrative as you're ever likely to see Created, written, and executive produced by Craig Mazin, Chernobyl is directed by Johan Renck as part-horror movie, part-cautionary tale, and part-political treatise. It presents a terrifying, nightmare vision of how bad things can get when hard scientific facts are made subservient to political agendas, and governments strive to undermine not only scientific expertise but the very nature of truth itself (the Soviet Union was a big fan of "alternative facts" long before the GOP). Chernobyl begins and ends by asking the viewer to ponder the cost of cumulative nation-wide lies. However, it's just as interested in celebrating the heroes as it is assigning blame. April 26, 1986, 1:23am; near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR, Reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant explodes, sending out masses of radioactive material. As the Central Committee tries to keep a lid on things, a commission is assembled to investigate the disaster. The commission's head is Boris Shcherbina (a career-best performance from Stellan Skarsgård), Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a devout party-man. The commission's scientific expert is Valery Legasov (a mesmerising Jared Harris), deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, who immediately realises that the accident is much more serious than the government are saying. Thematically, Chernobyl is not subtle. The opening line is "What is the cost of lies?", and this issue is front and centre for the entire five episodes. The show presents the Soviet Union as a place where lying and statecraft were one and the same, and in so doing, it illustrates what can happen when institutions of government put political ideology above objective facts, when egotistical politicians disregard everything that experts are telling them in favour of their own ill-informed theories (sound familiar?). The first episode in particular gives us some fine illustrations of a system obsessed with committees, bureaucracy, and secrecy, all built upon an unnecessarily complicated and rigid hierarchy. However, if there's an overriding mindset amongst the Soviet people, it's a sense of civic duty, borne **** belief in socialism and total trust in the Central Committee. Not all characters share this trust, but enough of them do to make it a trope. And for the most part, the show presents this sense of duty to the State as deeply honourable, worthy **** deal of respect. How the State elicits, manipulates and exploits these feelings is being criticised, not the feelings themselves – a vital distinction. Aesthetically, Chernobyl opens with the explosion, throwing the audience into the chaos and confusion. However, rather than placing us in the control room at the moment of the explosion, we see it through the closed window of a character who doesn't even notice it happening until the shockwave hits a couple of seconds later. It's a wholly unexpected way to begin, presenting a massive real-life disaster not from the perspective of spectacle, but from a subjective human perspective. This immediately sets up the show's interest in people. The helicopter crash seen in the trailer is shot the same way - focusing on human reactions to the crash rather than the crash itself. As for the cinematography generally, Jakob Ihre shoots everything unfussily, with no real visual gymnastics. However, there are still moments of stark beauty and great artistry. The second episode ends with a dialogueless scene that Michael Mann would be proud of and also features perhaps the single most extraordinary shot in the series – a high elevation shot of Pripyat looking down at the residents being evacuated onto a fleet of buses. In the background, the power plant can be seen still burning, whilst the people and the plant are bifurcated by the flats in which they used to live. This is as good an example of thematic photography as you're likely to find. As for problems, well, the characters are a little too black and white – the 'good' characters are practically saintly, and the 'bad' characters are almost pure evil. And there's not a lot of ground in between. At its core, the show is most interested in what happens when governments stop listening to science, when every smart person in the room is telling a leader one thing, and he or she decides to ignore it based on nothing other than ideology or ego (and yes, Trump's attitude to the ever-worsening global climate crisis is very much the target). An exceptional piece of television in pretty much every way, Chernobyl is as terrifying as it is compelling, as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening. And all of this is not even to mention the dogs. I'm just not ready to talk about the dogs.

Thoughts on Season Three Season one of True Detective was ground-breaking, one of the finest seasons of TV ever made. Season two was awful. Season three? Well…of all the shows I've ever seen, season three of True Detective is one of them. Unquestionably, there's a lot to praise – the aesthetics, the sense of place, the acting. And there are some interesting themes – racial tension, journalistic ethics, marriage, fatherhood, the shadow of Vietnam, old age. But this being creator/writer/showrunner Nic Pizzolatto unfettered, there's a lot to criticise too – the glacial pace, the under-written female roles, the cod-philosophy, the (toxic) machismo. Pizzolatto (a novelist by trade) seems to need a director with a keen enough vision to mask the fact that his scripts are actually pretty by-the-numbers. Season one had Cary Joji **** who gave us a very thin story by way of such unforgettable imagery that it made everything feel deeper than it really was. Season three has such a vision for the first two episodes, which were directed by Jeremy Saulnier. After that, directorial duties were split between Pizzolatto himself and journeyman TV director Daniel Sackheim. Season three without Saulnier (or ****) isn't as bad as season two, but it's still very weak. The story is split over three time periods. In 1980, in the fictional town of West Finger, Arkansas, two children disappear. The case lands on the desk of Wayne Hays (an insanely good Mahershala Ali) and his partner Roland West (a superb Stephen Dorff). Shortly thereafter, Wayne forms a bond with the kids' English teacher, Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo), who has her own reasons for pursuing the case. Ten years later, in 1990, Hays (now married to Amelia and with two children) is working a dead-end desk job and West is a lieutenant. When unexpected evidence comes to light, the case is reopened. And then, in 2015, Hays, now a widower suffering from memory loss, begins recording an interview for a true-crime TV show doing an episode about the case. Especially laudable is how the show handles the time jumps, employing a variety of methods that collapse the three different periods into one another. A question asked of Hays apparently in 1990 is actually being asked in 2015, with the sound bridging the picture edit; a streetlight going out in 1980 cuts to a key-light going out in Hays's 2015 interview; a shot of Hays looking through a window in 1980, shows his 2015 reflection; a single-shot scene in a car depicts the characters repeatedly changing from 1990 to 2015 every time their face is off-screen. It's all really well done. Also laudable is the old-age make-up by Michael Marino, which is some of the best I've ever seen, and is complemented by an exceptional performance from Ali. He plays Hays differently in each of the three timelines – in 1980, he's driven, confidant, imposing; in 1990, a sense of bitterness and indignation has crept in; in 2015, he's become a vulnerable and confused old man with just a hint of his past acerbity. Elsewhere, Dorff is exceptional throughout, and Scoot McNairy as the kids' father is heartbreaking in a somewhat thankless role. So, why is season three a dud? Well, for a few reasons. It moves at an agonisingly slow pace, and without the visual gymnastics of someone like **** or Saulnier, the story can't sustain itself, and the characters aren't any more interesting than the plot. There's certainly no Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) or Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). Hays is brilliantly played, but he's as dull as dish-water, and the 1990-set problems between himself and Amelia, which come to take up an increasing amount of screen-time, are so uninteresting, they're difficult to watch. And then there's the finale. Okay, the finale of season one was weak. It was when we saw that at the season's core was nothing but a serial killer paedophile, and the mythology (the Yellow King, black stars, Carcosa) all boiled down to little. It didn't ruin the season, but it was underwhelming. Season three's finale is so badly structured that I genuinely do not understand how it made it to screen - about three-quarters of the way through, with most of the season's questions still open, a character literally sits down and explains everything. To hell with the cardinal rule of writing for film or TV ("show, don't tell"); here we have a finale with a 10-minute exposition-dump right at its heart, which literally tells without showing. Despite disliking two of the three seasons of True Detective, I'm still a fan (season one was that good). But that magic had more to do with the director than the writer. Much like season one, the mystery at the heart of season three was never as complicated nor as portent as it initially seemed, but unlike season one, season three doesn't give us much else to latch onto. The story Pizzolatto is telling and the characters within are too weak to support eight hours of narrative.

A dark and well-made show about the effects of psychological trauma, but the bifurcated narrative is a significant mistake Airing on BBC One in the UK and Ireland and Starz in North America, Dublin Murders is an eight-part series that adapts the first two novels in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series – In the Woods (2007) and The Likeness (2008). And herein lies the show's biggest problem. French's series is pseudo-anthological in design; each novel has a different protagonist, and although there are common characters across all of the stories, each plot is wholly self-contained. In writing Dublin Murders, Sarah Phelps presents the plots of the first two novels as happening concurrently. This doesn't even remotely work, with the events of The Likeness never feeling like anything other than a half-baked B-plot that serves only to detract from the far superior material in the A-plot. Nevertheless, there is much to laud here; the acting, the cinematography, production design, and art direction, the editing and directing, and, when focusing on the first novel, much of Phelps' writing. The show takes place in 2006 and begins with the discovery of the body of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin (Amy Macken) in the woods around Knocknaree, a (fictional) housing estate in Dublin's suburbs. Detectives Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) and Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) of the (fictional) Dublin Murder Squad are assigned to the case, which has attracted a great deal of attention, as twenty-two years earlier three young children disappeared in the same woods. One of those children was found a few hours after they disappeared, and although he was uninjured, his shirt was ripped as if by claws, and his shoes were filled with someone else's blood. He swears, however, that he has no memory of what happened in the woods. That child, Adam, left Ireland with his parents and as far as anyone knows, never returned. However, Rob is in fact adult Adam, having secretly returned to Ireland with a new identity, a fact known only to Cassie, and he plans to use the Devlin investigation as a means to delve into the 1985 case. Meanwhile, Cassie is approached by her old boss, senior investigator Frank Mackey (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), with an intriguing undercover operation. Aesthetically, the show has a lot going for it. To a certain extent, it mixes genres – there's the obvious whodunnit, but there's also a pseudo-Chinatown motif of greed, conspiracy, and corruption, and a vaguely supernatural, otherworldly undercurrent, not unlike Twin Peaks. In terms of narrative structure, although the 2006-set events are presented chronologically, the show makes ample use of flashbacks, which jump around quite a bit in the timeline. That this never becomes arbitrary is a testament to the editing, which always ensures to establish the link between the show's present and the moments to which the characters are flashing back. The cinematography is also worth mentioning, working hand-in-hand with the production design to suggest that things just aren't quite right in Knocknaree in general, and the Devlin home in specific. The acting too is impressive. Scott and Greene have tremendous chemistry, which is pivotal, and although both are initially presented as likeable, if damaged, individuals, as the show goes on, both actors allow us to see a much darker side to their personas, with each turning on the people closest to them in a particularly vicious manner. Thematically, much like In the Woods, the show isn't so much focused on the Devlin murder as it is the nature of lingering trauma. Virtually every character is damaged in some way, but none more so than Rob, who, to a certain extent, never really made it out of the woods in 1985. The show begins with him asking Cassie, "what if the killed are the lucky ones?" And this is a central theme throughout – what if it's those who are murdered who could be considered free, and those who survive that are forever trapped within their trauma? All of which brings us to the show's fatal flaw. Phelps is unable to mould the two plots to coalesce properly, with the characters in Cassie's case never being developed. We're never allowed to get to know these people, as the whole thing never feels like anything other than an afterthought. Splitting the show like this does neither plot any favours – in the novels, each case works by immersing us in the interiority of the protagonist, as the plot unfolds in a manner coloured by that character's subjectivity. Continually cutting away from one plot to show us the other completely breaks that immersion. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the show for the most part. It's well-acted, looks great, and in relation to the murder case, is very well written. A shorter run focusing on just that case would have been infinitely preferable, but that's not what we got. It's worth checking out, but be prepared to be frustrated once the undercover operation starts taking up so much time.

A dark and well-made show about the effects of psychological trauma, but the bifurcated narrative is a significant mistake Airing on BBC One in the UK and Ireland and Starz in North America, Dublin Murders is an eight-part series that adapts the first two novels in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series – In the Woods (2007) and The Likeness (2008). And herein lies the show's biggest problem. French's series is pseudo-anthological in design; each novel has a different protagonist, and although there are common characters across all of the stories, each plot is wholly self-contained. In writing Dublin Murders, Sarah Phelps presents the plots of the first two novels as happening concurrently. This doesn't even remotely work, with the events of The Likeness never feeling like anything other than a half-baked B-plot that serves only to detract from the far superior material in the A-plot. Nevertheless, there is much to laud here; the acting, the cinematography, production design, and art direction, the editing and directing, and, when focusing on the first novel, much of Phelps' writing. The show takes place in 2006 and begins with the discovery of the body of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin (Amy Macken) in the woods around Knocknaree, a (fictional) housing estate in Dublin's suburbs. Detectives Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) and Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) of the (fictional) Dublin Murder Squad are assigned to the case, which has attracted a great deal of attention, as twenty-two years earlier three young children disappeared in the same woods. One of those children was found a few hours after they disappeared, and although he was uninjured, his shirt was ripped as if by claws, and his shoes were filled with someone else's blood. He swears, however, that he has no memory of what happened in the woods. That child, Adam, left Ireland with his parents and as far as anyone knows, never returned. However, Rob is in fact adult Adam, having secretly returned to Ireland with a new identity, a fact known only to Cassie, and he plans to use the Devlin investigation as a means to delve into the 1985 case. Meanwhile, Cassie is approached by her old boss, senior investigator Frank Mackey (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), with an intriguing undercover operation. Aesthetically, the show has a lot going for it. To a certain extent, it mixes genres – there's the obvious whodunnit, but there's also a pseudo-Chinatown motif of greed, conspiracy, and corruption, and a vaguely supernatural, otherworldly undercurrent, not unlike Twin Peaks. In terms of narrative structure, although the 2006-set events are presented chronologically, the show makes ample use of flashbacks, which jump around quite a bit in the timeline. That this never becomes arbitrary is a testament to the editing, which always ensures to establish the link between the show's present and the moments to which the characters are flashing back. The cinematography is also worth mentioning, working hand-in-hand with the production design to suggest that things just aren't quite right in Knocknaree in general, and the Devlin home in specific. The acting too is impressive. Scott and Greene have tremendous chemistry, which is pivotal, and although both are initially presented as likeable, if damaged, individuals, as the show goes on, both actors allow us to see a much darker side to their personas, with each turning on the people closest to them in a particularly vicious manner. Thematically, much like In the Woods, the show isn't so much focused on the Devlin murder as it is the nature of lingering trauma. Virtually every character is damaged in some way, but none more so than Rob, who, to a certain extent, never really made it out of the woods in 1985. The show begins with him asking Cassie, "what if the killed are the lucky ones?" And this is a central theme throughout – what if it's those who are murdered who could be considered free, and those who survive that are forever trapped within their trauma? All of which brings us to the show's fatal flaw. Phelps is unable to mould the two plots to coalesce properly, with the characters in Cassie's case never being developed. We're never allowed to get to know these people, as the whole thing never feels like anything other than an afterthought. Splitting the show like this does neither plot any favours – in the novels, each case works by immersing us in the interiority of the protagonist, as the plot unfolds in a manner coloured by that character's subjectivity. Continually cutting away from one plot to show us the other completely breaks that immersion. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the show for the most part. It's well-acted, looks great, and in relation to the murder case, is very well written. A shorter run focusing on just that case would have been infinitely preferable, but that's not what we got. It's worth checking out, but be prepared to be frustrated once the undercover operation starts taking up so much time.

