Category: Television

There’s a reason why Criminal Minds is currently filming its eighth season – it’s like no other crime procedural show on the air. Watching the Season One box set, it’s clear why the show is so successful. Not a show for the faint-hearted, Criminal Minds follows the Behavioural Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI as they […]

The Borgias is an experience to be immersed in, even if it is a somewhat ludicrous portrayal of 15th century Italy.

You have to go into this series prepared. It’s like EastEnders on acid, or perhaps The Godfather remade in East London via an Usher music video. The colours, the violence, the filming style – it’s all cranked up to bursting point. As the title suggests, this four-part drama is an adaptation of Martina Cole’s novel […]

In the February of 2009 there was a feature article in The Independent about the current state of television drama. It said we were currently living through ‘a new golden age’ of TV fiction, but this was being helmed by the USA rather than Britain. We have, as the article suggested, fallen behind. At the […]

Everything is fine. People can relax. All the stresses of life are cured. Because there’s a new DVD boxset of Lewis out. If you want to feel bruised and psychologically assaulted, as if you’ve just been dragged by the ankles around a museum of torture that uses sandpaper for carpet, then watch Waking the Dead (all nine […]

Have you ever wondered what would happen if all the fairy tale characters we have ever heard of were dumped into our world? No? Me neither, but this is the premise for a new show created by the writers of award winning series Lost, so expect LOTS of mysteries and cliffhangers. Each episode follows a different […]

Game of Thrones maintains the momentum, quality and characterisation that made it such a hit to begin with.

Silent Witness is the latest piece of BBC content to receive complaints from the more sensitive members of the British public. According to comments submitted to the broadcaster’s website, they felt the two-part story Redhill veered too close to ‘torture-porn’ for their liking. Of course, the Daily Mail has published a piece describing the situation as a […]

Silent Witness has been going for 16 years now which, in this day and age of brutal axing of shows which don’t ‘find their audience’, is a mark of the series’ enduring popularity. Some people can’t stomach it, for a variety of reasons. It’s often unflinchingly gory in its scenes of bloody autopsies and violent […]

The UK edition of talent show The Voice launched recently, but is it just another rip-off of The X Factor?

I have mixed feelings about James Cameron’s epic 1997 feature Titanic. As I’m sure you are aware, it’s about to be re-released in cinemas in a new version, converted to 3D, so those who found the banal dialogue and crass characterisation too intellectually challenging the first time round can be helped along by pointy things […]

Augustly decorated in medals for conquering the critics – brandishing Golden Globes for best drama and best actress – terrorism drama Homeland arrived at Camp Channel 4 in February, audacious and determined and warranting the anticipation surrounding it. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), an American marine, has spent a gruelling eight years in enemy captivity; enduring brutal […]

Noel Fielding obviously wields an interesting mind in the way he can weave quirky characters and turn a phrase. His appearances on Never Mind The Buzzcocks show that he is, in fact, quite witty, not just weird. So I was interested to see how he writes when given total creative freedom and not in partnership […]