Netflix

Thursday

Melissa Kite

How I fell out of love with the BBC

One of the many technological things I don’t understand is, how come I’m paying to watch television? I know why I used to pay. I used to switch on a box in the corner of the room and marvel at the choice of three quite interesting programmes and something slightly racy on Channel 4. It was all reassuringly underwhelming, with everyone doing as well as could be expected given the circumstances. The cardboard sets on a lot of the shows wobbled and we were happier for it, one could argue. There was an obvious balance of earnestly attempted light entertainment and archly presented informative content and I for one didn’t

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Too edgy and clever to be wasted on kids: Netflix’s Locke & Key reviewed

One of my perpetual gnawing terrors is that I’ll recommend a series that looks initially promising but turns out to be total rubbish, meaning I’ll for ever have thousands of viewers’ wasted lives and disappointment on my conscience. But my even greater fear is that I’ll peremptorily condemn something after one or two episodes which subsequently reveals itself to be a near-masterpiece. This almost happened with Locke & Key (Netflix). ‘You realise I’m watching this on sufferance. The second you’ve seen enough to review, we’re moving on to something else,’ declared the Fawn. And I could sort of see her point. Not only does it take a while to get

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Why the BBC licence fee makes sense

A consensus seems to be forming that the BBC licence fee is for the chop. In a digital age, the reasoning goes, we should not be forced to subscribe to huge bundles of content, with no choice over what we pay for and what we don’t. This argument, intriguingly, is both true and false at the same time. It is worth remarking that Netflix and Spotify succeeded by adopting a very similar model to, er, the BBC What’s true is that technology has removed two constraints which made the licence fee necessary in the first place. At the BBC’s outset, the airwaves were limited, creating a monopoly. Moreover it was

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite

Russian Doll is a brilliant new Netflix drama in which a woman relives the same night over and over again. It is particularly enjoyable for me to watch because I feel like that is exactly what I am going through. The same problems present and re-present themselves, quite as though I never come to grips with them, when in reality I do nothing but try to come to grips with them. In Russian Doll, a New York software engineer called Nadia Vulvokov (‘It’s like Volvo only longer,’ she pleads) finds herself reliving her 36th birthday party in an ongoing time loop wherein she repeatedly dies horribly in a violent accident

Friday

Robert Jackman

The best underrated shows on Netflix

With over 160 million subscribers – which ranks somewhere between the population of Bangladesh and Nigeria – Netflix’s biggest shows command staggering audiences worldwide. But the streaming platform has also snapped up the rights to hundreds of lesser known series, some of which are just as good. Here’s our pick of the undiscovered gems: Rectify When it comes to sheer critical acclaim, few shows can match Rectify. From the moment this slow-burn crime drama debuted in the US in 2013, it was praised to the hills by television aficionados. Yet even after four successful seasons, and an excellent finale, the show remains relatively unknown compared to the likes of Breaking

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The best Oscar-winning films to watch on Netflix

As this year’s Oscar-winning films continue their box office reign, it’s salutary to remember that some excellent films have been honoured over the years. Even as many have faded from memory (Crash, anyone?), some of the award-winners that can be found on Netflix represent the very best in contemporary cinema. Here are some of our favourites. The Silence Of The Lambs (1991) Jonathan Demme’s psychological thriller was the last (to date) film to win the ‘big five’ at the Oscars – Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay. Although many aspects of it, especially Anthony Hopkins’s performance as the intellectual cannibal Hannibal Lecter, have been

Tuesday

Robert Jackman

The best foreign language films to watch on Netflix

With South Korean film Parasite taking home the Best Picture gong at this year’s Oscars, it’s clear that foreign language films and series are having a bit of a moment. Keen to polish your language skills whilst devouring a good box-set at the same time – or just looking to sound more cultured at your next dinner party? Either way, you won’t regret getting stuck into these subtitled Netflix dramas: Fauda Following hot on the heels of Homeland (which also began life in Israel), Israeli terorrism thriller Fauda – which means ‘chaos’ in Arabic – has been a bit of a global smash for Netflix. While the show has tension