A sarcastic posthumanist Dracula won't be to everyone's taste, but I thoroughly enjoyed this unique take on the Count Adapted from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and running a hefty 270 minutes (divided into three episodes of 90 minutes each), this series seeks to capture the tone of the novel, if not necessarily the plot. There are some problems, and fans of the novel have taken especial (and not entirely unjustified) umbrage with the unexpected narrative shift in the last episode, but all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this version. Hungry, 1897; Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), an English lawyer sent to Transylvania some months prior, is physically deformed and mentally fragile, and is staying at a small convent. Having written an account of his experiences, Harker is interviewed by the acerbic Sister Agatha (a superb Dolly Wells), who is hoping he can fill in some of the details he left absent from his document. And so he tells how he came to Transylvania to meet the elderly Count Dracula (an exceptional Claes Bang), and of the subsequent horrors he experienced. Whereas the novel begins just before Harker arrives at Castle Dracula, the show begins with him already in a nunnery in Hungry, having fled the castle, and the novel's multi-perspective epistolary narrative is replaced with a more basic single-character flashback-style narration. Opening this way is a wise move, as it alerts the audience that this isn't a 1:1 adaptation. Each episode looks and feels substantially different from the other two; the first is a basic gothic horror full of deep shadows, huge towers, labyrinthine interiors, and ominous opulence; the second is a ship-based murder-mystery (except, of course, we all know who the killer); and the third is a gaudy, postmodernist-infused examination of youthful vapidity, corporate greed, and the all-conquering power of superficiality. Arwen Jones's production design across all three episodes is also stunning; from the twisting staircases and dead-end tunnels of Castle Dracula to the weather-beaten Demeter (the doomed ship in the second episode) to Dracula's residence in the third episode, everything on screen seems completely real and lived in. And there are also some extraordinary visual moments here. A close-up of a fly crawling on an eyeball, for example, which then crawls behind the eyeball is particularly disturbing, as is a scene where Dracula literally climbs out of a wolf. The exterior shots of Castle Dracula are also amazing, and why wouldn't they be as the show uses the incredible Orava Castle in Slovakia, which was also used for Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). The acting is also terrific, particularly Bang as the sarcastic Count and Wells as perhaps the most irreverent nun ever committed to screen. Much of the strength of their performances comes in how well they handle the dry humour. So, for example, when the convent is surrounded by bats, and Agatha is asked "why would the forces of darkness wish to attack a convent", she replies (completely deadpan), "perhaps they're sensitive to criticism." Later, explaining to Harker how he has had artists paint the sun for him, he then says, "And Mozart wrote such a pretty little tune", before mumbling to himself, "I really should have spared him". The nonchalant way Bang delivers the line is hilarious. As the show goes on, Bang gets to show more of his range, bringing out not just Dracula's confidence and sarcasm, but so too his pride, frustration, boredom, and fears, culminating in an exceptional final scene, with Bang doing some wonderful silent acting. Thematically, the show deconstructs much traditional vampire lore, particularly the power of crucifixes; why would Dracula fear the cross when he doesn't believe in God? Along the same lines, his immortality is examined in light of the boredom that it must entail. Similar deconstruction of his need for blood sees it presented more like an addiction than a necessity. As for problems, many viewers despised the last episode, and I can see why (although I loved it), as it takes things in a new, unexpected direction that asks more than a little leap of faith from the audience. Certainly, if the first two episodes form a broadly coherent unit, the third disrupts everything, and is thematically, aesthetically, and tonally divorced from its predecessors. Some of the humour in this episode also pushes things a little too far. I'm also not sure the show needed to be as long as it is; three 60 minute episodes probably would have sufficed. That aside though, I loved this adaptation, which captures much of the tonal qualities of the original very well. It deviates wildly from the book, but featuring a suitably posthumanist Dracula for our jaded times, Gatiss and Moffat may not have pleased traditionalists, but this is a fine attempt to bring Dracula into the 21st century without ever losing sight of his origins and raison d'être.

A sarcastic posthumanist Dracula won't be to everyone's taste, but I thoroughly enjoyed this unique take on the Count Adapted from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, and running a hefty 270 minutes (divided into three episodes of 90 minutes each), this series seeks to capture the tone of the novel, if not necessarily the plot. There are some problems, and fans of the novel have taken especial (and not entirely unjustified) umbrage with the unexpected narrative shift in the last episode, but all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this version. Hungry, 1897; Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), an English lawyer sent to Transylvania some months prior, is physically deformed and mentally fragile, and is staying at a small convent. Having written an account of his experiences, Harker is interviewed by the acerbic Sister Agatha (a superb Dolly Wells), who is hoping he can fill in some of the details he left absent from his document. And so he tells how he came to Transylvania to meet the elderly Count Dracula (an exceptional Claes Bang), and of the subsequent horrors he experienced. Whereas the novel begins just before Harker arrives at Castle Dracula, the show begins with him already in a nunnery in Hungry, having fled the castle, and the novel's multi-perspective epistolary narrative is replaced with a more basic single-character flashback-style narration. Opening this way is a wise move, as it alerts the audience that this isn't a 1:1 adaptation. Each episode looks and feels substantially different from the other two; the first is a basic gothic horror full of deep shadows, huge towers, labyrinthine interiors, and ominous opulence; the second is a ship-based murder-mystery (except, of course, we all know who the killer); and the third is a gaudy, postmodernist-infused examination of youthful vapidity, corporate greed, and the all-conquering power of superficiality. Arwen Jones's production design across all three episodes is also stunning; from the twisting staircases and dead-end tunnels of Castle Dracula to the weather-beaten Demeter (the doomed ship in the second episode) to Dracula's residence in the third episode, everything on screen seems completely real and lived in. And there are also some extraordinary visual moments here. A close-up of a fly crawling on an eyeball, for example, which then crawls behind the eyeball is particularly disturbing, as is a scene where Dracula literally climbs out of a wolf. The exterior shots of Castle Dracula are also amazing, and why wouldn't they be as the show uses the incredible Orava Castle in Slovakia, which was also used for Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922). The acting is also terrific, particularly Bang as the sarcastic Count and Wells as perhaps the most irreverent nun ever committed to screen. Much of the strength of their performances comes in how well they handle the dry humour. So, for example, when the convent is surrounded by bats, and Agatha is asked "why would the forces of darkness wish to attack a convent", she replies (completely deadpan), "perhaps they're sensitive to criticism." Later, explaining to Harker how he has had artists paint the sun for him, he then says, "And Mozart wrote such a pretty little tune", before mumbling to himself, "I really should have spared him". The nonchalant way Bang delivers the line is hilarious. As the show goes on, Bang gets to show more of his range, bringing out not just Dracula's confidence and sarcasm, but so too his pride, frustration, boredom, and fears, culminating in an exceptional final scene, with Bang doing some wonderful silent acting. Thematically, the show deconstructs much traditional vampire lore, particularly the power of crucifixes; why would Dracula fear the cross when he doesn't believe in God? Along the same lines, his immortality is examined in light of the boredom that it must entail. Similar deconstruction of his need for blood sees it presented more like an addiction than a necessity. As for problems, many viewers despised the last episode, and I can see why (although I loved it), as it takes things in a new, unexpected direction that asks more than a little leap of faith from the audience. Certainly, if the first two episodes form a broadly coherent unit, the third disrupts everything, and is thematically, aesthetically, and tonally divorced from its predecessors. Some of the humour in this episode also pushes things a little too far. I'm also not sure the show needed to be as long as it is; three 60 minute episodes probably would have sufficed. That aside though, I loved this adaptation, which captures much of the tonal qualities of the original very well. It deviates wildly from the book, but featuring a suitably posthumanist Dracula for our jaded times, Gatiss and Moffat may not have pleased traditionalists, but this is a fine attempt to bring Dracula into the 21st century without ever losing sight of his origins and raison d'être.

A darkly magical realist retelling that isn't for kids Written by Steven Knight and directed by Nick Murphy, this latest adaptation of Charles ****' 1843 novella eschews the sweetness of previous adaptations and deconstructs the thematic foundations of the novella itself. Fans of the original have taken issue with some of the changes (such as the reformulation of Scrooge from misanthrope to villain, the depiction of child sexual abuse, and the joyless nature of the Cratchit family), and certainly, some of these complaints are justified. On the other hand, the attempt to ground the whimsical nature of the original in something more akin to psychological realism is, for the most part, very well-handled. But the last 30 seconds are VERY ill-advised. The first thing that jumped out at me was the aesthetic, particularly Si Bell's cinematography, which avoids primary colours as much as possible, instead casting the world in blacks, greys, browns, and off-whites. Interiors punctuate these shadows with the teal and orange glow of the fireplaces, and overall the show's palette is extremely muted, as it should be. In this sense, the opening scene, featuring an ominous raven and a child urinating on Marley's grave, tells us just how unique the visual template is. The most aesthetically impressive sequence comes in the last episode; as Scrooge stands in his office, he looks up and the ceiling has become a layer of ice. Then someone falls through the ice and seems to float in the air – we're actually underneath the ice layer, and the person who has fallen through is drowning. It's a haunting image. There's also a lovely shot in the second episode – as Scrooge relives a moment from his childhood, we see his father (Johnny Harris) threaten to beat him as he cowers on a bed. However, although it is the adult Scrooge we can see, the shadow he casts is that of a child. Thematically, the show covers some of the same ground as the novella. For example, Scrooge brilliantly deconstructs the concept of gift-giving and then goes on to pick apart the very notion of Christmas cheer, in a speech that represents some of Knight's tightest writing; "How many Merry Christmases are meant and how many are lies? To pretend on one day of the year that the human beast is not the human beast?" In a subsequent scene, he relives the origins of this philosophy, as his father tells him, "every man, every woman; they're all beasts who care only for themselves." Where this adaptation breaks from the novella is in the depiction of Scrooge himself. Usually, a curmudgeonly old misanthrope, here, he has been refashioned as an outright villain. A manipulative asset stripper, he is complicit in the deaths of numerous factory workers and miners, a man who goes out of his way to be nasty to people, and whose treatment of Cratchit is almost fetishistically perverse. And that isn't even to mention his abuse of the power his wealth affords him, using it to compel people to demean themselves for his curiosity. ****' Scrooge is not an irredeemable character, but the Scrooge of the show is, which necessitates that the joyful catharsis found in **** be reformulated. And the absence of such catharsis is precisely the point; this Scrooge understands that redemption won't do anything to erase his past deeds, which is a kind of psychological verisimilitude not usually found in this tale. Depicting Scrooge as worse than usual allows Knight to build organically to a more downbeat, but so too more realistic ending that's far more in tune with our own cultural milieu than the optimism found at the conclusion of **** tale. On a much more practical level, the pacing of the show is very poor. The Ghost of Christmas Present only appears to Scrooge at the top of the second hour; he then takes that entire hour and about 20 minutes of the last hour. The Ghost of Christmas Present gets about 20 minutes and the Ghost of Christmas Future no more than 10 or so. This has the effect of making the first hour seem unending and the last hour seem rushed. Another issue I have is the design of the Ghost of Christmas Future. See the awesome Death-like figure on the poster? Don't get too attached to him because he never appears in the show, not once. The Ghost of Christmas Future is a guy wearing a long black coat and a black hat, with his mouth sewn shut…and that's about it. And then there's final 30 seconds. I have no idea what they were going for with this ending, but it makes little contextual sense, it's patronising, incredibly preachy, and…just wrong, both thematically and tonally. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this adaptation, which is dark both literally and figuratively. It's an altogether more realistic version of the story, one more in tune with our cynical times, and for that, Knight should be commended. But the changes are significant, and a few don't work. In this sense, I'm honestly not surprised it got such a mixed reaction.

A darkly magical realist retelling that isn't for kids Written by Steven Knight and directed by Nick Murphy, this latest adaptation of Charles ****' 1843 novella eschews the sweetness of previous adaptations and deconstructs the thematic foundations of the novella itself. Fans of the original have taken issue with some of the changes (such as the reformulation of Scrooge from misanthrope to villain, the depiction of child sexual abuse, and the joyless nature of the Cratchit family), and certainly, some of these complaints are justified. On the other hand, the attempt to ground the whimsical nature of the original in something more akin to psychological realism is, for the most part, very well-handled. But the last 30 seconds are VERY ill-advised. The first thing that jumped out at me was the aesthetic, particularly Si Bell's cinematography, which avoids primary colours as much as possible, instead casting the world in blacks, greys, browns, and off-whites. Interiors punctuate these shadows with the teal and orange glow of the fireplaces, and overall the show's palette is extremely muted, as it should be. In this sense, the opening scene, featuring an ominous raven and a child urinating on Marley's grave, tells us just how unique the visual template is. The most aesthetically impressive sequence comes in the last episode; as Scrooge stands in his office, he looks up and the ceiling has become a layer of ice. Then someone falls through the ice and seems to float in the air – we're actually underneath the ice layer, and the person who has fallen through is drowning. It's a haunting image. There's also a lovely shot in the second episode – as Scrooge relives a moment from his childhood, we see his father (Johnny Harris) threaten to beat him as he cowers on a bed. However, although it is the adult Scrooge we can see, the shadow he casts is that of a child. Thematically, the show covers some of the same ground as the novella. For example, Scrooge brilliantly deconstructs the concept of gift-giving and then goes on to pick apart the very notion of Christmas cheer, in a speech that represents some of Knight's tightest writing; "How many Merry Christmases are meant and how many are lies? To pretend on one day of the year that the human beast is not the human beast?" In a subsequent scene, he relives the origins of this philosophy, as his father tells him, "every man, every woman; they're all beasts who care only for themselves." Where this adaptation breaks from the novella is in the depiction of Scrooge himself. Usually, a curmudgeonly old misanthrope, here, he has been refashioned as an outright villain. A manipulative asset stripper, he is complicit in the deaths of numerous factory workers and miners, a man who goes out of his way to be nasty to people, and whose treatment of Cratchit is almost fetishistically perverse. And that isn't even to mention his abuse of the power his wealth affords him, using it to compel people to demean themselves for his curiosity. ****' Scrooge is not an irredeemable character, but the Scrooge of the show is, which necessitates that the joyful catharsis found in **** be reformulated. And the absence of such catharsis is precisely the point; this Scrooge understands that redemption won't do anything to erase his past deeds, which is a kind of psychological verisimilitude not usually found in this tale. Depicting Scrooge as worse than usual allows Knight to build organically to a more downbeat, but so too more realistic ending that's far more in tune with our own cultural milieu than the optimism found at the conclusion of **** tale. On a much more practical level, the pacing of the show is very poor. The Ghost of Christmas Present only appears to Scrooge at the top of the second hour; he then takes that entire hour and about 20 minutes of the last hour. The Ghost of Christmas Present gets about 20 minutes and the Ghost of Christmas Future no more than 10 or so. This has the effect of making the first hour seem unending and the last hour seem rushed. Another issue I have is the design of the Ghost of Christmas Future. See the awesome Death-like figure on the poster? Don't get too attached to him because he never appears in the show, not once. The Ghost of Christmas Future is a guy wearing a long black coat and a black hat, with his mouth sewn shut…and that's about it. And then there's final 30 seconds. I have no idea what they were going for with this ending, but it makes little contextual sense, it's patronising, incredibly preachy, and…just wrong, both thematically and tonally. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this adaptation, which is dark both literally and figuratively. It's an altogether more realistic version of the story, one more in tune with our cynical times, and for that, Knight should be commended. But the changes are significant, and a few don't work. In this sense, I'm honestly not surprised it got such a mixed reaction.

Nelson "Nelly" Rowe (Lennie James) is a popular self-styled womaniser living on a Deptford council estate in London, whose life is turned upside down when he is arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his thirteen-year-old daughter Jody (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness), whom he hasn't seen in ten years. After convincing the police of his innocence, and frustrated with the way the case is progressing, Nelly decides to take matters into his own hands and try to track down Jody himself. From a plot perspective, the first season of Save Me starts very slowly, but what it does do extremely well is build up a background of small details that help establish the milieu as authentic and lived-in. The housing estate in Deptford is essentially a character in itself, and the glimpses of the denizens going about their idiosyncratic ways gives an almost documentarian tone – from the guy doing tai chi on his balcony to the kids kicking a football at one another, to the young lesbian couple stealing a kiss against a wall, to the meditating Buddhist, to the couple dancing slowly on a basketball court, to the woman in a burka carrying a skateboard, to the older folk watching it all happen day after day, it's a paean to the real lives that people lead in this kind of community. Indeed, one of the most consistent themes is the importance community in general. Elsewhere, the penultimate episode features a '****' scene that's exceptionally difficult to watch, but not for the reasons you'd think, and which offers a fascinating portrayal of how potent sexual power dynamics can be. Lennie James, who also wrote the show, is predictably enthralling, with a simmering rage just below the surface, which is constantly threatening to boil over. Stephen Graham plays Fabio "Melon" Melonzola, a convicted sex offender trying to put the past behind him, bringing his usual chameleonic abilities to a difficult part. Suranne Jones as Claire McGory, Jody's mother, isn't really given a huge amount to do beyond a few generic scenes as the quintessential worried parent, it she plays the part well, going with subtlety and shock rather than histrionics. Strangely, a subplot involving her husband Barry (Barry Ward) is inexplicably dropped in the penultimate episode. These missteps notwithstanding, the season is a fine amalgamation of a Ken Loach warts-and-all tone with a more thriller-esque core that's well directed by Nick Murphy. Picking up eighteen months after the end of the first season, the second season, dubbed Save Me Too, also starts with slow early episodes which almost imperceptibly ramp up the tension, and once again, the last two episodes are exceptional. With this season's directorial duties split evenly between Jim Loach (son of Ken) and Coky Giedroyc, the show's aesthetic becomes slightly more adventurous (the second episode, for example, is primarily a flashback, whilst other episodes place us more directly in Nelly's head, with a more noticeable sense of subjectivity), but not to the point of distracting from what remains the core of the story – realistic characterisation. Just as with the first season, the second is far more interested in characters than plot, and once again, James and Graham are exceptional. James goes all-in on Nelly's bull-in-a-china-shop mentality, making the character, if anything, less attractive than he was in the first season. He's still got the twinkle in the eye, but the events of the last year and a half have definitely had an impact on him. Never the most tactful character, his tendency to shout first and ask questions the next day after he's calmed down is even more apparent than before. And although characters such as Clair and Barry drop into the background a little, others come to the fore and help to expand the milieu; there's Tam (Jason Flemyng), Nelly's kind-hearted cross-dressing friend; Bernie (Alice May Feetham), Melon's conflicted wife; Stace (Susan Lynch, who may or may not be in love with Nelly; Zita (Camilla Beeput, Nelly's girlfriend; and, especially, Grace (an exceptional and emotionally devastating performance from Olive Gray), who was once held by the same people who took Jody.

