3 to watch this week. . .
Munich: The Edge Of War (Cert 12, streaming from January 21 exclusively on Netflix)
In the autumn of 1938, Europe stands on the precipice of conflict.
Adolf Hitler (Ulrich Matthes) is preparing to invade Czechoslovakia, which would initiate hostilities across the continent.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons) attempts a diplomatic resolution by asking Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini to intervene.
An emergency conference in Munich involving delegations from Germany, Britain, Italy and France signals the possibility of a peaceful resolution over disputed territory.
British civil servant Hugh Legat (George MacKay) is asked to join the British delegation so he can secretly meet with his old university chum, German diplomat Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewohner), who is in possession of secret documents revealing Hitler’s grand plan.
Bidding farewell to his wife, Pamela (Jessica Brown Findlay), and young son, Hugh nervously prepares to commit an act of espionage on foreign soil for the greater good.
Adapted from Robert Harris’s international bestseller, Munich: The Edge Of War is a compelling spy thriller that confidently sustains tension even with grim knowledge of real-life events that unfolded one year after the 1938 Munich Agreement was signed.
German director Christian Schwochow sombrely depicts
escalating tensions in his homeland as the Third Reich inspires frenzied fanaticism and Jews are mercilessly persecuted.
MacKay delivers a solid performance as a family man in the eye of a storm, but Niewohner steals every scene as the proud patriot, weighed down by guilt that he once fervently banged a drum for Hitler’s nationalist rhetoric.
The Gilded Age (Nine episodes, starts streaming from January 25 exclusively on NOW)
Downton Abbey scribe Julian Fellowes is one of the creative minds behind this lavish period drama set in 1882, a period of immense economic and social change, which glides onto Sky Atlantic this week and streams exclusively on Now.
The key protagonist is Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson), the penniless, orphaned daughter of a Southern general from rural Pennsylvania, who moves in with her rigidly conventional, socialite aunts Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) in New York City.
With the help of Peggy Scott (Denee Benton), an African American woman posing as her maid, Marian becomes entwined in the lives of wealthy neighbours as she chooses between adhering to the rules or forging her own path.
Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon co-star as a railroad tycoon and his resourceful wife, who are determined to leverage their wealth to secure a solid footing in polite society.
The Sinner – Season 4 (Eight episodes, streaming from January 26 exclusively on Netflix)
The first series of whodunnit The Sinner based on German crime writer Petra Hammesfahr’s novel full of rug-pulling twists was one of the surprise TV hits of 2017, providing Bill Pullman with a plum role as Detective Harry Ambrose.
A fourth and final helping of the anthology percolates on Netflix.
When a tragedy occurs involving the daughter of a prominent island family, retired detective Ambrose pledges to assist the investigation.
He becomes immersed in a tantalising mystery that turns his life and that of the residents of the Northern Maine tourist idyll upside down.
Frances Fisher co-stars as matriarch Meg Muldoon and Cindy Cheung plays Stephanie Lam, a mother fiercely protective of her son.
Ronin Wong serves up suspicion as restaurateur Mike Lam while Neal Huff features as a kind-hearted lobsterman.
The Responder is a new take on a crime drama – and you’ll see a different side to lead star Martin Freeman, as Georgia Humphreys discovers. Long night shifts on the front line of Liverpool policing, with no idea of the situations you might be called to – and your own mental health struggles.
That’s the situation facing Chris Carson (Martin Freeman), a morally compromised first responder working in one of the most deprived areas of the UK, and the character at the centre of new BBC One series The Responder. A darkly funny and intense watch, the five-part crime drama is based on the real experiences of the writer, ex-police officer Tony Schumacher.
Having been demoted from Detective Inspector to PC three years ago – for perceived corruption – Chris is crisisstricken, struggling both professionally and personally.
He’s seeing a therapist, there’s a complicated relationship with a childhood friend called Carl (who also happens to be a local drug dealer), and he has a wife and daughter at home. Then he faces a fresh challenge, as he’s forced to take on a new rookie partner, Rachel (Adelayo Adedayo).
