No./9 NEXT IN THE SERIES
You fell in love with that incredible new TV show. And then it ended! Don’t despair — Boyd Hilton recommends the sibling shows to watch next
IF YOU LOVED... TIME BANISHED BRITBOX
This one-series wonder from 2015 is basically a period version of Time. Also written by Jimmy Mcgovern, it’s set in the first penal colony in New South Wales, Australia, in the 18th century, and its seven intense episodes interrogate the power imbalance between the British prisoners and their guards, mostly Marines in the Royal Navy. Russell Tovey is James Freeman, the everyman equivalent of Sean Bean’s character in Time, who resorts to desperate measures after being bullied by another convict (played by Game Of Thrones’ Rory Mccann). An underrated gem that easily deserved a second season.
OZ SKY ON DEMAND/NOW
There are prison dramas and there’s Oz. Across six seasons and 56 episodes, this HBO show created by Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life On The Street) pummelled viewers with its unflinching look at the US penal system. The (fictional) Oswald State Correctional Facility is a world where inmates are divided by race and social class, and where sexual assault and violence are a daily reality. Underpinning the saga is the warped ‘relationship’ between neo-nazi Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) and Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), jailed, like Sean Bean in Time, for a drunk-driving crime.
ACCUSED AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Before they acted together in Time, Sean Bean and Stephen Graham co-starred in an extraordinary episode of Jimmy Mcgovern’s 2012 anthology series Accused. Bean plays Simon, a frustrated English teacher by day who transforms himself into a woman called Tracie at night, and Graham is married man Tony, who meets Tracie in a bar, the pair having sex later that evening. The implications of this casual relationship are, unsurprisingly for a Mcgovern drama, dark and bleak, but Bean and Graham are astonishing.
BANANA ALL 4
Within two years of graduating from the National Film and Television School, Lewis Arnold — Time’s director — was helming the first four episodes of Russell T Davies’ Banana. The sister show to Cucumber, originally aired at the same time, it explores stories of younger LGBT characters, often only tangentially connected to its companion show. The opening half an hour detailing the sex life of Cucumber supporting character Dean (Fisayo Akinade) is a tour de force of television. TIME IS OUT NOW ON BBC IPLAYER AND ON DVD