Wednesday

Will Gore

The best war films to watch on Netflix

1917, the World War One epic that has picked up 10 Oscar nominations (including for Best Picture and Best Director for Sam Mendes), is currently going great guns in cinema. If it has put you in the mood for more war on screen, then fire up Netflix, where there are plenty of military flicks to pick from. Jarhead 1917 is not Sam Mendes’s first foray onto the battlefield. Jarhead, released in 2005, was an adaptation of a memoir written by US marine Anthony Swofford about his experience of serving in the first Iraq war – the resulting film is a different kind of war movie in which the longueurs of

Wednesday

James Delingpole

The only way to survive Christmas TV is to avoid anything seasonal and watch Giri/Haji

The key to surviving the next couple of weeks of TV is to avoid like the plague anything that smacks of seasonal viewing. So, no Christmas specials (such as the semi-celebrity, elderly grown-ups version of University Challenge where the questions are even more laboriously PC than on the student edition), no Harry Potter, no adverts featuring tinsel, dragons and patronisingly diverse families making merry. Basically, you want to steer clear of terrestrial TV altogether — but with one exception. You may use BBC iPlayer to download the only decent drama series that slipped through the net: Giri/Haji. Joe Barton’s blackly comic Anglo-Japanese thriller was by some margin the most original

Tuesday

Robert Jackman

The best political shows to watch on Netflix

These days we political anoraks can usually get more than our fill of drama – and laughs – from the real world. Just look at what’s happening in Westminster – not to mention the White House. But what if you’re still craving more? Here’s our list of the best Netflix choices, including documentaries, dramas and comedies, for political obsessives. Mitt Through intimate access to Romney and his family on the campaign trail, Mitt seeks to present a more rounded picture of the man who failed to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. And the picture that emerges is a quietly moving one: a man of charm and kindness who never quite

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

No one else has the weird levels of self-regard shown by people who appear regularly on TV

One of the more tedious tropes of recent years is for journalists to bemoan the rise of populism while busily casting about for some dark force to which to attach the blame. Mark Zuckerberg, Google, nameless Russians, an uneducated populus, social media, whatever. One avenue that is rarely explored is that a major cause of the rise of populism might be the journalists themselves, and the extent to which the once noble aim of impartiality has led to something ridiculous — where almost everyone in authority is treated as a liar. For the past three decades, Britain has had centrist governments led by mainstream politicians. And in that period, did

James Delingpole James Delingpole

War of the Worlds is as bad as Doctor Who

Edwardian England deserved everything it got from those killer Martian invaders. Or so I learned from the BBC’s latest adaptation of The War of the Worlds (Sundays). Everything about that era, apparently, was hateful, backward and ripe for destruction: regressive attitudes to women and homosexuality; exultant white supremacy (cue, a speech from a government minister on the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race); a general prevailing bone-headedness and stuck-upness; stiff, stuffy, relentlessly brown clothing with superfluous belts; and as for those ridiculous bristling moustaches… Still, I don’t think H.G. Wells would have been totally appalled by this travesty of his 1898 potboiler. Wells was, after all, a man of the left

William Shawcross

The Queen, and indeed the British public, deserve better than The Crown’s lies

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently met with survivors of national disasters. They were attending the launch of a new charity. The Duke made a short, supportive speech. But much more important was the private time he and the Duchess spent with the survivors. As Lord Dannatt, who was hosting the public meeting said: ‘Their empathy with those affected demonstrated the vital link between the royal family and people of this country.’ That vital link is indeed one of the key strengths of the monarchy. Countless (and almost always unsung) hours are spent every year by royal family members with people needing recognition or comfort, as they visit schools,

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

Netflix’s ‘The King’ isn’t ‘Francophobic’