Here, we find out more from Aldershot-born Freeman, 50, famous for his roles in The Office, Sherlock, and The Hobbit film trilogy.
WHY DID YOU WANT TO PLAY THIS CHARACTER?
He is a great mixture of vulnerability and strength. I think there is something about a man of few words that is attractive. There’s a reason why people like characters that don’t have to overexplain themselves and I think Chris is one of them.
He’s very intelligent, he’s emotionally smart, but he’s a copper. He finds it hard to be open at home and with his counsellor, and in his job it’s
probably wise not to be open, so he picks his moments when he can let off steam and talk to people. But those are few and far between and the amount of plates he is spinning is frightening. So much so that if he drops even one of those plates he could wind up dead.
THE MORAL AMBIGUITY OF CHRIS IS SO INTERESTING TOO…
That was one of the things that
I thought about in the pilot episode; I wasn’t being told what to think, and I wasn’t being told who the goodies or baddies were, or that he was a goodie or baddie.
Essentially he is a decent human being, but, faced with the challenges of his job – he’s probably been in the job over 20 years – that tends to take some of the shine off your character because you’re turning up at the worst times in people’s lives.
WHAT SORT OF RELATIONSHIP DOES CHRIS HAVE WITH HIS NEW POLICE PARTNER RACHEL?
Neither of them wants to be each other’s partner because Chris knows that Rachel doesn’t respect him. She gets a bad vibe off him and he believes it’s likely to do with the fact that he has a bit of a sketchy past on the job and she knows it.
There’s a barely disguised antipathy between them for much of the series. However, as the series progresses, Rachel begins to find out more and more about Chris and discovers he may not be as bad as he’s been made out to be.
YOU HAVE HAD SO MANY GREAT TV ROLES OVER THE YEARS. WHAT DID YOU THINK WHEN YOU READ TONY’S SCRIPTS?
It didn’t feel like it was written by committee. It didn’t feel like it was written for anybody else apart from the person who had written it. There were things
about it where you just thought, ‘He’s just going for it’. And it had its own tone. It was just pleasing itself, and I like work that pleases itself because hopefully, by rationale, it’s bound to please some other people. But it wasn’t being written to please the folks over here, and then the folks over there; it was just someone’s own experience.
WHAT ELSE DO YOU THINK IS UNIQUE ABOUT THE RESPONDER?
I think it’s a drama that doesn’t offer answers but asks a lot of questions. There is nothing neat about it – it’s chaotic and unsettling and there’s an underlying authenticity to it. We all wanted to make something different that was exciting and unformulaic.
DOES THAT SENSE OF ‘WONDER’ COME BACK TO YOU WHEN YOU READ A SCRIPT LIKE THIS?
I haven’t read anything like it before and I love being excited by scripts because every time you get a script you do want it to be The Godfather. You do want it to be amazing and you live in eternal hope.
Then, very occasionally, when your ability aligns with other people’s skills and when someone has such faith in you, it’s lovely. I have a reasonably healthy ego but there were several times in the run-up to filming that I asked Tony, Chris (Carey, executive producer) and Laurence (Bowen, executive producer) if they were sure they had the right man for the job and couldn’t they get someone better than me. Then Tony said that he’d had me in mind when he wrote it and kept seeing me in scenes when he was writing it, so that really relaxed me.
HOW DIFFICULT DID YOU FIND DOING THE SCOUSE ACCENT?
I definitely had to work. I read the pilot episode at the beginning of 2019, not knowing exactly when we would do it and then, of course, Covid happened.
I had one session with the late great (dialect coach) Joan Washington, a Zoom thing. It (the accent) was already in pretty good shape because my ear’s OK. But, obviously, I was mindful because the first Zoom readthrough we did, it’s me and a lot of Liverpudlian actors, and it’s the first time that I was doing it in front of people like that – people who weren’t my girlfriend or my kids. So that was pretty nerve-racking.
The Responder starts on BBC One on Monday, January 24. All episodes will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer.
‘I haven’t read anything like it before and I love being excited by scripts’