Nelson "Nelly" Rowe (Lennie James) is a popular self-styled womaniser living on a Deptford council estate in London, whose life is turned upside down when he is arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his thirteen-year-old daughter Jody (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness), whom he hasn't seen in ten years. After convincing the police of his innocence, and frustrated with the way the case is progressing, Nelly decides to take matters into his own hands and try to track down Jody himself. Picking up eighteen months after the end of the first season, the second season, dubbed Save Me Too, also starts with slow early episodes which almost imperceptibly ramp up the tension, and once again, the last two episodes are exceptional. With this season's directorial duties split evenly between Jim Loach (son of Ken) and Coky Giedroyc, the show's aesthetic becomes slightly more adventurous (the second episode, for example, is primarily a flashback, whilst other episodes place us more directly in Nelly's head, with a more noticeable sense of subjectivity), but not to the point of distracting from what remains the core of the story – realistic characterisation. Just as with the first season, the second is far more interested in characters than plot, and once again, James and Stephen Graham are exceptional. James goes all-in on Nelly's bull-in-a-china-shop mentality, making the character, if anything, less attractive than he was in the first season. He's still got the twinkle in the eye, but the events of the last year and a half have definitely had an impact on him. Never the most tactful character, his tendency to shout first and ask questions the next day after he's calmed down is even more apparent than before. And although characters such as Clair and Barry drop into the background a little, others come to the fore and help to expand the milieu; there's Tam (Jason Flemyng), Nelly's kind-hearted cross-dressing friend; Bernie (Alice May Feetham), Melon's conflicted wife; Stace (Susan Lynch, who may or may not be in love with Nelly; Zita (Camilla Beeput, Nelly's girlfriend; and, especially, Grace (an exceptional and emotionally devastating performance from Olive Gray), who was once held by the same people who took Jody.

Nelson "Nelly" Rowe (Lennie James) is a popular self-styled womaniser living on a Deptford council estate in London, whose life is turned upside down when he is arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his thirteen-year-old daughter Jody (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness), whom he hasn't seen in ten years. After convincing the police of his innocence, and frustrated with the way the case is progressing, Nelly decides to take matters into his own hands and try to track down Jody himself. From a plot perspective, the first season of Save Me starts very slowly, but what it does do extremely well is build up a background of small details that help establish the milieu as authentic and lived-in. The housing estate in Deptford is essentially a character in itself, and the glimpses of the denizens going about their idiosyncratic ways gives an almost documentarian tone – from the guy doing tai chi on his balcony to the kids kicking a football at one another, to the young lesbian couple stealing a kiss against a wall, to the meditating Buddhist, to the couple dancing slowly on a basketball court, to the woman in a burka carrying a skateboard, to the older folk watching it all happen day after day, it's a paean to the real lives that people lead in this kind of community. Indeed, one of the most consistent themes is the importance community in general. Elsewhere, the penultimate episode features a '****' scene that's exceptionally difficult to watch, but not for the reasons you'd think, and which offers a fascinating portrayal of how potent sexual power dynamics can be. Lennie James, who also wrote the show, is predictably enthralling, with a simmering rage just below the surface, which is constantly threatening to boil over. Stephen Graham plays Fabio "Melon" Melonzola, a convicted sex offender trying to put the past behind him, bringing his usual chameleonic abilities to a difficult part. Suranne Jones as Claire McGory, Jody's mother, isn't really given a huge amount to do beyond a few generic scenes as the quintessential worried parent, it she plays the part well, going with subtlety and shock rather than histrionics. Strangely, a subplot involving her husband Barry (Barry Ward) is inexplicably dropped in the penultimate episode. These missteps notwithstanding, the season is a fine amalgamation of a Ken Loach warts-and-all tone with a more thriller-esque core that's well directed by Nick Murphy.

Exceptional in every way; thematically rich, aesthetically breathtaking, and emotionally devastating Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986) is well-known for its deconstruction of the superhero genre, dismantling and interrogating virtually every generic trope so as to question the very purpose of such stories. At the same time, its depiction of Cold War paranoia and condemnation of right-wing idolatry are front and centre without ever seeming forced. Created by Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost and The Leftovers), the most significant thing about this adaptation is that it isn't an adaptation; it's an original story set 33 years after the events of the comic. And is it any good? It's not as good as The Leftovers (what is?), but it is an exceptional piece of work. The acting is immense, the writing is challenging, the aesthetic is stunning. All in all, Watchmen is that rarest of beasts – a show which lives up to the hype. Familiarity with the plot of the original isn't a requirement so as to appreciate the sequel, as you're given all the world-building back-info you need, but it can certainly help you get the most out of Lindelof's intricate narrative and thematic tapestry, especially in the earlier episodes. The world of Watchmen is a slightly different version of our world, in which the 1930s saw the rise of "costumed adventurers"; ordinary people who took to the streets to fight crime. The show is set in Tulsa, OK in 2018. White supremacist groups have been on the rise, and police are now allowed to wear masks and remain anonymous. In essence, the story follows the fallout from a murder, which is soon discovered to be much more complex than originally thought. Lindelof has stated that he wanted to tackle whatever socio-political issue that was to 2019 as the Cold War was to 1985, and to him, it "felt like it was undeniably race and policing". Politically then, the show does much the same thing as the comic did – it deploys a real-world socio-political problem in a not quite 1:1 fictional milieu. In Reagan's America, it was apocalyptic Cold War paranoia, whereas in Trump's Divided States, it's the rise of right-wing extremism. The theme of white and black comes up time and again throughout the series. For example, in "An Almost Religious Awe", a member of the KKK offshoot, Seventh Kavalry, asserts that "white men in masks are heroes. Black men in masks are scary," whilst in "See How They Fly", another member of the group proclaims, "it is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now". In the same episode, speaking of the President, who has introduced a system of reparations, it's stated, "first he took our guns. And then he made us say sorry. Over and over again. Sorry. Sorry for the alleged sins of those who died decades before we were born. Sorry for the colour of our skin." Another major theme is how racial tensions are manifested in law enforcement. As the show begins, we're watching Trust in the Law, a 1921 Oscar Micheaux film about Deputy Bass Reeves, aka The Black Marshal (Bass Reeves was a real marshal and Micheaux was a real director, although Trust in the Law is not a real film). Here, the bad guy wears white (and is white) and the good guy wears black (and is black), thus inverting assumptions. The first scene set in 2018 does something similar as a menacing black cop pulls over a nervous white driver. These two scenes form a beautiful bit of visual story-telling, establishing the centrality of racial tensions, conveying that such things are often more complex than they appear. The show's aesthetic, especially, the cinematography and editing, is also worthy of praise. "This Extraordinary Being", for example, is shot primarily in black and white, and takes place in the 30s and 40s, with the cinematography employing the odd bit of colour here and there within the black and white photography to focus our attention on particular objects. As for "A God Walks Into Abar", if you're interested in learning about editing, watch this episode. Cut by Henk Van Eeghan, it essentially tries to give a visual representation of how Doctor Manhattan experiences time – with every moment in his existence happening all at once, so he can 'remember' things that haven't happened yet. It's a spellbinding exercise in stylistic control, with flawless time jumps that fold organically into one another to form a single cohesive template. Watchmen is an exceptionally good show. There will be fans of the comic who'll dislike it on principle. There will also be those who accuse it of pandering to a liberal PC agenda, and there'll be those who simply don't like the idea of a Watchman TV show with a black woman at its centre. Make no mistake, however, this show has been put together by people who know, appreciate, love, and understand the comic. Thematically complex, aesthetically breathtaking, brilliantly acted, Watchmen is an exceptional piece of television.

Exceptional in every way; thematically rich, aesthetically breathtaking, and emotionally devastating Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986) is well-known for its deconstruction of the superhero genre, dismantling and interrogating virtually every generic trope so as to question the very purpose of such stories. At the same time, its depiction of Cold War paranoia and condemnation of right-wing idolatry are front and centre without ever seeming forced. Created by Damon Lindelof (co-creator of Lost and The Leftovers), the most significant thing about this adaptation is that it isn't an adaptation; it's an original story set 33 years after the events of the comic. And is it any good? It's not as good as The Leftovers (what is?), but it is an exceptional piece of work. The acting is immense, the writing is challenging, the aesthetic is stunning. All in all, Watchmen is that rarest of beasts – a show which lives up to the hype. Familiarity with the plot of the original isn't a requirement so as to appreciate the sequel, as you're given all the world-building back-info you need, but it can certainly help you get the most out of Lindelof's intricate narrative and thematic tapestry, especially in the earlier episodes. The world of Watchmen is a slightly different version of our world, in which the 1930s saw the rise of "costumed adventurers"; ordinary people who took to the streets to fight crime. The show is set in Tulsa, OK in 2018. White supremacist groups have been on the rise, and police are now allowed to wear masks and remain anonymous. In essence, the story follows the fallout from a murder, which is soon discovered to be much more complex than originally thought. Lindelof has stated that he wanted to tackle whatever socio-political issue that was to 2019 as the Cold War was to 1985, and to him, it "felt like it was undeniably race and policing". Politically then, the show does much the same thing as the comic did – it deploys a real-world socio-political problem in a not quite 1:1 fictional milieu. In Reagan's America, it was apocalyptic Cold War paranoia, whereas in Trump's Divided States, it's the rise of right-wing extremism. The theme of white and black comes up time and again throughout the series. For example, in "An Almost Religious Awe", a member of the KKK offshoot, Seventh Kavalry, asserts that "white men in masks are heroes. Black men in masks are scary," whilst in "See How They Fly", another member of the group proclaims, "it is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now". In the same episode, speaking of the President, who has introduced a system of reparations, it's stated, "first he took our guns. And then he made us say sorry. Over and over again. Sorry. Sorry for the alleged sins of those who died decades before we were born. Sorry for the colour of our skin." Another major theme is how racial tensions are manifested in law enforcement. As the show begins, we're watching Trust in the Law, a 1921 Oscar Micheaux film about Deputy Bass Reeves, aka The Black Marshal (Bass Reeves was a real marshal and Micheaux was a real director, although Trust in the Law is not a real film). Here, the bad guy wears white (and is white) and the good guy wears black (and is black), thus inverting assumptions. The first scene set in 2018 does something similar as a menacing black cop pulls over a nervous white driver. These two scenes form a beautiful bit of visual story-telling, establishing the centrality of racial tensions, conveying that such things are often more complex than they appear. The show's aesthetic, especially, the cinematography and editing, is also worthy of praise. "This Extraordinary Being", for example, is shot primarily in black and white, and takes place in the 30s and 40s, with the cinematography employing the odd bit of colour here and there within the black and white photography to focus our attention on particular objects. As for "A God Walks Into Abar", if you're interested in learning about editing, watch this episode. Cut by Henk Van Eeghan, it essentially tries to give a visual representation of how Doctor Manhattan experiences time – with every moment in his existence happening all at once, so he can 'remember' things that haven't happened yet. It's a spellbinding exercise in stylistic control, with flawless time jumps that fold organically into one another to form a single cohesive template. Watchmen is an exceptionally good show. There will be fans of the comic who'll dislike it on principle. There will also be those who accuse it of pandering to a liberal PC agenda, and there'll be those who simply don't like the idea of a Watchman TV show with a black woman at its centre. Make no mistake, however, this show has been put together by people who know, appreciate, love, and understand the comic. Thematically complex, aesthetically breathtaking, brilliantly acted, Watchmen is an exceptional piece of television.

A fine overview of a pivotal figure in American socio-political history Based on The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman (2014), The Loudest Voice takes as its subject the rise and fall of Roger Ailes, and the concomitant rise and ongoing success of Fox News, the "fair and balanced" news network he founded in 1996. And whilst Bombshell (2019) focuses on the women who brought Ailes down, The Loudest Voice is more interested in the man himself. Does it tell us anything new? Not really. Is it biased? Absolutely. Is it subtle? Not even a little. However, it's well-written, brilliantly acted, and extremely well-mounted. Rather than providing a straightforward biographical account of Ailes (a superb Russell Crowe), the show focuses on seven key events, looking at one per episode, beginning with the formation of Fox News ("1995"). The following six deal with Ailes and Fox's response to 9/11 ("2001"); the rise of Barack Obama ("2008"); Ailes and his wife Beth (Sienna Miller in a performance every bit as good as Crowe's) purchasing a local newspaper in their home town of Garrison, New York ("2009"); Obama running for a second term ("2012"); the rise of Donald Trump ("2015"); and Ailes being sued by Gretchen Carlson (Naomi Watts) for sexual harassment ("2016"). The most immediately obvious element of Loudest Voice is the non-linear editing. The most impactful scene in this respect occurs in "2009"; a scene of Ailes compelling employee Laurie Luhn (Anabelle Wallis) to give him oral sex, intercut with her cleaning her mouth out in the bathroom afterwards. It's a horrific moment and a brilliant example of using the mechanics of the medium to comment on the events depicted without resorting to dialogue, showing us how disjointed editing can be thematic, telling us all we need to know about Luhn's attitude towards her relationship with Ailes. Indeed, Luhn's storyline is one of the show's most effective. Her discomfit with the relationship is hinted at throughout the first two episodes, but it's only in "2008" that it takes centre stage, culminating in a horror show of mental collapse across two episodes. The early scenes between her and Ailes are really the only ones that speak to his darker characteristics, which go on to be such an important theme in later episodes. Much like John Lithgow in Bombshell, Crowe initially plays Ailes as intelligent, inspiring, funny, charming, even nurturing, and the only real suggestion of the depravity beneath that veneer comes in the form of the increasingly disturbing sex scenes between him and Luhn. Thematically, Ailes and Fox's roles in dividing the country is a major focus, especially in "2009". Here, we see Ailes stoking the fires of division in Garrison by interjecting himself into a dispute amongst the locals. This is the microcosm. In the same episode, we see the increasingly volatile clashes between Obama supporters and those who oppose him, fuelled by Fox's anti-Obama vitriol. This is the macrocosm. As visual metaphors go, cutting between a fractious townhall meeting in Garrison and news coverage of street clashes across the country is a little heavy-handed, but it is effective in getting the point across – Ailes was very good at breeding division. And of course, there's the constant theme of Ailes and Fox's crimes against journalism. For example, "2001" features a scene in which he willingly turns Fox into the propagandist arm of the Republican Party, and scenes like this are found throughout the seven episodes. In terms of problems, although it improves over time, the prosthetic work in the first couple of episodes is really poor. Ailes's skin is far too smooth and plastic-like, as if he's been run through a Photoshop filter. Another issue is that I'm not entirely convinced that seven hours were necessary. Tied to this is some unusual choices about content – so we get, for example, an episode on the purchasing of a local newspaper, but there's no mention of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which was Fox's first big ratings win. If Roger Ailes didn't exactly build the Divided States with his own hands, at the very least, those who did were working from his blueprint, and The Loudest Voice is a very fine deconstruction of that blueprint. Certainly, it's more interested in probing the political impact of Fox than examining the psychology of the man, and it's disappointingly silent on the question of why he did what he did – it never really deals, for example, with whether or not Ailes genuinely believed he was fighting the good fight or if he recognised that he was essentially a snake oil salesman. However, for all that, it's very enjoyable – the acting is top-notch, the aesthetic superb, and the events it recounts of great importance in today's cultural climate.

