2 hours ago
5
And Just Like That
Where to begin with the love/hate Sex and the City spin-off? The show was plagued with woeful writing, cringe-inducing character development (justice for Miranda!) and just 71 seconds of fan-favourite Samantha. But for a moment there, as the third series started, it looked like And Just Like That had finally hit its stride. Then came an episode all about Seema’s natural deodorant. No wonder creator Michael Patrick King announced that this would be the final series. It ended on a bum note; the closeup of Miranda’s toilet flooded with poo was just way too symbolic. Still, there’s no denying that fans have had a hoot dissecting every single “wtf?” episode. And as Carrie – a single woman once more – danced around her palatial townhouse to Barry White’s You’re The First, The Last, My Everything, who didn’t let out a little sob?
All’s Fair
Can Kim Kardashian act? Of course she can’t. But that was almost the least of All’s Fair’s problems. The recipient of a very rare zero star review in the Guardian (and, it must be said, richly deserving the absence of every one of those stars), it was hard to know where to start with listing the problems with this Ryan Murphy clunker. The hilariously leaden writing? The tedious veneration of wealth and consumption? The almost wilful parade of cliches? Performances so bad they felt almost spiteful? Let’s just say “all of the above” and never speak of this show again. Except a second season has been commissioned so we’re probably going to have to.
AKA Charlie Sheen
Given the restraining orders, the domestic violence allegations and the parental failures, it’s fair to say that Charlie Sheen has been a bad boy. Not that you’d really have known it from this three-part documentary which chuckled along at Sheen’s various bouts of self-destructive hedonism while struggling to tell us anything we didn’t already know about the Hollywood hell-raiser. Instead, it felt as if this loose cannon was being indulged, so any sympathy this series might induce should be reserved for the people who have had to endure close contact with this charming but flippant egotist.
The Iris Affair
Of course we knew it was preposterous from the get-go: a drama about a supercomputer known as Charlie Big Potatoes that could either save the world – or destroy all of humanity. We stuck with it out of sheer love for Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander … but by the end, it felt like even they had stopped bothering. Hollander barely cared when he died, and Algar ended up slicing Charlie with an axe … in super slow-motion. Talk about giving up the ghost.
MobLand
Shady characters meeting in deserted boxing gyms? The Prodigy’s Firestarter jackhammering away in club scenes? The late 90s called and wants its gangland drama back. Actually, that is unfair on the gangland dramas of the late 90s. Many of them look a little dated now, but at least they didn’t suffer the ignominy of having to indulge Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren’s baffling Irish accents. But there were many other problems with MobLand. Mainly that it was just really dull; a dispute over drug-selling territory between various cockney picaresques which Nick Love would probably dismiss as a bit basic.
With Love, Meghan
Given the extent to which she grinds the gears of the nation’s performatively enraged, right-wing culture warriors, it’s almost tempting to admire the Duchess of Sussex’s various televised ventures into twee homemaking as deliberate provocations. But then you watch them and are forced to admit that actually, in this one instance, they might have a point. It’s like watching the Liberty catalogue come to life before your horrified eyes; a wine o’clock poster with delusions of grandeur; a parade of snoozing dogs, humming beehives, Hallmark platitudes and pointless crafting “hacks” you’ll forget instantly. All underpinned by vast, largely unearned wealth. Ugh.
Victoria Beckham
There are clearly interesting things to be said about both Victoria Beckham and her struggles with vocation, self-image, self-acceptance. But for whatever reason, this three-part series chose not to say them. Instead, the experience was akin to consuming a sales catalogue. Victoria clearly has good reason to bridle at what she describes as her “miserable cow” image. But sadly, she didn’t do herself any favours with this cagey non-event of a series.
The Inheritance
It should have been the next Traitors – except even camper, with Liz Hurley playing dead and executor Robert Rinder overseeing her inheritance. What more could you ask for? As 13 normies battled it out, there was plenty of backstabbing and squabbling. But the rules quickly became bewildering: it’s still too confusing to explain what exactly was happening in the weekly division ceremonies. Even more disappointingly, we only saw glimpses of Hurley via videos recorded for the contestants. The Inheritance ended up reeking of a show that was trying way too hard to live up to something way beyond it.
Too Much
How do you follow a show that defined a generation as much as Girls did? The pressure on Lena Dunham was immense when she released this starry romcom about Jessica, a rosy-eyed New Yorker who lands in London with a broken heart. Meg Stalter took her biggest role to date by the horns and was joyous to watch as she revelled in Austen levels of romantic ideals, all while falling for indie guy Felix (Will Sharpe). But it was all very glossy and, ironically, was not enough. Plus, the amount of celebrity friends involved felt icky.
Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping
David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s previous sketch series, the largely excellent That Mitchell and Webb Look, had a skit pondering the innate patchiness of the sketch show. We only wish that this return to the format rose to the status of “patchy”. Given the shrewd recruitment of talented younger comics Stevie Martin, Krystal Evans, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Lara Ricote, expectations were high. But sadly, most of it didn’t land. Sweary Aussie Drama was a single joke milked to a husk but repeated in every episode. Mitchell seemed too willing to slip into Would I Lie to You? auto-rant mode. The writing room sketches, meanwhile, simply provoked the thought that they should probably have stayed in there a while longer.
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox
This dramatisation of the story of Amanda Knox was executive produced by Amanda Knox and pretty much exclusively showcased the perspective of Amanda Knox. So, while there probably is an interesting drama to be made about the 2007 murder in Perugia of British student Meredith Kercher, this isn’t it. Of course, the story of Knox’s wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration is interesting in itself but the material needed to be handled sensitively. Instead, the series struggled painfully to find the right tone, lurching awkwardly from oddly jaunty, slightly mannered farce to inevitably, real-life horror. Twisted? Arguably. A total mess? Very much so.
Prime Target
We love Leo Woodall … but did we buy him playing the greatest maths genius since Euclid, a man so smart he’s on the brink of a prime number discovery that could ruin society as we know it? Nope! This globe-trotting thriller about the NSA spying on – and killing off – intellectuals, and the man with the elaborate formula they were after, frankly got more farcical by the second. Silliness-by-numbers.
1000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story
This hagiography followed the OnlyFans star renowned for sexual escapades such as proudly sleeping with men who look ‘barely legal’ as she prepared for her biggest feat yet: having sex with 1000 men (or 1057, as it turned out) in the space of 12 hours. What on earth would possess her? What we wanted was way more interrogation of Bonnie Blue’s actual psyche, plus those of the men in the queue to have sex with her – some donning balaclavas and, fascinatingly, many others not. They could at least have spoken to the legendary mum who showed up to haul her son out of the queue. What we got was horrific shots of Bonnie making snow angels on a floor full of used condoms and absolutely no interrogation of her infamy whatsoever. And to think, the documentary-maker has a teenage daughter too.
