When a trailer for Q Force (Netflix) was released in June, it caused a kerfuffle on social media. This animated series, about a queer group of spies operating an offshoot squad in the fictional American Intelligence Agency, failed to put its best foot forward with its teaser, which was a ragingly unfunny series of LGBTQ+ cliches and bad jokes. Online commentators were unimpressed by its rainbow...
“Folks say that as we get on, life is a series of indignities,” muses a judge to a police chief in a small American town. “I’m not sure I see it that way. Because once you don’t give a shit how you look or what people think, then nothing seems like an indignity.” He Irishes up his coffee with whiskey. “If my man boobs are blocking the view of my shoes, so what?” It’s a good question, the kind of...
Are we still surprised that comedians and comic actors can turn their hands to drama? Or are we sophisticated enough to know now that if you can do comedy, you can do anything. It’s trying to go the other direction that generally holes performances below the waterline. True Story (Netflix) is here to add to the mountain of evidence that comedy-to-drama is a road worth travelling. The hugely...
Over early morning coffee at his Oxfordshire farmhouse, Jeremy Clarkson is talking about his new nemesis, badgers, and the fact that they constantly urinate, usually on his grass. “If they’ve got TB and a cow eats that bit of grass, then you, the taxpayer, pay for that cow to be killed. A quarter of the world’s badgers live in the UK, causing chaos. But if you say, ‘I’m going to shoot a badger’...
The dark new drama The Shrink Next Door tells an almost unbelievable story. Almost, of course, because it actually happened. In 1980s New York, wealthy businessman Martin “Marty” Markowitz fell under the spell of his psychiatrist Isaac “Ike” Herschkopf, who manipulated Marty into giving him his house, handing over his business and cutting off his family for almost 30 years. In an adaptation...
There are plenty of theories why the John Lewis Christmas ad no longer hits as hard as it once did. You could look at the fortunes of John Lewis itself, which has spent the last couple of years locked in a nightmare of plunging revenues and store closures. You could look at how aggressively every other retailer has attempted to rip off the tear-jerky John Lewis Christmas ad formula, to the extent...
Welcome, one and all, to the first television adaptation of a Mark Millar comic, and the first fruit of Netflix’s £25m purchase of his publishing house in 2017. It is Jupiter’s Legacy, a tale full of intergenerational superhero conflict, flashbacks to late 20s Chicago, and as much crash-smash-whizzbangery in among the parental guilt, boomer certainty and millennial angst as you could hope to find...
There is a moment near the start of Jimmy McGovern’s latest drama, Time (BBC One), that perfectly encapsulates his genius. Mark Cobden (Sean Bean) is arriving for processing at the prison in which he will serve his four-year sentence. Among the questions barked at him – name, age, is he on any medication – is one about his religion. Nervous and disoriented, he mumbles something about not really...
The actor Tommy Dorfman has confirmed that she is transgender. Dorfman, who played the gay cis-male character Ryan Shaver on the hit Netflix show 13 Reasons Why, told Time magazine: “I view today as a reintroduction to me as a woman, having made a transition medically … Today is about clarity: I am a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her. My name is Tommy.” Dorfman told the interviewer, trans...
The greatest trick by Lupin, a new French series on Netflix, is disguising substantiveness in plain sight. The show, created by the British showrunner George Kay and inspired by the beloved French character Arsène Lupin, packages over 115 years of inspiration (dating back to the character’s invention by writer Maurice Leblanc in 1905) in a slick, swift escape easily binged in a day. Its star, the...