James Walton

‘The British don’t revolt, they grumble,’ said someone in the first episode of The Way. But what if we ever reversed this policy? That was the question posed by a drama that’s clearly a passion project for its director, Michael Sheen – and therefore set in Wales. More specifically, The Way takes place in Port

As Curb Your Enthusiasm begins its 12th and apparently final series, one key question remains: how does Larry David get away with it? While many entertainers are sent into exile for ancient tweets far less tasteless than the average episode of Curb, the show sails on – providing extended comic riffs on incest victims, Holocaust

With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from the same production company, comes Born from the Same Stranger: another thumping slice of highly effective old-school human-interest storytelling, this time served with a side order of ethical dilemmas. In the

The big finish to Streets of Gold: Mumbai, an excited look at the city’s ‘wealthiest one-percenters’, was an extravagant party hosted by ‘two of India’s most coveted fashion designers’. As the programme made clear, all the guests were rich and/or famous, and all were dressed to prove it. ‘If you’re basic, you’re not invited,’ said

When it comes to one-off family dramas for Christmas, two things are pretty much guaranteed. They’ll begin with credits announcing a starry cast, and they’ll end with a redeemed character gazing at some falling snow as the music swells. The only tricky bit, then, is what should happen in-between. Should the redemption take place against

For years now, lots of TV thrillers have begun with a terrified woman running through some woods. But not The Couple Next Door. Instead, the first episode opened with the sight of an isolated cabin and the sound of a gunshot – and only then did a terrified woman run through some woods. Why the

Perhaps unfairly, Marcel Theroux does rather bring to mind Dannii Minogue. Not only does he look very similar to his more famous sibling, but when not writing (pretty good) novels, he’s in the same line of work: like Louis, he makes TV documentaries that feature much brow-furrowing. His latest was a neat fit for ITV1’s

‘Only with women’ is a phrase used by more cynical TV types for a show that takes something that’s been done before with men, but by changing the gender of the characters can pose as ground-breaking. It sprang to mind this week when both of BBC1’s big new dramas unblushingly took the only-with-women approach; the

Remember the groans of dismay, possibly including your own, which greeted John Cleese’s announcement in February that he was reviving Fawlty Towers? Happily, there appears to be much more goodwill behind the return of Frasier – the bad news being that, judging from the first three episodes, it might well need it. Kelsey Grammer’s entrance

If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one. You could also argue that, in contrast to most of its characters, it didn’t really bring much to the party. And yet, in a rare challenge to the law of diminishing returns, the more it

Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the question, ‘Should we cancel Picasso?’ He is, after all, ‘the ultimate example of problematic white guys clogging up the artistic canon’. Given the programme’s title – and the BBC’s increasing loss of nerve – you

Bad Behaviour is a decidedly solemn new Australian drama series with plenty to be solemn about. It was billed in Radio Times as ‘slow-burning’ – which feels a little tactless, given that the opening scene featured a girl in a boarding-school dormitory setting herself on fire (and burning quite quickly). We then cut to the

The Reunion opened in 1997 with some young people being carefree: a fact they obligingly signalled by zipping around the South of France helmetless on motorcycles while laughing a lot. Love appeared to be in the air as well – given that they consisted of two couples: the men in charge of driving (different times),

In 2014, Ben Macintyre presented a BBC2 documentary based on his book A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. The programme managed to shed new light on a familiar but still irresistible story by concentrating on Philby’s relationship with his old chum – and fellow Cambridge man – Nicholas Elliott. Elliott was

No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone off on an earnest quest to investigate a touchy subject and reached his conclusions only after the most extravagant of brow-furrowing. There is, however, a perhaps unexpected twist: the resulting programmes are rather good, creating

In the opening minutes of Best Interests (Monday and Tuesday), an estranged middle-aged couple made their separate ways to court, pausing outside it to look at each other with a mixture of furious reproach and overwhelming regret. From there we cut to a scene that perhaps overdid the evocation of Happier Times as the same

In advance, The Gallows Pole: This Valley Will Rise was touted as a radical departure for director Shane Meadows. After all, he made his name with the film This Is England and its three rightly acclaimed TV sequels, about a group of working-class folks struggling to survive against the heartless backdrop of that reliable old

The most controversial aspect of Netflix’s new drama-documentary Queen Cleopatra – not least in Egypt – was the casting of a black actress, Adele James, in the title role. After all, one of the few things that seems certain about Cleopatra’s early life is that she was a Macedonian Greek. Luckily, though, the show had

With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for TV intimacy co-ordinators. Just two weeks ago, we had Netflix’s Obsession. Now Paramount+ has come to the slightly weird party, turning the daddy of them all, Fatal Attraction, into an eight-part series. In the original

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series