True Detective: Night Country (Sky Atlantic/Now)
Big Boys (Channel 4) | channel4.com
The Artful Dodger (Disney+)
Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? (BBC Two) | iPlayer
More than 30 years since Jodie Foster made FBI rookie Clarice Starling her own, the veteran actor returns to law enforcement, as chief of police Liz Danvers in True Detective.
Nic Pizzolatto’s crime drama anthology is back for a new season after a five-year hiatus – and a sense of diminishing returns following the first season, a decade ago, starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. The inclusion of a subtitle for this fourth outing nods to a changing of the guard. This is the first instalment without a writing credit for Pizzolatto (he remains as an executive producer). Instead, the Mexican writer and director Issa López takes over as show runner, and her narrative vision could not be further from the desert heat and sweat-drenched machismo of the original.
We’re in the fictional mining town of Ennis, Alaska – plunged into the seasonal darkness – and the landscape is as brutally austere as Danvers’s emotional intelligence initially appears. Eight research scientists (“All men,” Danvers notes, pointedly) have mysteriously and suddenly disappeared, leaving behind an un-paused DVD screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and a whiteboard with WE ARE ALL DEAD scrawled on it. Oh, and a human tongue is on the kitchen floor.
It’s Danvers’s job, alongside her former protege but current bete noire after an esoteric falling out, state trooper Evangeline Navarro (played by impressive debutant Kali Reis), to find them.
Danvers is dealing with a rebellious stepdaughter and a romantic entanglement with her boss (Christopher Eccleston), while Navarro, who is Iñupiat, is haunted by an unsolved murder six years prior: the merciless killing of a fellow Indigenous woman, a protester against the mining activity that turns the town’s water black.
Whether you deem Night Country a successful reboot of a spiralling franchise will depend on your interest in spirituality (never too far from the True Detective hinterland, but the supernatural is more explicit here) and how forgiving you are in the face of subpar special effects. For this is a show that begins with clunky CGI reindeer (think: McDonald’s Christmas advert), and later features a gory tableau of corpses that the staff at Madame Tussauds might have moved to the back out of professional embarrassment.
But the darkly atmospheric, almost Lynchian cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister (Oscar-nominated for his work on Tár) is impressive, and López’s direction nails an ever present ominousness. Plus, every now and then Fiona Shaw’s retired professor pops up and rolls a joint or guts a wolf and says things like: “Don’t confuse the spiritual world with mental health issues.” Because those are in abundance in Ennis, too. It might be a barren landscape, but there’s a hell of a lot going on.
If Aesop had it right and a man can be known by the company he keeps, perhaps a TV show can be understood by its admirers, and fans of Jack Rooke’s Big Boys include, impressively, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lisa McGee and Kathy Burke.
The second series of this semi-autobiographical comedy, based on Rooke’s university days in the aftermath of the death of his father and his own (homo)sexual awakening, picks up after the summer break.
The end of the first series saw lead character Jack’s best mate Danny struggling with depression, and in the second we get more of an insight into Danny’s childhood – and are introduced to his wayward father. Yemi, a flamboyant fashion student (played by Olisa Odele) who is as promiscuous as Jack is virginal (watch that space…), is less out and proud when it comes to a secret he’s been harbouring; and final friendship group member Corinne (Izuka Hoyle) has found herself a boyfriend while back in Edinburgh – disappointing news for an increasingly smitten Danny.
There’s also much more of cousin Shannon (Harriet Webb), by far the funniest character, who is 100% sure she’s going to have a baby boy after returning multiple positive pregnancy tests – because the line came up blue every time.
One of the things most loved about Big Boys is its warmth and kindness. I actually prefer its sharp observations on mid-2010s Britain, whether political (“IndyRef”) or its appreciation of hun culture. But there’s no doubt the season finale is a right tear-jerker.
People bemoan the neverending production line of Dickens adaptations, forgetting that they’re responsible for some of the most enjoyable turns by cherished actors (Olivia Colman, Helena Bonham Carter and Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham alone). And if any canon character is worthy of their own spin-off, then surely it’s the Artful Dodger?
David Maher, David Taylor and James McNamara thought so, and created this raucous eight-parter starring Thomas Brodie-Sangster in the title role, with his former mentor and ultimate bad influence Fagin played by David Thewlis.
The Dodger isn’t picking pockets in London any more. He was shipped off to a penal colony in Australia, which is where we find him, 15 years on, and somewhat surprisingly now a surgeon prodigy (qualifications: extreme dexterity). But when Fagin turns up, sentenced to the colony himself, it becomes clear that the Dodger won’t be staying on (roughly) the right side of the law for long.
The entire cast (including Tim Minchin as the wonderfully named villain Darius Cracksworth) are having an obvious blast, and snappy editing, the contemporary score and hyperactive directing by Jeffrey Walker help it zip along. There’s a love interest in the form of Lady Belle Fox (Maia Mitchell), who is no damsel in distress but an Elizabeth Garrett Anderson-type and sees the Dodger as her ticket to work experience in an operating theatre. As for what goes on in there? As gruesome as anything in True Detective.
Given the current state of the world, you’d be forgiven for reading the titular question of BBC Two’s Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? with a tinge of hopeful anticipation. Amid the awards chatter around Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, and the week before the Doomsday Clock is reset, Jane Corbin’s documentary examines our present peril.
The Doomsday Clock is a measure that an organisation called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A handy little calculation on finite doom. If midnight on the theoretical clock represents Armageddon, then the position of the minute hand is how close we are. Currently, we’re… 90 seconds away.
Corbin crisscrosses the globe, visiting Geneva to speak to a WMD expert, Pavel Podvig, who breaks down the likelihood of Putin literally going nuclear; and stops off at Los Alamos, the home of the US’s nuclear weapons facility (which featured heavily in Nolan’s film). She meets a retired chief weapons engineer and anti-nuclear activists in the UK.
There’s archival footage of the Cuban missile crisis and the signing of the resultant pacts, as well as more recent footage of Kim Jong Un, and Trident submarines menacingly churning up the waters.
One of the most encouraging interviewees is Daniel Högsta, deputy director of a Nobel peace prize-winning group that has drafted a promising-sounding treaty to eliminate weapons. But the film ends with varying opinions on the current state of affairs, and most predict the Doomsday Clock will move forward – although Podvig is a hesitantly optimistic outlier.
The final word, however, goes to Rachel Bronson, who heads up the Bulletin: “It doesn’t feel normal out there; it feels dangerous.”
Star ratings (out of five)
True Detective: Night Country ★★★
Big Boys ★★★★
The Artful Dodger ★★★
Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? ★★★★
What else I’m watching
Winterwatch
(BBC Two)
If we’ve not long to go before being consumed in a giant fireball thanks to a re-elected Trump throwing a tantrum, then I can think of worse ways to spend one’s time than spying on red squirrels on Brownsea Island.
Around the World in 80 Weighs
(Channel 4)
Six people travel to different countries and examine varying cultural attitudes to food and weight. It turns out Japan has a very healthy population, which would be great, if it wasn’t for the bitter taste of controlling government policies and menacing fitness apps.
Love Island: All Stars
(ITV)
I’ve just watched the new Love Island in the hope that I would finally “get it”. This format features former contestants: a sort of “best of” compilation edition. Verdict? Thank God I can swim.