Complex, intelligent, and sobering Based on Lawrence Wright's 2006 book, The Looming Tower tells the story of how the 9/11 attacks were made possible by the internecine squabbling between the CIA and FBI. However, whereas the majority of the book deals with al-Qaeda, the series focuses almost exclusively on the American perspective. Certainly, there are depictions of some of the terrorists; but this is an American story. And although the binary of CIA=bad/FBI=good is too neat, this is sobering TV, at its best as it depicts how easily these events could have been prevented. Although framed by the 9/11 Commission in 2004, the story begins in 1998, with both the CIA and FBI each having a dedicated "bin Laden unit". The CIA's Alec Station is run by Martin Schmidt (a pretentious and reptilian Peter Sarsgaard playing a thinly-fictionalised Michael Scheuer), whilst the FBI's I-49 is run by John O'Neill (a boisterous and foul-mouthed Jeff Daniels). Each unit is required to share intelligence with the other, but, in reality, they don't share much of anything except insults, whilst in between the two is Richard Clarke (Michael Stuhlbarg), National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism. As the show begins, bin Laden (referred to primarily as UBL) is interviewed for ABC News, promising a grand statement unless the US pull out of the Middle East. The majority of Americans, however, are more interested in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Developed for TV by Wright, Dan Futterman, and Alex Gibney, an element to which the show returns time and again is the underestimation of UBL. This is initially touched on in "Now It Begins...", with Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim), a young Lebanese-born FBI agent, telling O'Neill, "he used the interview to appear strong by threatening the United States as he looked an American directly in the eye." In "Mercury", Soufan explains, "killing Bin Laden is only going to secure his legend and inspire more martyrs." Later in this episode, O'Neill tells Schmidt, "this isn't a war about one man. Bin Laden is an ideologue, not some plutocrat running a banana republic. His people actually believe. It's bin Laden-ism we're up against, not just bin Laden." This underestimation is even more pronounced under the Bush presidency, leading to some of the show's best scenes. For example, in "A Very in Relationship", newly appointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Eisa Davis) interrupts Clarke as he's giving a presentation on al-Qaeda, telling him he's being too long-winded. A later scene in the same episode has O'Neill stunned when Rice doesn't know who he is. An extraordinarily well-written scene, it's the only time we see O'Neill lost for words. Another major theme is faith, especially the lapsed faith of O'Neill and Soufan. O'Neill was raised a catholic, but no longer practices, which troubles Liz (Annie Parisse), one of his two mistresses, who believes him (incorrectly) to be divorced. Soufan no longer practises Islam, but the faith-based nature of al-Qaeda troubles him ("when people use my religion to justify this s**t, it affects me"). Indeed, one of the most welcome elements of the show is the depiction of Muslims in general, challenging the notion that all Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists. Important here is Hoda al-Hada (July Namir), wife of one of the hijackers. She doesn't subscribe in any way to her husband's belief in UBL and is more concerned with her children knowing their father than the otherworldly blessings of Allah. When it comes to the acting, Bill Camp (playing Robert Chesney, one of O'Neill's most reliable agents) and Michael Stuhlbarg are the standouts. Camp is given an amazing eight-minute scene in "Mistakes Were Made" where he is quiet and calm, fondly remembering his military service, before exploding at the right moment. Stuhlbarg plays Clarke as perennially frustrated, and although he never lets Clarke's quiet politeness slip, on several occasions, he hovers tantalisingly close, in what is an exceptionally subtle and nuanced performance. In terms of problems, there's nothing on al-Qaeda's background, hugely important context that was one of Wright's main themes. The various romantic subplots feel rote, generic, and emotionally inauthentic; elements forced into the story so as to counter the testosterone-soaked main narrative. Another issue is the rigid binary distinction between the FBI and CIA (and between O'Neill and Schmidt), which never feels completely authentic. Nevertheless, The Looming Tower is taut and complex. The story is streamlined, but it hasn't been drained of moral complexity, serving as a reminder of something with great importance today – with UBL literally telling the US he was going to attack, everyone was more focused on a semen-stained dress. And living, as we do, in an era where the American media is routinely distracted by irrelevancies, it seems the lessons of history have not been heeded.

Thematically interesting and brilliantly acted, but painfully slow and far too long Although Sharp Objects has been advertised as a murder-mystery, it's really interested not in who's behind a pair of murders in a Missouri town, but in how those murders affect a trio of women caught up in the investigation. Feminine in design rather than feminist, the show is a portrait of tainted motherhood and corrupted sisterhood, and focuses on internecine inter-generational conflict, matrilineal dysfunction, and the difficulty of escaping past trauma. But whilst the acting is exceptional, and the show is well edited, it left me unengaged, uninterested, and bored. Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is a barely-functioning alcoholic who works as a reporter in St. Louis, and who is sent to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to report on the murder of two young girls. Her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), looks down on her with barely-concealed disappointment, and Camille is especially haunted by the memory of her younger sister Marian, who died when they were children. In the years since, Adora re-married and had another child, Amma (Eliza Scanlen), who fascinates Camille with her dual personality – dutiful daughter who plays with a doll's house, and roller-blading lollypop **** teenage temptress. Based on the 2006 Gillian Flynn novel, Sharp Objects was written primarily by showrunner Marti Noxon and Flynn herself, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who was also lead editor. This is important insofar as the editing is the show's calling card, attempting to draw us into Camille's psyche via fleeting snippets of childhood memories. So, for example, adult Camille lies in bed and stares at a crack on the ceiling and when we cut back to the bed, she's a child looking at that same crack; adult Camille is shown opening a door, and child Camille enters a room. This inculcates us into Camille's mind, also hinting at her trauma, without ever being too revealing. Vallée overuses the technique, neutering it of its potency, but that notwithstanding, it's a good example of "show, don't tell", and of content generating form and form giving rise to content; the memories are tied to Camille's fragmented psychology, with the brief cuts acting like splinters in her mind. Thematically, the show focuses on female experience, specifically motherhood/daughterhood. Adora is a woefully bad mother who made little secret of the fact that she preferred Marian to Camille, telling her, "you can't get close. That's your father. And it's why I think I never loved you. You were born to it, that cold nature". Later she admits that what she wanted from Camille was the one thing Camille couldn't give – she wanted Camille to need her. The show also deals with how women respond to familial trauma, arguing that the pain experienced by abused women is just as valid as that experienced by abused men, the manifestations of trauma just as catastrophic, and the anger engendered just as self-destructive. We're used to seeing stories focused on damaged, hard-drinking male characters with dark backgrounds, but Sharp Objects is about the female equivalent. Indeed, in Wind Gap women are locked into the virgin/slut binary; it's a place where a woman's worth correlates with her femininity, her maternal instincts, and her acceptance of her place in androcentric societal structures. However, I just couldn't get into it. The biggest problem is the pace. I understand it's a character drama, not a plot-heavy murder-mystery, but as episode after episode ended flatly, I just stopped caring. Almost nothing happens. And that's not hyperbole, I mean it literally. Tied to this is that the show is far, far too long. The novel is 254 pages, but the show runs 385 minutes, with the characters not interesting enough to take up the slack. Elsewhere, the flashback editing is used so often that it loses its potency and starts to feel like Vallée is using it arbitrarily rather than in the service of character. Additionally, the show abounds in clichés – the alcoholic hard-as-nails journalist, the incompetent local police, the out of town detective to whom nobody listens, the gossiping women. Vallée also has a tendency to overuse certain images, thus robbing them of their effectiveness – Amma and her friends roller-blading around town, Amma playing silently with her dollhouse, shots of Camille filling a water bottle with vodka. There's a lot to admire in Sharp Objects, but precious little to like. Not exactly a work of post-#MeToo fempowerment, it certainly has a female-centric perspective, and its examination of issues usually associated with men is interesting. The performances are top-notch and the editing is decent if overused, but the show did little for me. I understand it's designed holistically rather than cumulatively, and I have no problem with that. But the pace is enervating and the characters just aren't interesting enough to fill the runtime.

More of a conventional documentary than advertised, but it provides a good overview In many ways, Ted Bundy is the archetypal serial killer, embodying many of the characteristics we associate with such criminals. Most significantly he was the first celebrity serial killer, and remains the best-known example (Charles Manson wasn't a serial killer). He also embodies media and cultural fixation with killers, almost always at the expense of their victims. And although Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes certainly has merit, and is well-made, it's also guilty of focusing on the killer whilst giving little time over to the victims. Written and directed by Joe Berlinger, one gets the distinct impression that Bundy himself would have been immensely happy with it. Conversations is derived from over 100 hours of audio recordings of Bundy being interviewed by Stephen G. Michaud, the transcripts of which have been available online for years, but which have never actually been heard before. One of the most important aspects of the series, is that Bundy would not discuss the murders, and so, to trick him into talking about them, Michaud asked him to act as a kind of consultant and to speculate as to the killer's motives. Not recognising that Michaud was exploiting his narcissism, Bundy immediately began to talk about the murderer in the third person. However, Conversations is more of a conventional documentary than you might expect. This is not necessarily a criticism, as the biographical material, whilst never original, is interesting and well put together; his involvement with the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, his work for a Suicide Hotline, his work as Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission (where he wrote a pamphlet for women on **** prevention). An equally fascinating aspect of the series, but one which is under-explored, is how Bundy's white privilege factored into his murders. As a well-educated, well-dressed, humorous, respectable middle-class white man, obviously intelligent, and seemingly charming, he was able to hide in plain sight, because no one could conceive of a man like him being a sadistic murderer. The problem, however, is that the show falls into the same trap; Bundy's wit and charm appears to win Berlinger over, as he seems to be just as fascinated with Bundy's antics as the media and public were. To be fair, the show doesn't glorify him; Berlinger ensures the audience knows he was a monster. However, the question is raised of when does documenting a violent narcissist transition into giving them a platform? With this in mind, the victims receive relatively little attention. Some, like his youngest victim, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, are focuses upon,, but others are lumped together, and Berlinger makes no real effort to characterise them. Instead of giving us a vivid illustration of who they were by interviewing family and friends, Berlinger gives us a rough pencil sketch made up of contemporary news reports. Aside from the side-lining of victims, the most obvious issue with Conversations is that it's a far more conventional piece than a deep dive into previously untapped reservoirs of Bundy's psyche. Part of the reason for this is the dearth of actual audio material, as from the 100 hours available, Berlinger uses about 20 minutes all told. Pretty much everything else is standard bio material, nothing that anyone familiar with the case won't already know. There are also some very strange aesthetic choices. For example, as Bundy discusses his relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer, a montage of contemporaneous footage depicts exactly what he's talking about (when me mentions eating dinner, there's a shot of a family sitting around the dinner table; when he mentions being nervous, we see someone biting their nails). It's a spectacularly on-the-nose montage that accomplishes nothing. A similar moment sees Bundy discussing sexuality, and Berlinger shows us a rapid montage of hardcore S&M porn, which is not only distasteful, it's ideologically reductionist. The worst example is when Carol DaRonch, one of five victims to survive Bundy, mentions that her life flashed before her, Berlinger inserts a montage of quaint home movie footage. If all that sounds very negative, however, let me be clear, I did enjoy Conversations, I was just a little disappointed in it. People already familiar with the case won't learn anything new, and those looking for a unique entry-point into the mind of a killer will be left wanting. Nevertheless, this is the story of a sociopathic narcissist that comments not just on societal privilege, but which also interrogates our own ghoulish fascination with such monsters. And yes, Berlinger seems unaware of the glaring irony here, but that doesn't change the fact that he has fashioned the ramblings of a mad man into a fascinating piece of work.

Overlong, but the acting is immense As far back as the late 80s/early 90s, long before "long-form narrative" became the dominant mode of television storytelling, I was a fan of what would then have been called "non-episodic storytelling", the best-known examples of which would have been Michael Mann's Crime Story (1986-1987) and David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (1990-1991). So, with that in mind, in an era where long-form narrative has become the norm, I should be in my element. And I am. Except for one thing - "Netflix bloat"; essentially, the phenomenon of shows stretching their stories too thin across too many episodes. And so we have the otherwise excellent Escape at Dannemora, a four or five-hour story elongated to eight hours. Ostensibly a prison break drama, the series is more interested in the psychology of the people involved. Excellently directed and beautifully shot, with a quartet of astounding performances at its centre, the show tells a fascinating story, but it moves at a glacial pace that requires serious patience. Written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin, and directed by Ben Stiller, the series tells the story of the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility escape, when Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro) and David Sweat (Paul Dano) escaped the maximum security prison with the aid of civilian prison employee Joyce "Tilly" Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), who was involved in a sexual relationship with both men. Aesthetically, Dannemora is exceptional, with director of photography Jessica Lee Gagne's work especially laudable. In the opening scene of the fifth episode, for example, there's a nine-minute single shot following Sweat from his cell to the manhole which they will use to escape. The unedited format really sells the distance they have to travel and the extraordinary effort it took to get out. Also worth noting is that the series is shot in CinemaScope (2.40:1). This format is almost never used on TV, where everything tends to be shot 1.78:1 (Master of None is an exception), but Stiller and Gagne use the format magnificently, with the narrow frame confining the characters. Combined with shooting through windows and having the characters stand in doorways, the compositions visually signify that these people are fundamentally trapped, existentially if not literally. From an acting perspective, Arquette is extraordinary. Yes, the physical transformation is laudable, but this is more than an impersonation. She plays Tilly as in a perpetual state of rage and resentment, a woman who feels she's entitled to more than she has. When we first meet her, her frustration levels with her husband Lyle (Eric Lange) are at breaking point, but in the sixth episode, which flashes back to formative moments from the characters' pasts, we learn that Lyle himself was once the same kind of escape hatch for Tilly that Matt and Sweat are in 2015. This episode also demonstrates her cruelty; something which has been on the fringes of the character thus far. Arquette emphasises Tilly's naivete, leaning into her childlike quality; seen in the tendency for her voice to become shrill and nasally, and to start crying whenever challenged. However, she never lets us forget that Tilly is hateful, disillusioned, and dangerous. Del Toro plays Matt as a classic sociopath; externally calm, but inherently volatile, and in the flashback episode, we see the extent of his sociopathy. Dano focuses on Sweat's brilliant mind, playing him as calm and thoughtful, but prone to anger when things don't go his way. Lange plays Lyle as blinded by ignorance and loyalty, convinced that Tilly still loves him, and he can weather the current storm. Lange leans into Lyle's inability to see just how much he's being manipulated, abused, and ridiculed, with his adoration for Tilly never wavering. The show unquestionably depicts him as a simpleton, but Lange finds more depth in the part. The problem with all of this, is the runtime, which is two or three hours too long. Yes, the deep dive into the characters' psychologies and backstory is fascinating, and the flashback episode is superb, but we didn't need five hours of context to get there, and at times, the plot seems to cease all forward momentum. It's never boring, but so much of it lacks urgency or tension. Ultimately, Escape at Dannemora is a brilliant piece of direction, with awe-inspiring performances. Although it gives us a lot of detail about the mechanics of the escape, it's far more interested in the mechanics of people. And in that sense, it's always interesting. It's also good evidence that just because you can use eight or more hours to tell a story, doesn't necessarily mean that you should. As a five hour piece, this could have been sensational. As is, it's above average, saved by its cast and Stiller's fine direction, but it remains always a slog.

