Tag: BBC iPlayer

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Three 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Tense Scottish thriller
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: tense, well-acted
What I don’t like about it: contrived, kinda pointless, terrible ending

Review:
An ambulance dispatcher receives a distressing call from someone who recognises him, he gets involved and covers up a crime, soon finding himself in over his head with people controlling him before eventually fighting back and taking some control himself (geddit?).

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: 19 half-hour episodes
Synopsis: Cousins don’t grow up in rural England
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: can be funny
What I don’t like about it: uncomfortable and unpleasant

Review:
This nice-and-cheap BBC cringe comedy is a family affair, written by and starring siblings Charlie and Daisy Cooper and also featuring their dad in a recurring role, and that definitely helps with improv. Their characters, cousins Kurtan and Kerry, live in a small village in the Cotswolds and reflect a life of limited influences, being around their late 20s but having many of the worse qualities of children. The show generally seems to have a mean and elitist view of the characters it features and only really lets its heart show through the character of the patient fatherly vicar, which only reinforces the patronising infantilising view that pervades the whole thing, especially being framed as a BBC documentary aimed at city-dwellers. It’s just so hard to tell which side they’re on.

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Six 30-minute episodes
Synopsis: A kind-hearted man avoids his way into being a total prick
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: good treatment of its theme, decent writing
What I don’t like about it: it’s not very funny, sometimes want to shake the main character

Review:
Romesh Ranganathan writes and stars as Jonathan, a man who avoids all the problems in his marriage until his wife chucks him out so he imposes on his sister Dan and sister-in-law Courtney, who can barely hide her displeasure. In the pilot, Jonathan kidnaps his son Spencer to avoid telling him about the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and makes similar uncaring and unfunny decisions throughout. Bright Spencer and aggressive Courtney are the main highlights in this very missable comedy.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): divorce, parenting

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Seven 45-minute episodes
Synopsis: Brit coming-of-age Sex and the City stuffed with middle-class millennial nostalgia
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: pretty good albeit scattershot soundtrack, occasional interesting moments
What I don’t like about it: way too many interchangeable party and sex scenes

Review:
BBC3’s latest overhyped and overprivileged comedy-drama finds starry-eyed childhood friends trying to make it as young media professionals in Camden. Their divergent paths through young adulthood and differing development rates threaten to tear them apart but friendship will win the day after over five hours of pointless partying, repetitive sex and cheap nostalgia pops.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): a whole lot of sex, drugs and partying

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer (season one not currently available)
Length: 8 one-hour episodes
Synopsis: Darkly comic Scottish thriller about two brothers who commit a crime and try to cover it up
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: really strong pilot, good brother dynamic, stylish and well-made
What I don’t like about it: loses its way quickly, the second season is awful and loses a whole recommendation point, hacky writing

Review:
This BBC Scotland drama commission started out really exciting but soon spiralled into a scale too large to care about, they try to pack about four seasons of Breaking Bad-style escalations into four episodes and then season 2 is a boring, bog-standard dark BBC crime drama. It’s a shame because the pilot was wonderful but never gets as good again.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): death by dangerous driving, violence, drugs and alcohol

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Twelve 30-minute episodes so far
Synopsis: One man’s view of New York City
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: it’s hilarious, it’s the most neurodivergent show on TV, it makes more points in an episode than most series put together, it’s a realistic view of a city I couldn’t bear to live in
What I don’t like about it: some of the footage is uncomfortable to watch, it can be a bit formulaic after a dozen episodes

Review:
John Wilson is an anxious New Yorker who never leaves home without his camera. He has assembled this collection of footage into half-hour episodes of meditation on the city and modern life. At the start of each episode, Wilson introduces a theme and “How to…” title for the episode but it soon meanders as he gets into mischief and social adventures, interviewing weird and wonderful humans and giving us tantalising, if comedically ‘played up’, views into his personal life. His choice of footage is always wonderful and played for laughs, a favourite trick is to juxtapose what he’s saying and what he’s showing until they converge on a double meaning. Many things about the show make it feel of special interest to autistic people – there are constant attempts to explain social rules which are soon shown to be inadequate when met with human behaviour, some interactions are engineered to be extra awkward and capture (primarily) neurotypical responses, John’s obsessive documenting and editing and his adorable, (extra)ordinary life. Watch it if you can!

Content notes (may contain spoilers): real-life footage of roadkill, car accidents etc., nudity and pornography

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Ten episodes, roughly 30-minutes each
Synopsis: A clownish band of pirates, led by a rich dandy, get more than they bargained for when their underwhelming adventures are interrupted by the fearsome Blackbeard
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: Taika Waititi, fun writing, good drama in the latter half, lovely romance and Taika Waititi (seriously if he doesn’t get an Emmy it’s a robbery)
What I don’t like about it: the first few episodes are very underwhelming, the mix of history and pure fiction can be hard to understand and delineate

Review:
This show has a secret! It begins as a middle-of-the-road comedy and feels, for the first couple of episodes, like a failed attempt to make “What We Do in the Shadows but with pirates” but that hides its true nature. The show “grows the beard” in episode four when Taika Waititi’s Blackbeard is introduced. His name has been enough to get me interested in a project since Boy, but his acting ability has been criminally underutilised since then and he brings this project to another level – giving me chills at least once an episode towards the end. Rhys Darby brings his unique charm to the role of “The Gentleman Pirate” Stede Bonnet and the rest of the cast glue as an ensemble as it goes on, Ewen Bremner being a particularly memorable highlight. Check this one out if you have enough time to sit through a few not-so-great episodes.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): Comical, but occasionally vivid, violence and injuries; relationship problems; mental health (BPD, DID)

Where to find it: BBC iPlayer
Length: Six 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: A diverse group meet in Bristol for court-appointed community service and become entangled in local organised crime
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: funny and snappy dialogue, characters and plot which eventually become engaging, fun pacing
What I don’t like about it: the characters begin as crude satirical stereotypes and the premise and plot feel cheesy through the first half of the series, it’s more than a bit contrived

Review:
It took me several tries to care about Stephen Merchant’s new series because it has such a weak opening; a fun premise is marred by characters made of straw and used as target practice for the show’s admittedly very strong jokes. Had I binge-watched the show, this may have been less noticeable because by the latter half of the season they were more fleshed out and easier to care about and by the end I felt the contradictions within and between each member of the group had been fully explored and partially resolved, the perfect end point of the story circle. It’s nice to see a TV show get an honest first season that doesn’t just feel like a pilot for a hopeful franchise and it makes me all the more excited to see a second.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs and alcohol, racism and prejudice, police and crime, mental health (particularly histrionic “personality disorder”), some peril but little violence