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Reviewing Sky’s The Heist before Christmas last year, I suggested that all feature-length festive television dramas begin with credits announcing a starry cast and end with a redeemed protagonist gazing up at some suddenly falling snow. Reviewing Sky’s Bad Tidings this year, I can rather smugly report that there’s no need to revise my theory. But just in case that isn’t enough television tradition to be going on with, here we also get that other Yuletide stand-by: the characters’ plans for the big day go hideously wrong, yet they still end up having the Best Christmas Ever. Viewed pleasantly drunk, I concede, Bad Tidings might just hit the spot The

Do you remember that nagging sense of mild disappointment as you sat through Dune 2? You’d been impressed by Dune: bit of a recondite plot if you hadn’t read the book but great to look at, with an austere art-house aesthetic, like Star Wars for people with an IQ. But then the sequel sold out. It turned a minor character from the book into the heroine of a stereotypical Hollywood romance, which not even the excitement of the sandworm-riding scenes could quite redeem. No disrespect to Brian Aldiss,but I think of ‘Brian’as a sort of joke name Anyway its latest screen incarnation, Dune: Prophecy, is worse, much worse. To give

‘I hope we passed the audition,’ said an alarmingly youthful Bob Geldof at one point in The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? He was, of course, quoting John Lennon from the 1969 Beatles rooftop concert: an appropriate reference in the circumstances – because this documentary was a kind of Get Back for the Smash Hits generation. Like a far shorter version of Peter Jackson’s film of the Beatles at work, it mixed footage we’d seen before with stuff locked away in the vaults for decades. It was also equally unafraid of longueurs, equally determined to accentuate the positive and equally likely to warm the flintiest of hearts. I

The Diplomat bears the same relationship to 21st-century ambassadorial geopolitics as Bridgerton does to the salons and social mores of early 19th-century England. The latter is Jane Austen as reimagined by a wannabe Jilly Cooper with a first-class degree in historical revisionism; the former is a bit like what The West Wing might have been if it had been written by Dan Brown and those behind the classic, early 1980s husband-and-wife mystery drama Hart to Hart. But I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of chattering-class types have been glued to The Diplomat since the first season when it started last year and have been recommending

All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three episodes, I quite understand why. This is coffee-table spy-drama porn perfectly calculated to satisfy all manner of lurid and exotic tastes. There’s sniper-rifle-assembly porn; foreign-property porn (the Jackal’s gorgeous mountain retreat near Cadiz with a to-die-for infinity pool); fashion-nostalgia porn (especially the brown suede jacket worn with a red neckerchief in homage to the original, starring Edward Fox); far-right German politician’s head exploding in a pink mist as the heavy calibre sniper round reaches the end of its remarkable, unprecedented two-and-a-half-mile trajectory porn. Even if you’re not a fan of

Sometimes spoilers can be your friend. For example, I have just cheated and looked up on the internet the shocking final plot twist in Disclaimer and now I have been relieved of a massive burden. No longer need I watch any more episodes of this weird, creepy, pretentious, contrived and prurient series just to see how it ends. You find yourself hating everyone and everything in it – even the cat On paper it all looks promising: based on a bestselling novel by Renée Knight (Lee Child says in a quote on the cover that it’s ‘exactly what a great thriller should be’); adapted and directed by fêted Mexican director

I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama is good it can be very, very good, as we saw with Spiral, Les Revenants, and, maybe the best series ever made about spies, Le Bureau. But La Maison is not in their league. This is a shame because its milieu is not one that has been explored that often in TV serials – and it’s something that a French production really ought to have handled brilliantly: haute couture. Judging by the fancy Parisian settings and general patina of Succession-style luxe, it hasn’t been short of a reasonable budget. What

In advance, Ludwig sounded as if it was aimed squarely at the Inspector Morse market. Set among spires of impeccable dreaminess (in a cunning twist, those of Cambridge), it has a main character who solves crimes and cryptic crosswords with equal efficiency. Once the series began, though, it was clear that its sights were set a little lower than that. Instead, the show seems content to take its place as the latest proof that plausibility is out of fashion in TV drama these days. (In my last column I reviewed Nightsleeper, which had no time for it at all.) One reason this detective feels like the traditional fish out of

Doctor Who fans may remember that after the show’s triumphant return in the early 2000s, we found out that showrunner Russell T. Davies had agreed with BBC mandarins to rid the franchise of some of its more unwieldy elements in order to make it palatable to casual viewers. Gotham City has long been the perfect backdrop for old-fashioned noir, and the city is on fine fettle here Watching the debut episode of The Penguin, HBO’s new crime series (available on Sky Atlantic), based on a popular Batman villain, I suspected a similar game was at play. The series might be visibly set in the Batman universe, but it’s also very