Brilliantly acted; equal parts hilarious and harrowing Directed by Edward Berger, and written for the screen by David Nicholls, this five-part miniseries is based on the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, published between 1992 and 2011. Each of the five episodes is based on a single novel, with each set in a different year. In the first episode, "Bad News" (set in 1982, and actually the second novel in the series), Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch), in the midst of a debilitating heroin addiction, receives word that his sybaritic father David (a terrifying Hugo Weaving) has died in New York, and he must collect the body. In "Never Mind" (the first novel in the sequence), as Patrick goes through heroin withdrawal upon returning from New York, he thinks back to 1967 and his time in the family's French villa, where David first **** him. In "Some Hope" (set in 1990), Patrick, now clean, reluctantly attends a banquet for Princess Margaret (Harriet Walter). In "Mother's Milk" (set in 2003), Patrick, now sober for several years, and working as a barrister, visits the villa with his family, where his mother Eleanor (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is extremely sick, having suffered a stroke. The stress results in Patrick drinking heavily. In "At Last" (set in 2005), his drinking has spiralled out of control following the dissolution of his marriage. The show wastes no time in establishing how severe Patrick's addictions are. In the opening scene of the first episode, he answers a telephone, to learn that his father has died. However, he looks and talks as if he is slightly out of sync with everything else. Struggling to keep himself upright, he sways, droops, seems about to fall asleep. Then he picks up a syringe. Upon hanging up the phone, he stares at the syringe, and his eyes come into focus for the first time. It's a stark introduction to the character, immediately establishing the hold drugs have on him. The show employs a number of stylistic devices to draw us into his interiority - dialogue only Patrick and the audience can hear, unnatural lighting changes corresponding to his mood, glitches in the picture in sync with his psychotic breaks, the bleeding of the past into the present (a room in the present will remind him of a room in the past, and suddenly he'll be there; he opens a door in 1982, and we cut to him standing in an open doorway in 1967). Aesthetically, each episode is grounded in a different genre. "Bad News" is a yuppie version of Trainspotting (1996), a dark night of the soul awash in non-diegetic purples and greens, where the formal chaos mirrors the breakdown of Patrick's mind; "Never Mind" is a lurid summer retreat, along the lines of Call Me by Your Name (2017), with a preponderance of deep yellows and reds; "Some Hope" is an Upstairs, Downstairs (1971)/Gosford Park (2001)-style comedy of manners, examining the ludicrousness of the class system; "Mother's Milk" is partly a fish-out-of-water story and partly a psychosexual intellectual drama; and "Mother's Milk" is a cold postmodern tragedy full of angst and unlooked-for self-discovery, dominated by metallics, greys, and blues. The show's most salient theme is the idea that when you deeply hurt a child, when you damage a child's soul, the effects will continue to be felt for many years. As is alluded to throughout the first episode, and as becomes painfully clear in the second, when Patrick was a child, David began molesting him. Rather than depicting this, the show's most chilling scene is one in which Patrick comes to David's room, and there is a shot of the perfectly-made bed on which David sits. After Patrick leaves, however, there is a shot of the bed in disarray. We never see what happens, because we don't need to. This is as well-directed a bit of cinematic shorthand as you're ever likely to see. Horrific in its simplicity. Another important theme is a mockery of the aristocracy. This is seen most clearly in the third episode, and especially in the odious character of Princess Margaret. The show depicts a decadent, toxic, emotionally calcified, and morally bankrupt class of people belonging to another age that have somehow lingered into modernity. Of course, this raises an obvious objection - "why should we care about Patrick?" Well, in part, we shouldn't. Essentially, this is the story of a spoiled rich kid. It's the very definition of white male privilege. And it never really manages to shake that. But there is more to it. For the themes, for the humour, for what it says about the British peerage, and, especially, for Cumberbatch's performance, this is certainly worth checking out. And despite the fact that we know Patrick is an obnoxious addict, there is enough humanity to ensure we remember the very real trauma beneath the bluster. And in that sense, it remains always compelling.

One of the finest documentaries ever made Described by the show's official website as "an immersive 360-degree narrative," The Vietnam War is a behemoth in every sense of the word; written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by celebrated documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the series cost $30 million to make, and was in production for over ten years, with the ten episodes running to a gargantuan eighteen hours. Assembled from over 24,000 photos and 1,500 hours of archive footage, the show features interviews with 79 people, including analysts, bureaucrats, journalists, artists, anti-war protestors, draft dodgers, conscientious objectors, deserters, Gold Star family members, and American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese troops. Deliberately eschewing interviews with historians and major polarising figures such as Jane Fonda, John Kerry, or Oliver Stone, the series features what Burns and Novick define as a "ground up" approach; concentrating almost exclusively on the experiences of ordinary people and soldiers from every side. Beginning with the French invasion of Indochina in 1858 and concluding with the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982 (although some brief postscript material goes up to President Barak Obama's visit to Vietnam in 2016), the series hits all the beats you'd expect within this timeframe, but where the show excels is not in trying to present an all-inclusive summary of everything that happened in the war, but in its mixture of the macro and the micro - intercut into the larger framework of political analysis and military assessment are more relatable and personalised interviews, which serve to reinforce what the war was like for the people who actually fought it and their families back home. These human stories serve as Burns and Novick's "ground up" material, helping to contextualise the less personal socio-political canvas against which they are set. A major theme throughout the series is the effect the war had on the American psyche. Whilst the first episode outlines how the US emerged from World War II as world leaders, convinced of its own irrefutable morality, and proud of its self-appointed role as global law enforcer, later episodes detail how all of this changed during the war. Fought in a country few Americans had even heard of, and fewer still knew anything about, the war was a conflict whose ultimate futility at so great a cost was unlike anything any living American had seen. The stain of the war lingered for decades, and lingers still. As the documentary lays bare, Vietnam fundamentally redefined the notion of American patriotism, altered the American zeitgeist, and undermined American exceptionalism. Another vital theme, but one which is left for the viewer to provide the connective tissue, is how the domestic events of the war are mirrored in contemporary American society. Undoubtedly, the war was the most divisive period in the US since the Civil War. However, the most divisive period since the war is right now; the US is currently in the seventeenth year of a war begun under dubious circumstances; there are accusations of foreign collusion in a US election; the president has threatened to use force against an Asian nation; there are mass demonstrations across the country; the White House is obsessed with leaks, with three different presidents attempting to undermine the media in a manner not dissimilar to Trump's catchphrase of "fake news." However, the series is not perfect. The most obvious criticism is that despite their claims that all sides are represented equally, there is an imbalance between the anti-war movement (represented by three interviewees and dozens of vets), and those who supported the war (represented by a few comments here and there from people who admit they were conflicted). This imbalance is also present in the number of North Vietnamese combatants (14) weighed against the number of South Vietnamese combatants (7). There are also some notable, and oftentimes bizarre, omissions. For example, there is no mention whatsoever of Maj Gen Edward Lansdale, LTC John Paul Vannor Lê Van Vien (aka Bay Vien). Nevertheless, The Vietnam War is an undeniably epic achievement. Burns and Novick have distilled down a massively complex canvas, whilst at the same time refusing to placate either side. This refusal leaves the series open to criticism from both sides, but it may also be the show's greatest strength. Rather than submitting to partisan politics, the series follows its own path, irrespective of how it appears to those with preconceived notions. Harrowing and insightful, informative and disturbing, conciliatory rather than condemnatory, The Vietnam War is a masterpiece.

Does what it aims to do Executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, and made by Will Smith's production company (Smith is also the presenter), One Strange Rock is essentially about the experiences of eight astronauts, and how their time in space led them to see Earth with new eyes. That, in turn, is used as a jumping off point to examine several different branches of Earth Science, with each episode focusing on a specific astronaut and dealing with a specific topic; the planet's respiratory system, the Theia Impact theory, how the planet protects us from the sun, the origin of life, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, the possibility of colonising another planet, how life has both transformed the Earth and been transformed by it, the evolution from single celled microbes to complex organisms, the development of the human brain, and the concept of Earth as home. Along the way, the show throws up a litany of hard to believe facts. To give just a sampling; the Amazon produces twenty times more oxygen than all of humanity could use, but none of it leaves the Amazon Basin, as it is used by the animals living there; the magnetic field generated by the planet's core stretches for 400,000 miles into space in every direction; every strand of DNA in the world contains billions of carbon atoms to bind it together; the human body has 37 trillion cells (more than the stars in the galaxy); tropical islands are composed of up to 70% parrot fish excrement; photosynthesis generates 100 terawatts of energy per year, six times more than humanity could use; the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe; 95% of all animals that have ever existed are extinct. Easily my favourite take from the show, however, is that it's 250,000 miles to the moon, 700 million miles to Saturn, 9 trillion miles to the edge of the solar system, 24 trillion miles to the nearest star (with our current technology, it would take 17,000 years to get there), and 25,000 light years (150,000 trillion miles) to the edge of the galaxy. That's a whole lotta miles! Very enjoyable stuff. My one complaint would be that most of the episodes feel a little padded, with each one containing two or three diversionary stories only tangentially related to the core theme. But it's still well worth watching; terrific visuals, great sound, experts who know what they're talking about, and mind blowing information, if the goal was to make the viewer look at Earth in a new manner, they certainly succeeded with me.

Unbearably painful Created by Julia Willoughby-Nason, Jenner Furst, and Nick Sandow, directed by Furst, and with Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and Harvey Weinstein serving as executive producers, this six-part documentary tells the almost unbearably tragic story of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. With his family unable to afford the $900 bail, Browder spent 1,111 days in Rikers, despite never being convicted of a crime. Turning down nine plea deals, Browder refused to admit to something he didn't do just so he could go home. With his case brought to court and delayed multiple times, Browder spent over 800 days in solitary confinement, where his mental health rapidly deteriorated. Indeed, the episodes dealing with his time in Rikers, and the experience and effects of long-term solitary confinement, are almost too horrific to bear. Were this fiction, the litany of abuses he suffers, and the details of how the system failed him, would be rejected as ridiculous, with his nightmare continuing even upon his release; in two separate incidents, he was shot and stabbed, and was later sectioned, as he became increasingly paranoid and unstable. Telling the parallel story of the anguish of his doting mother, if I had one criticism, it would be that the narrative is stretched too thin. Much like The Keepers, there isn't enough material here to warrant this many episodes, and it does lapse into repetition at times. Nevertheless, this is harrowing stuff; highly recommended.

Unadventurous but enjoyable When Anthony Sullivan (Michael Riendeau) disappears on his tenth birthday, his family is devastated. However, as more and more time passes without the police being able to locate him, long-buried family secrets are dragged to the surface, turning the Sullivan family against one another. A journeyman show, The Disappearance is very much paint-by-numbers stuff, with nothing you haven't before seen in half-a-dozen similar narratives, with writers Normand Daneau and Geneviève Simard taking no real risks. Having said that, however, it's a well-made piece of television. Confidently directed by Peter Stebbings, the material may offer nothing revelatory, but what it does offer is enjoyable enough on its own terms. An excellent Peter Coyote dominates the show as Anthony's grandfather, Henry, a retired judge with a strained relationship (to say the least) with his son, Luke (Aden Young), Anthony's father. As the veneer of civility slowly erodes, the fissures running beneath the family dynamic begin to erupt, with blame and recrimination becoming the central tenets of familial interaction. You may guess half-way through who the kidnapper is, and yes, they're one of those Hollywood kidnappers who leave cryptic clues everywhere, but this remains a well-made, if unadventurous, show.

A balanced overview of an unprecedented case Erin Lee Carr's two-part HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, takes as its subject the story of the 2014 case where Michelle Carter, a 17-year-old woman encouraged her suicidal 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy, III to kill himself, and was subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. Looking at issues of technology, mental health, the ethicality of prescribing powerful SSRIs to teenagers, a reductionist media that pushes an easy-to-digest narrative based on familiar tropes and themes at the expense of the more multifaceted, complex, and uncomfortable reality, and, of course, whether one person can be held legally responsible for another's suicide, the show doesn't so much take a side as work to remind viewers that more than one side exists. And although there are some notable problems, it does a pretty decent job overall. According to journalist Jesse Barron, "the biggest mystery of this story is not why Michelle Carter did what she did, but what Michelle Carter thought she was doing", and this is a central point – Michelle's own understanding of her actions are at the centre of everything. Certainly, her actions were inhuman, immoral, and abhorrent, but did she intend them as such? Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin argues that Michelle became overwhelmed by the caretaker role Conrad had assigned to her and posits that in early July, she became "involuntarily intoxicated"; a result of her being on Prozac. However, in an example of the show's balance, we immediately cut to another psychiatrist pointing out that there's no agreement that involuntary intoxication as a medical diagnosis is even real. The show makes a solid argument that, in this case, Occam's razor does not apply; the simplest explanation for Conrad's death – that Michelle manipulated him into committing suicide so she could elicit sympathy from those around her – is not necessarily the most likely explanation. This is not simply a case of hideous sociopathy; it's far more psychologically complex, and Carr does a fine job of peeling back the layers to illustrate this complexity. Such context does not, in any way, excuse what Michelle said or how she acted, nor does the show suggest as much. But it does go some way to explaining her psychology; in a case where context has been ignored, yet context is everything, the show attempts to provide the viewer with that context, revealing Michelle's own deeply disturbed psyche and psychological trauma. However, there are some problems. Take Breggin's centrality. Should a psychiatrist who says something like, "she's clearly out of her mind and so is he" really have such a prominent role in a show of this nature? There's also no mention of the fact that he's against psychiatric drugs in general, nor is there anything about how, in 1987, after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and telling psychiatric patients not to take their medication, he was brought before a disciplinary board. The biggest problem, however, is that neither Michelle nor any of her family participated in the film. Given how concerned Carr is with understanding what was going on in Michelle's head, this is a considerable problem. Several of Conrad's family appear, and the cumulative effect is to convey just how crippling his mental health issues were. In terms of Michelle, however, the only person who speaks to her mindset is Breggin. Along the same lines, Conrad's background and family life are sketched pretty thoroughly, but Michelle's is left completely blank – we learn absolutely nothing about her childhood or parents, who are never even mentioned. This is a significant misstep on Carr's part, and the lack of background contextualisation renders Michelle as something of an impenetrable question mark, which works against the show's attempts to elucidate her mindset and motivation. Nevertheless, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter is an informative engagement with a case of huge complexity and importance. Challenging the prevailing media depiction of Michelle, Carr sets out to remind the viewer that things are more complicated than they may have been led to believe. Never advocating for Michelle's complete innocence nor endorsing the devil woman persona, Carr stays fairly balanced throughout. She acknowledges that Michelle's actions and words were indefensible and inhuman, but so too does she argue sociopathy may not have been the primary cause. The central question of the case is whether Conrad would have killed himself had Michelle not encouraged him to do so. The easy answer is "no, he wouldn't". Carr, however, suggests that that question may be unanswerable. What happened is clear. But Carr is attempting to remind us that why it happened is a much more complex question.

The funniest season yet, and the best since Asylum A pitch-perfect homage to summer-camp slasher movies, AHS/1984 is, for me, the best season of American Horror Story since Asylum. However, it's divisive, and AHS purists probably won't be overly impressed that it's a dark and camp comedy before it's a thriller or a horror. However, it's consistently hilarious, it doesn't take itself seriously, and it elicits quite a bit of empathy for several of the characters. And the soundtrack, wardrobe, and hairstyles have more '80s cheese than you could ever imagine. LA, 1984. Montana (Billie Lourd), Xavier (Cody Fern), Chet (Gus Kenworthy), and Ray (DeRon Horton) are heading to work as counsellors at newly reopened Camp Redwood. When Brooke (Emma Roberts) is attacked by Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker (Zack Villa), she decides to join the others. At Redwood, they meet Margaret (Leslie Grossman), who survived a massacre there in 1970 and who now owns the camp; Rita (Angelica Ross), the nurse; Bertie (Tara Karsian), the chef; and Trevor (Matthew Morrison), the activities director. Meanwhile, Benjamin Richter, aka Mr Jingles (John Carroll Lynch), former groundskeeper at Redwood and perpetrator of the 1970 massacre, escapes from a nearby mental facility with murder on his mind. Not quite a post-modernist reimagining of the slasher genre, the season could stand as a respectable slasher in its own right, and in this sense, the tone is pitch-perfect. Take the opening credits. Whereas previous sequences have been unnerving, the opening to 1984 is a thing of tacky '80s beauty – shot on VHS in 1.33:1 (complete with tracking lines), the credits are made up of shots of aerobics, tape decks, gaudy fashion, dodgy '80s video graphics, VCRs, Ronald Reagan, and roller skates. Meanwhile, the unsettling AHS theme music is here reproduced on a synth. It's horrible, cheesy, about as unthreatening as you can imagine, and awesome. The show hits classic genre markers such the campfire scene used to provide exposition, the chase scene where the girl being pursued keeps tripping, the characters continually splitting up for various (dubious) reasons, and the plethora of pseudo-POV shots from behind trees. Having said all that, however, there are certainly elements of postmodern deconstruction; the girl with the huge breasts becomes the guy with the huge ****, the black characters survive beyond the opening act, the quintessential shower scene upon which someone is spying involves not women but men, and there's a pseudo-meta defamiliarisation of the notion that serial killers in slasher films are notoriously difficult to kill. A vital element of any season of AHS is humour, and 1984 is no different. Usually, the best laughs come from the earnestness of the characters, who are blissfully unaware of how ridiculous they sound. So, when Brooke meets Xavier, he tells her, dead-pan, "I trained with Stella Adler. I'm method". Later on, he discusses the dangers of being in a coma by referencing the song, "Coma Chameleon". After one of the characters is badly burned, an argument breaks out and when someone tells this character to breathe, they proclaim, "I have breathed the fire of a thousand white-hot suns". Discussing Billy Idol, a character points out, "You can't sing "Rebel Yell" and not be a rebel". Thematically, the most obvious issue is media commodification of serial killers. Whether it be by making a movie or putting their face on a magazine, serial killers and mass murderers sell, and there's something inherently wrong about that. As with previous AHS seasons, we also look at gender issues. Here we see a critique of the notion that female victims of male serial killers are celebrated as "feminist heroes", and there's a nicely written reformulation of the serial killer trope whereby women are often not believed as they fight male monsters. In terms of problems, on the one hand, there is too much time spent on explaining things the audience already knows. On the other, there is a disorienting and not entirely successful time jump between the penultimate and last episode, and it feels almost like there was an episode skipped between the two, especially as the finale ill-advisedly introduces a new character. Some viewers will also undoubtedly find the humour too camp and too frequent, whilst some will find the references nothing more than pastiche, intertextuality for its own sake. All in all, I enjoyed this season of American Horror Story. It's not the most thrilling or unnerving, but it is the funniest. Strong characters, tremendous acting, and some genuinely heartfelt moments combine with great costumes, foolish hair, and a great soundtrack to produce a season that might mean little to those born post-1989, but to the rest of us is an ode to the achingly familiar.

