The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When the small screen got big
We were swept off our feet by drama with cinematic ambitions – and budgets to match, says Benji Wilson
For years, TV drama has tried to look like cinema; in 2016 it finally succeeded. Big was beautiful: there were Winter Palace balls in War and Peace, a coronation fit for a queen in The Crown and, in The Night Manager, an entire night sky illuminated by napalm.
Evidently, there were large sums of money involved, and nowhere larger than in The Crown, on which Netflix reportedly spent $10 million an episode. Cameras swooped down on Westminster Abbey and soared over smog-shrouded London. But the show was emotionally rich, too, building up a complex psychological portrait of the Royal family – proof that the online streaming service can rival its better-known competitors when it comes to quality television.
Mainstream TV was not to be outdone, however. Director Dominic Cooke gave Shakespeare a brutal relevance by compressing his more obscure history plays into The Hollow Crown’s second series, with Benedict Cumberbatch as a tortured Richard III. In the frothier Victoria, we were thrust straight into the turbulent early life of the last Hanoverian monarch, played by a mesmerically doll-like Jenna Coleman.
Elswehere, grit was delivered in grand style. National Treasure, an extraordinary, if queasy, drama about a British sitcom star (played by Robbie Coltrane) implicated in an abuse scandal, offered the sort of stylish mise en scene you might expect in arthouse cinema.
There is no substitute for good storytelling and all of these series, though visually arresting, were far more than mere baubles. Andrew Davies’s filleting of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and David Farr’s tensionfilled modernisation of le Carré’s Cold War thriller The Night Manager proved that you can capture a novel’s essence without slavishly preserving every detail.
The best drama of the year, however, was Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley. Back for a second series, this essentially oldfashioned story set in Hebden Bridge is about a policewoman in her 50s dealing with the evil that men do. There are no lavish setpieces, no A-list stars and few explosions. But it had a wonderfully tight script and, with Sarah Lancashire as the principled but frequently compromised Sergeant Catherine Cawood, the best performance of recent years.
In fact, women dominated in TV drama. Siobhan Finneran as Cawood’s damaged sister was nearly as compelling, while Keeley Hawes’s shock return in Line of Duty was one of the year’s genuine thrills. (Hawes also sparkled as the splendidly scatty matriarch in The Durrells). Stephen Poliakoff ’s wonky spy thriller Close to the Enemy was saved by the fabulously smoky Angela Bassett and the rising star Phoebe Fox, who gave two other, terrifically different performances, in The Hollow Crown and NW, an adaptation of Zadie Smith’s novel.
Fine female performances (and
BEST OF 2016
writing) punctuated comedy, too. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag was the most talked-about show of the year – and it wasn’t just hype. This scabrous account of female sexuality and thirtysomething ennui was daring, heartbreaking and very funny. Sharon Horgan, always a name to be reckoned with, wrote two brilliant pilots, The Circuit and Motherland, and was granted her own series on HBO, Divorce. Documentaries provided some of the year’s best material. How to Die: Simon’s Choice, about euthanasia; Dunblane: Our Story, on the 20th anniversary of a lone gunman’s killing of 16 children and one teacher; and two Louis Theroux programmes, Drinking to Oblivion and Savile, proved that you can still make important TV on a smaller budget. But the headlines were hijacked by two shows now embedded in the British psyche. The Great British Bake Off’s move from the
Naked Attraction, Channel 4 Channel 4 slipped one step closer to privatisation with this dating show that asked couples to size up each other’s genitals before they even met. Classy
BBC to Channel 4 became even more of a fuss when it emerged that Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins and Mary Berry had decided not to renew their contracts. The disastrous reboot of Top Gear, hosted by Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, showed how dearly the BBC had paid for letting Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May take to Amazon what was essentially the old Top Gear format, as 30 seconds of their superannuated schtick on The Grand Tour made clear.
Terrible trends come and go, from reality shows to makeover programmes, but David Attenborough has remained a constant. He and the BBC Natural History Unit have been doing the same thing for decades, but each series feels like a giant leap forward, not just in technical prowess, but in jaw-dropping beauty – and Planet Earth 2, from its dancing Rocky Mountain bears to the sad, solitary Himalayan snow leopards, was no exception. As an emotional epic, it put most of this year’s dramas in the shade.