The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of us non-billionaire folk to be content with our miserable lot by showing us that even if we did have lots more money we’d actually really hate it. They’re all secretly messed up, treacherous and unfaithful, riddled with hatred, and popping pills It’s set on Nantucket Island, where the streets are cobbled and the old-moneyed families gather every summer to polish their bijou antique rowing boats at their beachside mansions which, I just checked, cost around £15 million. Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) and his bestselling romantic novelist wife (Nicole Kidman), happily

Kaos is a new Netflix gods-and-monsters black-comedy blockbuster that will scorch your screen and fry your brain like a thunderbolt from Zeus. It’s sick, cynical, brutal and very, very dark but it’s so well acted, ingeniously plotted, moving, inventive, funny and addictive that I fear resistance may be futile. Playboy Poseidon hangs out on his superyacht servicing his mistress – and sister, and brother’s wife Written by Charlie Covell, it’s like Succession relocated to a parallel modern world in which the ancient Greek gods still rule over us, ruthlessly pursuing their peculiar ends with a characteristically Olympian disregard for the pain and misery their shenanigans inflict on us worthless mortals.

Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s so little by way of laughter or a redemptive pay off you might be tempted to end it all like one of the numerous doomed characters do – off camera, fortunately – in the almost relentlessly catastrophe-laden season one. Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television Now we’re back for season two

On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such reliable sources as Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment podcast and my children, South Korea has replaced America as the cultural centre of the Earth for many British teenagers. Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale But this global domination hasn’t come about by chance. Korean youngsters are trained for

My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous upset…’ Rogan is marketed as an edgy alternative to the mainstream media. He is about as edgy as Banksy I jest. I actually do know what happened in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball. It was the first thing I watched because that was what was on when I walked into the room and

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World? announced the scale of its ambition straight away. Before the opening titles, we’d already heard from Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and the late Henry Kissinger. We’d also seen the lines drawn up as to how its bold subtitle might be answered. It is an authentically confusing programme, where any firm moral position doesn’t stay firm for long As Clinton put it, in 1945 a question emerged whose implications would dominate post-war US foreign policy: ‘Why didn’t we do more to try to prevent the transport of the Jews?’ The immediate response was the heartfelt yet potentially

Unless you did English A-level and shoehorned a mention of it into your Chaucer paper to try to get extra marks, you probably haven’t even heard of Boccaccio’s The Decameron, let alone read it. Which no doubt partly explains Netflix’s decision to give it the Bridgerton treatment: no one, anywhere, is liable to complain about their most cherished classic being massacred. I had to look up who was responsible for this atrocity of a show, so I could check who to hate But massacred it has been. Just as Bridgerton drives a coach and horses – or bulldozer with flashing rave lights and klaxons, more like – through anything that

If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of the phrases would end with a colon, and for one obvious reason: to play a neat trick on the viewers: that of making them keen to hear what comes next. (You get the idea.) Monday’s programme therefore began by explaining that the mosquito is ‘the target of one of medical science’s greatest quests: the battle to save millions of lives and end a scourge that has shaped human history: malaria’. Unusually for an uncompromising science documentary, the finale was a genuine tear-jerker Now in its 51st year, Horizon has spent

Most of my favourite TV shows seem to involve gangsters in one way or another: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Top Boy, The Offer (that brilliant series on Paramount+ about the making of The Godfather), series two of The White Lotus, Suburra, Gomorrah; even, you could argue, Game of Thrones (cod-medieval fantasy gangsters with dragons) and Succession (gangsters who don’t need to use guns). It’s the first thing in ages where I’ve been salivating to watch the next episode Perhaps there’s something lightly psychopathic about being so allured by a genre which celebrates relentless, brutal killing, where the forces of law and order and civilisation are the enemy, and where the

A partly subtitled show set in Istanbul might sound like a brave departure for a BBC Sunday night crime drama. But in fact, if you strip away The Turkish Detective’s minarets and bazaars (not hard given that they supply somewhat perfunctory local colour), what remains is, according to taste, either reassuringly familiar or utterly bog-standard. The series began with Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai) leaving his job at the Metropolitan Police to take up fish-out-of-water duties in the city of his birth. Waiting for him at Istanbul airport was what at first seemed like a straightforward comedy foreigner, much given to muttering the words ‘very good, very good’ and driving like

The Bear has been called ‘the most stressful thing on TV’ and I think that’s probably a fair description. It’s set in a Chicago restaurant and – as has become de rigueur in all films and TV series about restaurants – the kitchen scenes are invariably fraught, jerkily shot, uptight, pent-up, explosive, inflammable, past boiling point, chaotic, horrific and generally conducive to the prevailing notion that while war might be hell it’s an absolute picnic when compared to being a chef. It’s also, if you can bear the stress part, possibly the best thing on TV. At least it has been for the first two series, which have built on