A fine overview of a pivotal figure in American socio-political history Based on The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News – and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman (2014), The Loudest Voice takes as its subject the rise and fall of Roger Ailes, and the concomitant rise and ongoing success of Fox News, the "fair and balanced" news network he founded in 1996. And whilst Bombshell (2019) focuses on the women who brought Ailes down, The Loudest Voice is more interested in the man himself. Does it tell us anything new? Not really. Is it biased? Absolutely. Is it subtle? Not even a little. However, it's well-written, brilliantly acted, and extremely well-mounted. Rather than providing a straightforward biographical account of Ailes (a superb Russell Crowe), the show focuses on seven key events, looking at one per episode, beginning with the formation of Fox News ("1995"). The following six deal with Ailes and Fox's response to 9/11 ("2001"); the rise of Barack Obama ("2008"); Ailes and his wife Beth (Sienna Miller in a performance every bit as good as Crowe's) purchasing a local newspaper in their home town of Garrison, New York ("2009"); Obama running for a second term ("2012"); the rise of Donald Trump ("2015"); and Ailes being sued by Gretchen Carlson (Naomi Watts) for sexual harassment ("2016"). The most immediately obvious element of Loudest Voice is the non-linear editing. The most impactful scene in this respect occurs in "2009"; a scene of Ailes compelling employee Laurie Luhn (Anabelle Wallis) to give him oral sex, intercut with her cleaning her mouth out in the bathroom afterwards. It's a horrific moment and a brilliant example of using the mechanics of the medium to comment on the events depicted without resorting to dialogue, showing us how disjointed editing can be thematic, telling us all we need to know about Luhn's attitude towards her relationship with Ailes. Indeed, Luhn's storyline is one of the show's most effective. Her discomfit with the relationship is hinted at throughout the first two episodes, but it's only in "2008" that it takes centre stage, culminating in a horror show of mental collapse across two episodes. The early scenes between her and Ailes are really the only ones that speak to his darker characteristics, which go on to be such an important theme in later episodes. Much like John Lithgow in Bombshell, Crowe initially plays Ailes as intelligent, inspiring, funny, charming, even nurturing, and the only real suggestion of the depravity beneath that veneer comes in the form of the increasingly disturbing sex scenes between him and Luhn. Thematically, Ailes and Fox's roles in dividing the country is a major focus, especially in "2009". Here, we see Ailes stoking the fires of division in Garrison by interjecting himself into a dispute amongst the locals. This is the microcosm. In the same episode, we see the increasingly volatile clashes between Obama supporters and those who oppose him, fuelled by Fox's anti-Obama vitriol. This is the macrocosm. As visual metaphors go, cutting between a fractious townhall meeting in Garrison and news coverage of street clashes across the country is a little heavy-handed, but it is effective in getting the point across – Ailes was very good at breeding division. And of course, there's the constant theme of Ailes and Fox's crimes against journalism. For example, "2001" features a scene in which he willingly turns Fox into the propagandist arm of the Republican Party, and scenes like this are found throughout the seven episodes. In terms of problems, although it improves over time, the prosthetic work in the first couple of episodes is really poor. Ailes's skin is far too smooth and plastic-like, as if he's been run through a Photoshop filter. Another issue is that I'm not entirely convinced that seven hours were necessary. Tied to this is some unusual choices about content – so we get, for example, an episode on the purchasing of a local newspaper, but there's no mention of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, which was Fox's first big ratings win. If Roger Ailes didn't exactly build the Divided States with his own hands, at the very least, those who did were working from his blueprint, and The Loudest Voice is a very fine deconstruction of that blueprint. Certainly, it's more interested in probing the political impact of Fox than examining the psychology of the man, and it's disappointingly silent on the question of why he did what he did – it never really deals, for example, with whether or not Ailes genuinely believed he was fighting the good fight or if he recognised that he was essentially a snake oil salesman. However, for all that, it's very enjoyable – the acting is top-notch, the aesthetic superb, and the events it recounts of great importance in today's cultural climate.

A difficult-to-watch examination of grooming and the psychological scars of abuse Leaving Neverland is not about Michael Jackson, Wade Robson, or James Safechuck. It's about how paedophiles groom not just their victims, but their victims' families. It's about the relationship that victims can form with their abusers. It's about the reasons that can conspire to prevent victims from coming forward. It's about how the effects of childhood sexual abuse linger into adulthood. Undoubtedly, it's unbalanced in favour of the accusers, with director Dan Reed omitting anything on their ongoing lawsuits against the Jackson estate. Irrespective of this, however, it's a hugely important document on grooming and the psychological effects of abuse. The film tells the similar but separate stories of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, each of whom met Jackson in 1987, when Wade was five and James was ten, and both of whom claim Jackson abused them for much of the following decade. Despite the 240-minute runtime, the only interviewees are Wade, his mother Joy, sister Chantal, brother Shane, grandmother Lorraine Jean Cullen, and wife Amanda, and James, mother Stephanie, and wife Laura. Aesthetically, the film is as plain as possible. Whereas Wade and James's accounts are graphic, they're never sensationalised, with Reed allowing their words to speak for themselves – there's no cutaways to experts telling us what to think, no montages to suture us into the timeframe. Indeed, at times, Reed waits patiently as an interviewee formulates their thoughts – a kind of "dead air" that one doesn't find in most documentaries. This tendency to leave the stories unadorned ties into the small pool of interviewees – this is Wade and James's story, and anyone which can't speak to that specific rubric isn't featured. For example, there's no attempt to portray Jackson as less culpable because he didn't have a childhood. In fact, it makes no attempt to portray him at all. Again, this is Wade and James's story only. Within that, it's as much about the complex relationships that victims can develop with their abusers as it is with the abuse itself. This speaks to why both Wade and James lied for so long (each man defended Jackson when he was accused of molestation in 1993, and Wade again defended him against similar accusations in 2005) – they weren't just lying to other people, they were lying to themselves. And ultimately, the film suggests that rather than being indicative of fabrication, such falsehoods are an understandable reaction to sustained abuse. A major theme is the manipulative nature inherent to grooming. As much as it is about the manipulation of the boys, so too is it about the non-sexual manipulation of the families - Joy and Stephanie were both talked into granting permission for a man they didn't really know to take their child into his bed, and the two are working today as much to forgive themselves as they are to atone to their children. Of course, there are problems. The imbalance for example. I understand why Reed confined his interviews to just Wade, James, and their families, but by doing so, he has opened himself and the film up to a not illegitimate form of attack. And because this makes the film easier to critique, it makes it easier to dismiss, and thus easier to ignore, which is pretty much the opposite of what you want to happen as a documentarian. Another problem is that it doesn't need to be four-hours long. There are several lengthy narrative digressions that, although they help to flesh out the home lives of Wade and James, do very little to inform the allegations against Jackson. Reed also tends to overuse drone shots of LA, which act like paragraph breaks. It's an interesting idea, but there are far too many, becoming repetitive and, eventually, irritating. And then, of course, there are the omissions, which have proven to be a red flag to a bull for Jackson fans. For example, that Wade is suing the Jackson estate is mentioned once, very briefly, and never alluded to again. That James is also suing the estate is never mentioned. In the end, the lack of balance is a significant problem, but not to the extent that it undermines the way Reed presents the accusations, the way he teases out the process of grooming, the way he unflinchingly presents the abuse itself, the way he comes to focus on the years after the abuse ended – the film's cumulative effect is startlingly raw and generally persuasive. It looks at the process by which Jackson manoeuvred himself into a position to abuse the boys as much as at the abuse itself and at the psychological effects of telling the lie for so long as much as at the lie itself. In this sense, this is a hugely valuable document, not necessarily in terms of the specifics of Wade and James's stories, but in relation to the broader issues of child sexual abuse, and the misconceptions that permeate the zeitgeist.

A strong adaptation marred by a poor central performance For me, the definitive King Lear was Owen Roe in Selina Cartmell's magisterial 2013 Abbey Theatre production in Dublin. The scenes on the heath were unlike anything I've ever seen, as Roe alternated, sentence by sentence between a fairly standard (if brilliantly staged) raging at the heavens, and turning directly to the audience and speaking quietly and calmly, almost emotionlessly. Sentence. By. Sentence. Without breaking the metre of the iambic pentameter verse! Of course, Cartmell's choice here is obvious; the use of two different styles of delivery serve as a succinct visual/aural metaphor for the inner turmoil of the character, but although it's a thematically simple enough device, it requires a performance of immense control to bring it off. And then we have Anthony Hopkins in writer/director Richard Eyre's TV adaptation for the BBC. Oh dear. What's especially disappointing is how little interested he seems in doing anything beyond giving the barest essentials in his interpretation of the part. Hopkins played Lear in over 100 performances in David Hare's 1986 National Theatre production, so how can someone who played the part this often possibly give an under par performance? Well, probably because he played the part this often. The performance is lethargic, jaded, lazy, as if it's routine, become so familiar that all meaning has evaporated from the text. Hopkins plays Lear as an easy-to-anger man, used to getting his own way, with little time for sentiment, whose grip on reality is becoming increasingly tenuous. Nothing wrong with that - it's a very basic reading of the character, but still nothing inherently wrong with it. The problem is, we've seen him play this character before, or a variation thereof, in everything from Legends of the Fall to Nixon to The Wolfman. Indeed, his performance in Eyre's Lear is, beat for beat, a virtual carbon copy of his performance in Julie Taymor's Titus. There are many similarities between the characters, to be sure, but not so many that the parts should be played in exactly the same manner (as a contrast, look at Brian Cox's work in the two roles; Titus in Deborah Warner's ground-breaking 1987 RSC production, and Lear in Warner's 1990 National Theatre production - three years, and an ocean of interpretive difference separate the performances). Hopkins's performance has two gears - scenery chewing and shouty scenery chewing. Also, his tendency to pause in the middle of verse lines is extremely distracting, and completely disrupts the meter. Such pauses serve to create artificial caesuras in the iambic pentameter, turning the verse into a bizarre amalgamation of anapaestic and dactylic hexameters, and even heptameters. A stronger director would have stamped this out, or had the actor speak in prose (as a few of the other actors do), but to have the actor speak in verse, yet show no respect for the verse is...strange. Thankfully the rest of the cast are universally strong. Emma Thompson as a nasty Goneril; Jim Broadbent as a sympathetic Gloucester; John MacMillan as a soft-spoken Edmund; Andrew Scott as an emotional Edgar; Jim Carter as a gruff Kent; Florence Pugh as a wide-eyed Cordelia; Karl Johnson as a serious Fool; Christopher Eccleston as a ridiculous Oswald; Anthony Calf as a take-charge Albany; and Chukwudi Iwuji as a considerate France. However, the film is stolen by Emily Watson and Tobias Menzies as a bloodthirsty Regan and Cornwall. Watson's Regan oozes raw sexuality, and the blinding scene clearly turns both of them on. Two terrific performances which left me wishing there was more of them in the play. Also impressive is Eyre's direction. His decision to set the play in modern London, with Lear as a retiring pseudo-dictator, works very well (Edgar is an astrophysicist, Edmund is in the armed forces). In this context, a scene in a shopping mall is especially well executed, as a now quite mad Lear wanders around the near-derelict shopping mall in a bad part of town, dressed like a vagrant, pushing a shopping trolley, and talking to a doll. It's a deeply unsettling image that encapsulates perfectly just how far he has fallen. Also well-conceived is the scene set in an asylum seekers' refugee camp. The political commentary is a little on the nose, as Lear looks around the camp at the faces of the refugees, forcing him to consider issues of which he's never before conceived, but it's effective and timely. All-in-all, this is a strong adaptation with an excellent cast brought down only by a weak central performance. Unfortunately, the part of Lear is so central that if it doesn't work, there's a problem. Hopkins's performance isn't so bad as to distract too much from the excellent work done elsewhere, but what's annoying about it is it could easily have been so much better.

An extraordinarily lazy adaptation I don't do remakes. They're a cancer of the industry. Where I am more flexible, however, is in adaptations of novels that have already been adapted. After all, my all-time favourite film falls into this category (Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) was the second adaptation of James Jones's novel). Fahrenheit 451 is also a second adaptation; in this case, of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, and, for all intents and purposes, it's a misfire. Bradbury himself has said the novel is not about censorship, as is often assumed, but was written in response to the Second Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism. More specifically, it's a treatise on the dangers of an illiterate society unquestionably accepting the word of a monopolising centralised mass media. Adapted for the screen and directed by Ramin Bahrani, the film is set at an unspecified point in the future, after a second civil war has been fought. All aspects of society are rigidly controlled by the Ministry, an authoritarian government that believes unhappiness, mental illness, and difference of opinion come from unregulated reading. As such, all books have been banned, although simplified and edited Ministry-approved editions of texts such as the Bible, Herman Melville's Moby ****, or, the Whale (1851) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) are available on the internet (known as "the 9"). Special units of "firemen" are tasked with locating and burning any remaining books, and estimates suggest that within 20-30 years, books will have become completely extinct. The film follows two such firemen; Cpt. John Beatty (Michael Shannon), the veteran and somewhat disillusioned mentor of Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan), an idealistic rookie who believes unquestioningly in the firemen's work. That is until he meets Clarisse McClellan (Sofia Boutella), who educates him as to the real history of the US, the rise of the Ministry, and why they want literature destroyed. Now, you'd think that in this age of Trump's fake news and people using Facebook as a news source, something with this subject matter would speak volumes to a contemporary audience. And you'd be right. Unfortunately, this film isn't about sheeple and mass media. Apparently unaware of Bradbury's statements, the filmmakers have focused almost exclusively on censorship. But it falls down in other areas as well. Mildred Montag is absent, hence the theme of addiction to television broadcasting which tells people how and what to think. Additionally, the infrequent and scattered allusions to the importance of literary texts serve to undermine the absolutely essential nature of what a group of rebels are doing by memorising whole texts. This should be the film's absolute central statement, but instead, it comes across as a bunch of weirdos being quirky. Jordan plays Montag as a bombastic loudmouth TV personality. Shannon is, well, Shannon. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy. He's an actor of immense talent. But here, he's playing an identical character to the one he played in The Shape of Water (2017). It's an extraordinarily lazy performance. In fact, everything about the film is lazy. Bahrani's direction is flat and uninspired; the whole thing looks like Blade Runner-lite. It's all very conventional and safe, which neither the novel nor François Truffaut's 1966 adaptation was. And this conventionality and safety grind against the inherently rebellious subject matter, rendering it less urgent, and hence, less potent.

