Top Boy (Netflix)
The Lovers (Sky Atlantic/Now
Love & Death (ITVX) | itv.com
Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero (Channel 4) | channel4.com
In a bumper opening week for the new autumn schedule, all I can say is: British television, you’re spoiling me. And never more so than with the third and final six-part Netflix series of Ronan Bennett’s UK-set drug-dealing odyssey Top Boy (count the first two Channel 4 series and it’s the fifth). This is the last opportunity for face time with Dushane (Ashley Walters), Sully (Kane “Kano” Robinson) et al, and the overriding ethos seems to be: make every brutal, hopeless, heart-squeezing second count.
Top Boy viewers never learn. We get attached to characters, then suddenly, terribly, they’re gone (“dun”). Here (spoilers ahead!), the opener unfolds as an aftershock to the previous series, with Jamie (Micheal Ward) dead and his brother, Stef (Araloyin Oshunremi), buckled by grief and revenge. Meanwhile, human ice sculpture Jaq (the extraordinary, Bafta-nominated Jasmine Jobson) melts over her sister’s baby, while Shelley (Simbiatu Abisola Abiola, AKA Little Simz) dreams of opening nail bars, and more drugs (“food”) are sold on the increasingly volatile Summerhouse estate.
Before long, drug kingpins and “brothers” Dushane and “Big man Sully” are facing off across a sticky caff table – Sully, shrouded in his ugly new power like a medieval king in a rotting pelt; Dushane, ever more cobra-esque and deadly as his clout wanes. As alarming as the pair are, the empire they have built seems nothing but a clanking, self-defeating bear trap of fear and paranoia. “If we’re not monsters, we’re food and I can never be food,” says Sully.
Here, then, is the “unhappy ever after” to the cursed fairytale of Summerhouse. Alongside Peaky Blinders’ Brian Gleeson, Oscar-nominated Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) slouches in as an Irish gangster whose fey charm buffs rather than masks his sociopathy. Violence-wise, the body count is astronomical (in this final outing, it’s less anything than anyone goes), and there’s everything from decapitated heads in boxes to a concrete western bloodbath in an unlikely venue that (without dishing too much detail) feels like a nod to Breaking Bad.
Top Boy, often dubbed Britain’s answer to The Wire, has never been just about drugs, or the vicarious thrills of an inner-city world with veiled language (“Wagwan”). It’s evolved into an urban morality tale of death, greed, chaos and cruelty (“Don’t beg, it’s disgusting”); but also of love and, ultimately, conscience. This final series isn’t perfect (it feels a couple of episodes short, and some sociopolitical elements seem Blu-Tacked on), but these are quibbles. Overall, what a blast, what a cast, what a genre-defining ride. Top that, indeed.
If you yearn to watch two borderline obnoxious people fall in love, then you’re in luck with the new six-part, Belfast-set comedy drama The Lovers, from Northern Irish playwright David Ireland (Cyprus Avenue; Ulster American).
Johnny Flynn is Seamus, a self-satisfied, London-based political broadcaster working in Belfast, who says things like: “I’ve got 500 likes for my tweet about Michael Gove.” Roisin Gallagher plays Janet, a scorn-fuelled supermarket worker: “Who says good morning anyway? What does he think he is – a fucking Disney princess?” Janet is preparing to kill herself when Seamus stumbles into her back yard while on the run from angry locals.
What follows in the three episodes I’ve seen is a kind of anti-romcom – a tale of polar opposites and encroaching darkness, touching on everything from mental illness to the Troubles. The pair’s decision to have an affair is further complicated by Seamus having a celebrity girlfriend (Alice Eve), who, though mildly deranged, seems (whisper it) nicer than Janet.
The obvious comparisons are with This Way Up and The Dry (in which Gallagher also starred). I ended up enjoying it while remaining wholly unconvinced that Janet and Seamus belong together. Tune in if you’re a sucker for a warped vibe.
Over on ITVX there’s another decision to have an affair, this time with devastating consequences, in the seven-part true crime HBO drama Love & Death, created and written by David E Kelley (Big Little Lies).
Elizabeth Olsen stars as Candy Montgomery, the Texas housewife who in 1980 killed her pregnant friend and neighbour, Betty (Lily Rabe), with an axe. Montgomery was played by Jessica Biel last year in Candy on Disney+, though that show seemed to aim for an arch, blackly comedic tone, signalled by Biel’s painfully tight perm.
Here, the perm is gone, and Montgomery (chirpy, all-American wife, mother and Methodist churchgoer) is presented as a frustrated housewife with a nice but dull husband (Almost Famous’s Patrick Fugit). Even when she starts an affair with Betty’s husband, Allan (Jesse Plemons), it all feels so polite and compartmentalised, it’s like extramarital lust encased in Tupperware, making what ensues even more inexplicable.
Love & Death eventually segues into a courtroom drama. It’s an absorbing study of suburban true-crime horror, with potent performances. As the awkward Allan, Plemons is outstanding, but then he always is. For her part, Olsen delivers a Candy who’s human and credible (warmer, twitchier than Biel’s). If I have a problem, it’s with Betty, who feels just a little underwritten. Call me old-fashioned, but victims shouldn’t be sidelined in their own tragic stories.
Watching the Channel 4 documentary Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero is an ordeal, but a necessary one. It details the history of how the Nazis first started the mass killing of Jewish people in the region in 1941, and harrowing black and white images keep filling the screen. People frogmarched to their deaths. A child clinging to its mother. The vast killing pits with naked humans packed “like sardines”, to be shot one by one.
This is the point at which the Nazis started killing women and children, including the Bila Tserkva massacre of 90 Jewish orphans who required care after their parents were murdered by death squads. If anyone is wondering why there are so many incriminating images, it’s because the Nazis recorded them, believing themselves to be on “the right side of history”. This film is hugely upsetting, as of course it should be.
Star ratings (out of five)
Top Boy ★★★★★
The Lovers ★★★
Love & Death ★★★
Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero ★★★★
What else I’m watching
Later… With Jools Holland: Amy Winehouse
BBC Two
It would have been Amy Winehouse’s 40th birthday on 14 September. As part of an evening-long celebration of the singer, here are performances and interviews from Later…, including a Hootenanny duet with Paul Weller.
Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing
BBC Two
The sixth-series return of Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse’s acclaimed fishing/chatting series that spreads the word about friendship and mental health. It’s Bob’s rescue dog, Ted’s, birthday, and that hound knows how to party.
Bad Behaviour
BBC Three
Starring Jana McKinnon, this compelling Australian drama centres on two women who meet again as adults, 10 years on from when one was a closeted lesbian and the other a vicious bully at a strange elite school deep in the bush.