I enjoyed watching the new Netflix epic, The King, which celebrated the brief life of Henry V. And it wasn’t just because of Robert Pattinson’s ‘Allo ‘Allo French accent in portraying the Dauphin. What gave me the most pleasure as I watched the French cavalry fall beneath a blizzard of arrows at Agincourt was the knowledge that the film has infuriated the French. One of their television channels has accused Henry V of being a ‘war criminal’, while Christophe Gilliot, director of the Agincourt battlefield museum, decried the film as perpetuating the myth started by Shakespeare that Henry was a gallant chap when in fact the opposite was true. ‘The

Deborah Ross

Detailed and devastating: Marriage Story reviewed

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a drama about the breakdown of a marriage and it is, at times, devastatingly painful. ‘Divorce,’ says a lawyer at one point, ‘is like a death without a body.’ It’s certainly not the most fun you’ll ever have at the cinema — although it is witty and there are some brilliantly comic lines — but you will see something riveting, detailed, authentic and excellent. Plus it also marks the return of Scarlett Johansson as an interesting actress — remember Lost in Translation? — rather than the one who hangs out with Iron Man and Thor and just does sexy kicks. I’d even forgotten she could

Thursday

Harry Readhead

The best crime series to watch on Netflix

It’s no secret that people are fascinated by crime. Nor is this a new phenomenon: writing in 1946, Orwell noted that murder gave a ‘great amount of pleasure to the public’, and proceeded to identify the common features of the gruesome and grisly crimes that gave the British most satisfaction. Psychologists, meanwhile, say that murder in particular is not only ‘a most fundamental taboo’ but ‘also, perhaps, a most fundamental human impulse’. This seems plausible. We all know those people who, stuck in a queue or sat in an interminable meeting, seem moments away from indulging that impulse. At any rate, lovers of the lurid and the macabre are spoiled

Monday

Ross Clark

The BBC’s latest attack on Netflix is galling

Lord Hall of Birkenhead is feeling pretty bullish about the quality of the organisation he leads. “We’re not Netflix, we’re not Spotify. We’re not Apple News,” the BBC’s director general will apparently tell the Royal Television Society on Thursday. “We’re so much more than all of them put together.”     To which the obvious answer is: if you are so confident that the public loves your product, then why are you so frightened about exposing it to commercial competition? Surely, Lord Hall would be relishing the opportunity to get rid of the tax on TV-ownership which funds the BBC and fund itself in the way that all other TV and radio

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Boxed in

Friends in Herefordshire said they were both fit and well but confessed to ‘watching far too much television’. I thought nothing of it until a Wiltshire couple whom my wife and I have known for ever said almost the same thing but with more foreboding. ‘We’ve got to break the habit of watching so much — even the good stuff.’ That’s the problem. There’s just too much good stuff on telly. It’s starting to become an issue, a tyranny of sorts, and certainly a drain on what Americans like to call ‘downtime’. Gone are the days when TV was mainly rubbish and you could just get on with life —

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 14 February 2019

Q. I have learned through a third party that a friend, who is feeling particularly insecure these days, has not been invited to the forthcoming book launch of one of our long-standing mutual friends. I don’t want to portray him as some kind of victim, but is there a way I can tactfully find out if, best-case scenario, his failure to receive an e-invitation was, as it so often is, a mistake by the publishers’ intern? Or if, worst-case scenario, he has been ruthlessly excluded on financial grounds for no longer being an ‘influencer’? This author is paying for his launch himself and it is in a private house. — Name and

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Putting the Boot in | 14 February 2019

‘I know, let’s repaint the Sistine Chapel. But this time we’ll get it done by Banksy.’ Perhaps this wasn’t the exact phrase used in the early production meetings for the Sky Atlantic reboot (ho ho) of Das Boot (Wednesdays). It does describe pretty well the net result, though. Yes, I know James Walton covered it last week but I’m going to have to strongly disagree with him: Das Boot — Wolfgang Peterson’s 1980s miniseries about life on a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic — is my favourite wartime TV drama ever. And I’m damned if I’m going to let this travesty of a new version through the net.