A fitting tribute to a man who was genuinely one of a kind On March 29, 1987, the most significant pro-wrestling match of all time took place at WrestleMania III in the Pontiac Silverdome, in front of 93,173 fans, as Hulk Hogan (the greatest of all time then and the greatest of all time now) defended his title against former best friend, André the Giant. It's not the greatest contest of all time; for a WrestleMania main event, it's very short (12 minutes), with Hogan extremely restricted as to what he could do with André, whose mobility was severely compromised and who was in immense pain due to acromegaly. But it didn't matter, because the match culminated with Hogan doing the impossible and slamming André. Which brings us to Jason Hehir's excellent documentary, the emotional high-point of which is that match. Sure, it's not always successful in its attempts to separate the man from the myth, often falling back on the very mythological elements it's trying to sidestep, and it's neither as insightful nor as objective as one might wish. However, it's respectful, informed, and entertaining, avoiding hagiography, and featuring some superb archival footage. Choosing to forego a narrator, and using only archival footage and talking-head interviews, Hehir allows the interviewees to tell the story. During pre-production, he and producer Bill Simmons decided to include only material which had been directly witnessed; there was to be nothing anecdotal; "we were only going to have first-person accounts. So, if someone said, "I heard André drank 156 beers," well, were you there? If you weren't, it's not gonna make it in. But when Ric Flair says "he drank 106 beers in front of me", that makes it in." This affords the documentary a sense of personalised intimacy – every interviewee is talking about things they saw rather than things about which they heard – which works towards Hehir's mission statement of depicting the man rather than the myth. In this respect, one of the most important sections is the disappointingly brief depiction of his time in his adopted home of Ellerbe, NC, which is where Hehir is most successful in dividing the man from the mythos. André loved living there because he could be himself and because he was left alone – he could be a regular citizen. This comes in the middle of a section about how logistically difficult André's life was (as Flair points out, he couldn't put on a disguise and stroll around New York, and as Hogan explains, everything was too small for him, rendering mundane tasks such as eating in a restaurant hugely difficult). The Ellerbe section is one of the most low-key, moving, and human parts of the documentary, and it's the only part where hyperbole seems entirely absent. Another moving section concerns the making of The Princess Bride. In a direct rejoinder to colleagues who humorously extol his legendary drinking, Cary Elwes points out that André drank as much as he did because he was perpetually in so much pain. Along the same lines, director Rob Reiner and actress Robin Wright discuss how surprised they were at how difficult André found it to perform even the simplest physical tasks (a pseudo-wrestling scene with Elwes had to use a (hilariously bad) stunt double, and for a scene where he catches Buttercup (Wright), she had to be supported on wires because André couldn't hold her weight. In this sense, although the tone is never melancholy, André's story does emerge as something of a tragedy – not because he failed to achieve his dreams, but because in doing so, he dissuaded himself from availing of the aid that could have lengthened his life, and would certainly have eased his suffering. In terms of problems, the most egregious is Hehir's failure (for the most part) to disentangle André Roussimoff from André the Giant. Hogan, Flair, WWE owner Vince McMahon and, André's best friend, Tim White all talk about the man behind the persona, but none of them knew him before he became André the Giant. This is why the Ellerbe section and the brief material on his life in France are so important, as they speak to who he was rather than who we believe him to be, with many of the (probably hyperbolic) stories fitting more comfortably into the image of André the Giant than the life of André Roussimoff. Additionally, more than likely due to WWE's direct involvement, there's nothing even remotely negative said about the company, although Hogan does point out that André probably shouldn't have been in the ring at WrestleMania III. The implication is that McMahon may have exploited André's passion for the business, but this is buried under more mythologising and is quickly forgotten. Nevertheless, this is a very fine tribute. André was vitally important to an industry at a pivotal crossroads, and the film captures why he was such a compelling character, able to elicit pathos (and later antagonism) from wrestling audiences the world over with relative ease.

Complex, intelligent, and sobering Based on Lawrence Wright's 2006 book, The Looming Tower tells the story of how the 9/11 attacks were made possible by the internecine squabbling between the CIA and FBI. However, whereas the majority of the book deals with al-Qaeda, the series focuses almost exclusively on the American perspective. Certainly, there are depictions of some of the terrorists; but this is an American story. And although the binary of CIA=bad/FBI=good is too neat, this is sobering TV, at its best as it depicts how easily these events could have been prevented. Although framed by the 9/11 Commission in 2004, the story begins in 1998, with both the CIA and FBI each having a dedicated "bin Laden unit". The CIA's Alec Station is run by Martin Schmidt (a pretentious and reptilian Peter Sarsgaard playing a thinly-fictionalised Michael Scheuer), whilst the FBI's I-49 is run by John O'Neill (a boisterous and foul-mouthed Jeff Daniels). Each unit is required to share intelligence with the other, but, in reality, they don't share much of anything except insults, whilst in between the two is Richard Clarke (Michael Stuhlbarg), National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism. As the show begins, bin Laden (referred to primarily as UBL) is interviewed for ABC News, promising a grand statement unless the US pull out of the Middle East. The majority of Americans, however, are more interested in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Developed for TV by Wright, Dan Futterman, and Alex Gibney, an element to which the show returns time and again is the underestimation of UBL. This is initially touched on in "Now It Begins...", with Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim), a young Lebanese-born FBI agent, telling O'Neill, "he used the interview to appear strong by threatening the United States as he looked an American directly in the eye." In "Mercury", Soufan explains, "killing Bin Laden is only going to secure his legend and inspire more martyrs." Later in this episode, O'Neill tells Schmidt, "this isn't a war about one man. Bin Laden is an ideologue, not some plutocrat running a banana republic. His people actually believe. It's bin Laden-ism we're up against, not just bin Laden." This underestimation is even more pronounced under the Bush presidency, leading to some of the show's best scenes. For example, in "A Very in Relationship", newly appointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Eisa Davis) interrupts Clarke as he's giving a presentation on al-Qaeda, telling him he's being too long-winded. A later scene in the same episode has O'Neill stunned when Rice doesn't know who he is. An extraordinarily well-written scene, it's the only time we see O'Neill lost for words. Another major theme is faith, especially the lapsed faith of O'Neill and Soufan. O'Neill was raised a catholic, but no longer practices, which troubles Liz (Annie Parisse), one of his two mistresses, who believes him (incorrectly) to be divorced. Soufan no longer practises Islam, but the faith-based nature of al-Qaeda troubles him ("when people use my religion to justify this s**t, it affects me"). Indeed, one of the most welcome elements of the show is the depiction of Muslims in general, challenging the notion that all Muslims are Islamic fundamentalists. Important here is Hoda al-Hada (July Namir), wife of one of the hijackers. She doesn't subscribe in any way to her husband's belief in UBL and is more concerned with her children knowing their father than the otherworldly blessings of Allah. When it comes to the acting, Bill Camp (playing Robert Chesney, one of O'Neill's most reliable agents) and Michael Stuhlbarg are the standouts. Camp is given an amazing eight-minute scene in "Mistakes Were Made" where he is quiet and calm, fondly remembering his military service, before exploding at the right moment. Stuhlbarg plays Clarke as perennially frustrated, and although he never lets Clarke's quiet politeness slip, on several occasions, he hovers tantalisingly close, in what is an exceptionally subtle and nuanced performance. In terms of problems, there's nothing on al-Qaeda's background, hugely important context that was one of Wright's main themes. The various romantic subplots feel rote, generic, and emotionally inauthentic; elements forced into the story so as to counter the testosterone-soaked main narrative. Another issue is the rigid binary distinction between the FBI and CIA (and between O'Neill and Schmidt), which never feels completely authentic. Nevertheless, The Looming Tower is taut and complex. The story is streamlined, but it hasn't been drained of moral complexity, serving as a reminder of something with great importance today – with UBL literally telling the US he was going to attack, everyone was more focused on a semen-stained dress. And living, as we do, in an era where the American media is routinely distracted by irrelevancies, it seems the lessons of history have not been heeded.

Thematically interesting and brilliantly acted, but painfully slow and far too long Although Sharp Objects has been advertised as a murder-mystery, it's really interested not in who's behind a pair of murders in a Missouri town, but in how those murders affect a trio of women caught up in the investigation. Feminine in design rather than feminist, the show is a portrait of tainted motherhood and corrupted sisterhood, and focuses on internecine inter-generational conflict, matrilineal dysfunction, and the difficulty of escaping past trauma. But whilst the acting is exceptional, and the show is well edited, it left me unengaged, uninterested, and bored. Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) is a barely-functioning alcoholic who works as a reporter in St. Louis, and who is sent to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to report on the murder of two young girls. Her mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), looks down on her with barely-concealed disappointment, and Camille is especially haunted by the memory of her younger sister Marian, who died when they were children. In the years since, Adora re-married and had another child, Amma (Eliza Scanlen), who fascinates Camille with her dual personality – dutiful daughter who plays with a doll's house, and roller-blading lollypop **** teenage temptress. Based on the 2006 Gillian Flynn novel, Sharp Objects was written primarily by showrunner Marti Noxon and Flynn herself, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who was also lead editor. This is important insofar as the editing is the show's calling card, attempting to draw us into Camille's psyche via fleeting snippets of childhood memories. So, for example, adult Camille lies in bed and stares at a crack on the ceiling and when we cut back to the bed, she's a child looking at that same crack; adult Camille is shown opening a door, and child Camille enters a room. This inculcates us into Camille's mind, also hinting at her trauma, without ever being too revealing. Vallée overuses the technique, neutering it of its potency, but that notwithstanding, it's a good example of "show, don't tell", and of content generating form and form giving rise to content; the memories are tied to Camille's fragmented psychology, with the brief cuts acting like splinters in her mind. Thematically, the show focuses on female experience, specifically motherhood/daughterhood. Adora is a woefully bad mother who made little secret of the fact that she preferred Marian to Camille, telling her, "you can't get close. That's your father. And it's why I think I never loved you. You were born to it, that cold nature". Later she admits that what she wanted from Camille was the one thing Camille couldn't give – she wanted Camille to need her. The show also deals with how women respond to familial trauma, arguing that the pain experienced by abused women is just as valid as that experienced by abused men, the manifestations of trauma just as catastrophic, and the anger engendered just as self-destructive. We're used to seeing stories focused on damaged, hard-drinking male characters with dark backgrounds, but Sharp Objects is about the female equivalent. Indeed, in Wind Gap women are locked into the virgin/slut binary; it's a place where a woman's worth correlates with her femininity, her maternal instincts, and her acceptance of her place in androcentric societal structures. However, I just couldn't get into it. The biggest problem is the pace. I understand it's a character drama, not a plot-heavy murder-mystery, but as episode after episode ended flatly, I just stopped caring. Almost nothing happens. And that's not hyperbole, I mean it literally. Tied to this is that the show is far, far too long. The novel is 254 pages, but the show runs 385 minutes, with the characters not interesting enough to take up the slack. Elsewhere, the flashback editing is used so often that it loses its potency and starts to feel like Vallée is using it arbitrarily rather than in the service of character. Additionally, the show abounds in clichés – the alcoholic hard-as-nails journalist, the incompetent local police, the out of town detective to whom nobody listens, the gossiping women. Vallée also has a tendency to overuse certain images, thus robbing them of their effectiveness – Amma and her friends roller-blading around town, Amma playing silently with her dollhouse, shots of Camille filling a water bottle with vodka. There's a lot to admire in Sharp Objects, but precious little to like. Not exactly a work of post-#MeToo fempowerment, it certainly has a female-centric perspective, and its examination of issues usually associated with men is interesting. The performances are top-notch and the editing is decent if overused, but the show did little for me. I understand it's designed holistically rather than cumulatively, and I have no problem with that. But the pace is enervating and the characters just aren't interesting enough to fill the runtime..

More of a conventional documentary than advertised, but it provides a good overview In many ways, Ted Bundy is the archetypal serial killer, embodying many of the characteristics we associate with such criminals. Most significantly he was the first celebrity serial killer, and remains the best-known example (Charles Manson wasn't a serial killer). He also embodies media and cultural fixation with killers, almost always at the expense of their victims. And although Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes certainly has merit, and is well-made, it's also guilty of focusing on the killer whilst giving little time over to the victims. Written and directed by Joe Berlinger, one gets the distinct impression that Bundy himself would have been immensely happy with it. Conversations is derived from over 100 hours of audio recordings of Bundy being interviewed by Stephen G. Michaud, the transcripts of which have been available online for years, but which have never actually been heard before. One of the most important aspects of the series, is that Bundy would not discuss the murders, and so, to trick him into talking about them, Michaud asked him to act as a kind of consultant and to speculate as to the killer's motives. Not recognising that Michaud was exploiting his narcissism, Bundy immediately began to talk about the murderer in the third person. However, Conversations is more of a conventional documentary than you might expect. This is not necessarily a criticism, as the biographical material, whilst never original, is interesting and well put together; his involvement with the Vietnam Anti-war Movement, his work for a Suicide Hotline, his work as Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission (where he wrote a pamphlet for women on **** prevention). An equally fascinating aspect of the series, but one which is under-explored, is how Bundy's white privilege factored into his murders. As a well-educated, well-dressed, humorous, respectable middle-class white man, obviously intelligent, and seemingly charming, he was able to hide in plain sight, because no one could conceive of a man like him being a sadistic murderer. The problem, however, is that the show falls into the same trap; Bundy's wit and charm appears to win Berlinger over, as he seems to be just as fascinated with Bundy's antics as the media and public were. To be fair, the show doesn't glorify him; Berlinger ensures the audience knows he was a monster. However, the question is raised of when does documenting a violent narcissist transition into giving them a platform? With this in mind, the victims receive relatively little attention. Some, like his youngest victim, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, are focuses upon,, but others are lumped together, and Berlinger makes no real effort to characterise them. Instead of giving us a vivid illustration of who they were by interviewing family and friends, Berlinger gives us a rough pencil sketch made up of contemporary news reports. Aside from the side-lining of victims, the most obvious issue with Conversations is that it's a far more conventional piece than a deep dive into previously untapped reservoirs of Bundy's psyche. Part of the reason for this is the dearth of actual audio material, as from the 100 hours available, Berlinger uses about 20 minutes all told. Pretty much everything else is standard bio material, nothing that anyone familiar with the case won't already know. There are also some very strange aesthetic choices. For example, as Bundy discusses his relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer, a montage of contemporaneous footage depicts exactly what he's talking about (when me mentions eating dinner, there's a shot of a family sitting around the dinner table; when he mentions being nervous, we see someone biting their nails). It's a spectacularly on-the-nose montage that accomplishes nothing. A similar moment sees Bundy discussing sexuality, and Berlinger shows us a rapid montage of hardcore S&M porn, which is not only distasteful, it's ideologically reductionist. The worst example is when Carol DaRonch, one of five victims to survive Bundy, mentions that her life flashed before her, Berlinger inserts a montage of quaint home movie footage. If all that sounds very negative, however, let me be clear, I did enjoy Conversations, I was just a little disappointed in it. People already familiar with the case won't learn anything new, and those looking for a unique entry-point into the mind of a killer will be left wanting. Nevertheless, this is the story of a sociopathic narcissist that comments not just on societal privilege, but which also interrogates our own ghoulish fascination with such monsters. And yes, Berlinger seems unaware of the glaring irony here, but that doesn't change the fact that he has fashioned the ramblings of a mad man into a fascinating piece of work.

Overlong, but the acting is immense As far back as the late 80s/early 90s, long before "long-form narrative" became the dominant mode of television storytelling, I was a fan of what would then have been called "non-episodic storytelling", the best-known examples of which would have been Michael Mann's Crime Story (1986-1987) and David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (1990-1991). So, with that in mind, in an era where long-form narrative has become the norm, I should be in my element. And I am. Except for one thing - "Netflix bloat"; essentially, the phenomenon of shows stretching their stories too thin across too many episodes. And so we have the otherwise excellent Escape at Dannemora, a four or five-hour story elongated to eight hours. Ostensibly a prison break drama, the series is more interested in the psychology of the people involved. Excellently directed and beautifully shot, with a quartet of astounding performances at its centre, the show tells a fascinating story, but it moves at a glacial pace that requires serious patience. Written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin, and directed by Ben Stiller, the series tells the story of the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility escape, when Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro) and David Sweat (Paul Dano) escaped the maximum security prison with the aid of civilian prison employee Joyce "Tilly" Mitchell (Patricia Arquette), who was involved in a sexual relationship with both men. Aesthetically, Dannemora is exceptional, with director of photography Jessica Lee Gagne's work especially laudable. In the opening scene of the fifth episode, for example, there's a nine-minute single shot following Sweat from his cell to the manhole which they will use to escape. The unedited format really sells the distance they have to travel and the extraordinary effort it took to get out. Also worth noting is that the series is shot in CinemaScope (2.40:1). This format is almost never used on TV, where everything tends to be shot 1.78:1 (Master of None is an exception), but Stiller and Gagne use the format magnificently, with the narrow frame confining the characters. Combined with shooting through windows and having the characters stand in doorways, the compositions visually signify that these people are fundamentally trapped, existentially if not literally. From an acting perspective, Arquette is extraordinary. Yes, the physical transformation is laudable, but this is more than an impersonation. She plays Tilly as in a perpetual state of rage and resentment, a woman who feels she's entitled to more than she has. When we first meet her, her frustration levels with her husband Lyle (Eric Lange) are at breaking point, but in the sixth episode, which flashes back to formative moments from the characters' pasts, we learn that Lyle himself was once the same kind of escape hatch for Tilly that Matt and Sweat are in 2015. This episode also demonstrates her cruelty; something which has been on the fringes of the character thus far. Arquette emphasises Tilly's naivete, leaning into her childlike quality; seen in the tendency for her voice to become shrill and nasally, and to start crying whenever challenged. However, she never lets us forget that Tilly is hateful, disillusioned, and dangerous. Del Toro plays Matt as a classic sociopath; externally calm, but inherently volatile, and in the flashback episode, we see the extent of his sociopathy. Dano focuses on Sweat's brilliant mind, playing him as calm and thoughtful, but prone to anger when things don't go his way. Lange plays Lyle as blinded by ignorance and loyalty, convinced that Tilly still loves him, and he can weather the current storm. Lange leans into Lyle's inability to see just how much he's being manipulated, abused, and ridiculed, with his adoration for Tilly never wavering. The show unquestionably depicts him as a simpleton, but Lange finds more depth in the part. The problem with all of this, is the runtime, which is two or three hours too long. Yes, the deep dive into the characters' psychologies and backstory is fascinating, and the flashback episode is superb, but we didn't need five hours of context to get there, and at times, the plot seems to cease all forward momentum. It's never boring, but so much of it lacks urgency or tension. Ultimately, Escape at Dannemora is a brilliant piece of direction, with awe-inspiring performances. Although it gives us a lot of detail about the mechanics of the escape, it's far more interested in the mechanics of people. And in that sense, it's always interesting. It's also good evidence that just because you can use eight or more hours to tell a story, doesn't necessarily mean that you should. As a five hour piece, this could have been sensational. As is, it's above average, saved by its cast and Stiller's fine direction, but it remains always a slog.

Much better than recent seasons Less a stand-alone narrative than a sequel to Murder House, Coven, and Hotel, American Horror Story: Apocalypse makes explicit what fans have implicitly known since the end of Freak Show - each season takes place in a shared universe. In recent years, the show has unquestionably stumbled, first with the poorly constructed meta-narrative of Roanoke, then with the horrendous Cult, leaving a fanbase yearning for a return to the brilliance of Murder House and Asylum. Apocalypse is nowhere near that as good, but it's a damn sight better than the last two seasons. When a nuclear conflagration wipes out most of mankind in 2019, a group of survivors find refuge in Outpost 3, one of multiple fallout shelters constructed by an organisation known as The Cooperative, tickets for which cost $100m per person. After eighteen months, however, the inhabitants are on the edge of madness. Enter Michael Langdon (Cody Fern). A representative of The Cooperative, he is to interview the Outpost 3 residents to determine who will be taken to The Sanctuary, an unimpenetrable fortress. Langdon, of course, is the murderous baby from the end of Murder House, and only Cordelia Goode (Sarah Paulson) and her coven can stand against him. Perhaps the most noticeable thing about Apocalypse is the structure, with the majority of the season taking place prior to the Apocalypse. About ten minutes into the fourth episode, "Could It Be... Satan?", the show cuts to three years earlier, telling the story of how Langdon went from being a baby in 2011 to a man in his 20s in 2021, how he came to be involved with The Cooperative, and how he came into conflict with Cordelia and the witches. The "present" is then not picked up about mid-way through the finale. As with every previous season of the show, the acting is exemplary. This season sees Paulson pulling triple duty, whilst also directing the sixth episode - "Return to Murder House". Evan Peters does her one better, playing four characters. And to nobody's surprise, Jessica Lange is superb as Constance, despite having only two scenes. However, the stand-out performance is Cody Fern. He is especially good in the scenes which show him still living with Constance, where he plays Langdon as a confused and moody teenager, a performance diametrically opposed to his 2021 Langdon, who is poised, confident, and quietly dangerous. Thematically, the show has always been hit and miss. On one hand, Murder House told a story about a middle-class family turning on itself, Asylum was a parable about clinical repression and religious cruelty, Coven dealt with the conflict between tradition and modernity, and Freak Show was a plea for acceptance and tolerance. On the other, Hotel, Roanoke and Cult were thematically weak. Reading between the lines of Apocalypse, it's partly about how centuries of male leadership has led the world to the brink of destruction, something which can only be avoided by the intervention **** of women. Indeed, one of the major plot strands sees a group of warlocks teaching Langdon how to harness his magical abilities in the hopes he may become the first male Supreme. Although Myrtle reminds them that testosterone is an inhibitor, the warlocks are so determined to overthrow the matriarchy that most of them ignore the signs that Langdon is dangerous. In this milieu, the dynamic between the witches and the warlocks is an inverse of traditional gender roles, with men forced to justify their behaviour to women in positions of power. However, there are problems. For example, the first episode, "The End", features a scene where a character speaks in voice over, suggesting he is to be the focal character. However, not only is this not the case, but no one ever speaks in voice over again, making this scene stand out like a sore thumb. A later episode also features a truly random and poorly thought-out diversion to Russia in 1918, which serves very little purpose. The show's Satanists are also ridiculous, so camp and clichéd they didn't work even as parodies. Additionally, the way the story resolves itself is a little too easy, whilst some viewers will object to the conclusion insofar as what it means for the ghostly inhabitants of Murder House. All in all though, I enjoyed Apocalypse. The cross-over is well handled, and the fact that so many actors are playing more than one character (occasionally in the same episode), really lets you see just how talented a group of performers they are. Better than Freak Show, Roanoke, and Cult, it's probably on a par with Hotel, but is nowhere near as good as Murder House, Asylum, or Coven.

Brilliantly acted; equal parts hilarious and harrowing Directed by Edward Berger, and written for the screen by David Nicholls, this five-part miniseries is based on the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, published between 1992 and 2011. Each of the five episodes is based on a single novel, with each set in a different year. In the first episode, "Bad News" (set in 1982, and actually the second novel in the series), Patrick (Benedict Cumberbatch), in the midst of a debilitating heroin addiction, receives word that his sybaritic father David (a terrifying Hugo Weaving) has died in New York, and he must collect the body. In "Never Mind" (the first novel in the sequence), as Patrick goes through heroin withdrawal upon returning from New York, he thinks back to 1967 and his time in the family's French villa, where David first **** him. In "Some Hope" (set in 1990), Patrick, now clean, reluctantly attends a banquet for Princess Margaret (Harriet Walter). In "Mother's Milk" (set in 2003), Patrick, now sober for several years, and working as a barrister, visits the villa with his family, where his mother Eleanor (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is extremely sick, having suffered a stroke. The stress results in Patrick drinking heavily. In "At Last" (set in 2005), his drinking has spiralled out of control following the dissolution of his marriage. The show wastes no time in establishing how severe Patrick's addictions are. In the opening scene of the first episode, he answers a telephone, to learn that his father has died. However, he looks and talks as if he is slightly out of sync with everything else. Struggling to keep himself upright, he sways, droops, seems about to fall asleep. Then he picks up a syringe. Upon hanging up the phone, he stares at the syringe, and his eyes come into focus for the first time. It's a stark introduction to the character, immediately establishing the hold drugs have on him. The show employs a number of stylistic devices to draw us into his interiority - dialogue only Patrick and the audience can hear, unnatural lighting changes corresponding to his mood, glitches in the picture in sync with his psychotic breaks, the bleeding of the past into the present (a room in the present will remind him of a room in the past, and suddenly he'll be there; he opens a door in 1982, and we cut to him standing in an open doorway in 1967). Aesthetically, each episode is grounded in a different genre. "Bad News" is a yuppie version of Trainspotting (1996), a dark night of the soul awash in non-diegetic purples and greens, where the formal chaos mirrors the breakdown of Patrick's mind; "Never Mind" is a lurid summer retreat, along the lines of Call Me by Your Name (2017), with a preponderance of deep yellows and reds; "Some Hope" is an Upstairs, Downstairs (1971)/Gosford Park (2001)-style comedy of manners, examining the ludicrousness of the class system; "Mother's Milk" is partly a fish-out-of-water story and partly a psychosexual intellectual drama; and "Mother's Milk" is a cold postmodern tragedy full of angst and unlooked-for self-discovery, dominated by metallics, greys, and blues. The show's most salient theme is the idea that when you deeply hurt a child, when you damage a child's soul, the effects will continue to be felt for many years. As is alluded to throughout the first episode, and as becomes painfully clear in the second, when Patrick was a child, David began molesting him. Rather than depicting this, the show's most chilling scene is one in which Patrick comes to David's room, and there is a shot of the perfectly-made bed on which David sits. After Patrick leaves, however, there is a shot of the bed in disarray. We never see what happens, because we don't need to. This is as well-directed a bit of cinematic shorthand as you're ever likely to see. Horrific in its simplicity. Another important theme is a mockery of the aristocracy. This is seen most clearly in the third episode, and especially in the odious character of Princess Margaret. The show depicts a decadent, toxic, emotionally calcified, and morally bankrupt class of people belonging to another age that have somehow lingered into modernity. Of course, this raises an obvious objection - "why should we care about Patrick?" Well, in part, we shouldn't. Essentially, this is the story of a spoiled rich kid. It's the very definition of white male privilege. And it never really manages to shake that. But there is more to it. For the themes, for the humour, for what it says about the British peerage, and, especially, for Cumberbatch's performance, this is certainly worth checking out. And despite the fact that we know Patrick is an obnoxious addict, there is enough humanity to ensure we remember the very real trauma beneath the bluster. And in that sense, it remains always compelling.

One of the finest documentaries ever made Described by the show's official website as "an immersive 360-degree narrative," The Vietnam War is a behemoth in every sense of the word; written by historian Geoffrey C. Ward and directed by celebrated documentarians Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the series cost $30 million to make, and was in production for over ten years, with the ten episodes running to a gargantuan eighteen hours. Assembled from over 24,000 photos and 1,500 hours of archive footage, the show features interviews with 79 people, including analysts, bureaucrats, journalists, artists, anti-war protestors, draft dodgers, conscientious objectors, deserters, Gold Star family members, and American, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese troops. Deliberately eschewing interviews with historians and major polarising figures such as Jane Fonda, John Kerry, or Oliver Stone, the series features what Burns and Novick define as a "ground up" approach; concentrating almost exclusively on the experiences of ordinary people and soldiers from every side. Beginning with the French invasion of Indochina in 1858 and concluding with the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982 (although some brief postscript material goes up to President Barak Obama's visit to Vietnam in 2016), the series hits all the beats you'd expect within this timeframe, but where the show excels is not in trying to present an all-inclusive summary of everything that happened in the war, but in its mixture of the macro and the micro - intercut into the larger framework of political analysis and military assessment are more relatable and personalised interviews, which serve to reinforce what the war was like for the people who actually fought it and their families back home. These human stories serve as Burns and Novick's "ground up" material, helping to contextualise the less personal socio-political canvas against which they are set. A major theme throughout the series is the effect the war had on the American psyche. Whilst the first episode outlines how the US emerged from World War II as world leaders, convinced of its own irrefutable morality, and proud of its self-appointed role as global law enforcer, later episodes detail how all of this changed during the war. Fought in a country few Americans had even heard of, and fewer still knew anything about, the war was a conflict whose ultimate futility at so great a cost was unlike anything any living American had seen. The stain of the war lingered for decades, and lingers still. As the documentary lays bare, Vietnam fundamentally redefined the notion of American patriotism, altered the American zeitgeist, and undermined American exceptionalism. Another vital theme, but one which is left for the viewer to provide the connective tissue, is how the domestic events of the war are mirrored in contemporary American society. Undoubtedly, the war was the most divisive period in the US since the Civil War. However, the most divisive period since the war is right now; the US is currently in the seventeenth year of a war begun under dubious circumstances; there are accusations of foreign collusion in a US election; the president has threatened to use force against an Asian nation; there are mass demonstrations across the country; the White House is obsessed with leaks, with three different presidents attempting to undermine the media in a manner not dissimilar to Trump's catchphrase of "fake news." However, the series is not perfect. The most obvious criticism is that despite their claims that all sides are represented equally, there is an imbalance between the anti-war movement (represented by three interviewees and dozens of vets), and those who supported the war (represented by a few comments here and there from people who admit they were conflicted). This imbalance is also present in the number of North Vietnamese combatants (14) weighed against the number of South Vietnamese combatants (7). There are also some notable, and oftentimes bizarre, omissions. For example, there is no mention whatsoever of Maj Gen Edward Lansdale, LTC John Paul Vannor Lê Van Vien (aka Bay Vien). Nevertheless, The Vietnam War is an undeniably epic achievement. Burns and Novick have distilled down a massively complex canvas, whilst at the same time refusing to placate either side. This refusal leaves the series open to criticism from both sides, but it may also be the show's greatest strength. Rather than submitting to partisan politics, the series follows its own path, irrespective of how it appears to those with preconceived notions. Harrowing and insightful, informative and disturbing, conciliatory rather than condemnatory, The Vietnam War is a masterpiece.

Does what it aims to do Executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, and made by Will Smith's production company (Smith is also the presenter), One Strange Rock is essentially about the experiences of eight astronauts, and how their time in space led them to see Earth with new eyes. That, in turn, is used as a jumping off point to examine several different branches of Earth Science, with each episode focusing on a specific astronaut and dealing with a specific topic; the planet's respiratory system, the Theia Impact theory, how the planet protects us from the sun, the origin of life, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, the possibility of colonising another planet, how life has both transformed the Earth and been transformed by it, the evolution from single celled microbes to complex organisms, the development of the human brain, and the concept of Earth as home. Along the way, the show throws up a litany of hard to believe facts. To give just a sampling; the Amazon produces twenty times more oxygen than all of humanity could use, but none of it leaves the Amazon Basin, as it is used by the animals living there; the magnetic field generated by the planet's core stretches for 400,000 miles into space in every direction; every strand of DNA in the world contains billions of carbon atoms to bind it together; the human body has 37 trillion cells (more than the stars in the galaxy); tropical islands are composed of up to 70% parrot fish excrement; photosynthesis generates 100 terawatts of energy per year, six times more than humanity could use; the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe; 95% of all animals that have ever existed are extinct. Easily my favourite take from the show, however, is that it's 250,000 miles to the moon, 700 million miles to Saturn, 9 trillion miles to the edge of the solar system, 24 trillion miles to the nearest star (with our current technology, it would take 17,000 years to get there), and 25,000 light years (150,000 trillion miles) to the edge of the galaxy. That's a whole lotta miles! Very enjoyable stuff. My one complaint would be that most of the episodes feel a little padded, with each one containing two or three diversionary stories only tangentially related to the core theme. But it's still well worth watching; terrific visuals, great sound, experts who know what they're talking about, and mind blowing information, if the goal was to make the viewer look at Earth in a new manner, they certainly succeeded with me.

Unbearably painful Created by Julia Willoughby-Nason, Jenner Furst, and Nick Sandow, directed by Furst, and with Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter and Harvey Weinstein serving as executive producers, this six-part documentary tells the almost unbearably tragic story of Kalief Browder, a 16-year-old who was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. With his family unable to afford the $900 bail, Browder spent 1,111 days in Rikers, despite never being convicted of a crime. Turning down nine plea deals, Browder refused to admit to something he didn't do just so he could go home. With his case brought to court and delayed multiple times, Browder spent over 800 days in solitary confinement, where his mental health rapidly deteriorated. Indeed, the episodes dealing with his time in Rikers, and the experience and effects of long-term solitary confinement, are almost too horrific to bear. Were this fiction, the litany of abuses he suffers, and the details of how the system failed him, would be rejected as ridiculous, with his nightmare continuing even upon his release; in two separate incidents, he was shot and stabbed, and was later sectioned, as he became increasingly paranoid and unstable. Telling the parallel story of the anguish of his doting mother, if I had one criticism, it would be that the narrative is stretched too thin. Much like The Keepers, there isn't enough material here to warrant this many episodes, and it does lapse into repetition at times. Nevertheless, this is harrowing stuff; highly recommended.

Unadventurous but enjoyable When Anthony Sullivan (Michael Riendeau) disappears on his tenth birthday, his family is devastated. However, as more and more time passes without the police being able to locate him, long-buried family secrets are dragged to the surface, turning the Sullivan family against one another. A journeyman show, The Disappearance is very much paint-by-numbers stuff, with nothing you haven't before seen in half-a-dozen similar narratives, with writers Normand Daneau and Geneviève Simard taking no real risks. Having said that, however, it's a well-made piece of television. Confidently directed by Peter Stebbings, the material may offer nothing revelatory, but what it does offer is enjoyable enough on its own terms. An excellent Peter Coyote dominates the show as Anthony's grandfather, Henry, a retired judge with a strained relationship (to say the least) with his son, Luke (Aden Young), Anthony's father. As the veneer of civility slowly erodes, the fissures running beneath the family dynamic begin to erupt, with blame and recrimination becoming the central tenets of familial interaction. You may guess half-way through who the kidnapper is, and yes, they're one of those Hollywood kidnappers who leave cryptic clues everywhere, but this remains a well-made, if unadventurous, show.