What to watch
This slick, smart thriller about Russian gangsters, banking greed and the globalisation of organised crime is the BBC’S flagship drama for the new year – and deservedly so. Taking Misha Glenny’s fascinating account of the spread of crime since the break-up of the Soviet bloc as its starting point, the addictive Mcmafia spins a tense web of lies, betrayals and deceit revolving around James Norton’s Alex Godman, the Englishraised, private-school educated son of Russian exiles who has turned his back on his family’s less-than-reputable past to forge a “respectable” career in banking. When that past comes rushing in, Alex soon discovers that he’s not the man that he thought he was – can he break free of family ties or will he lose everything that he’s worked for?
It would be easy to see Mcmafia as another glossy thriller in the same mode as The Night Manager, but it’s more interesting than that. Hossein Amini (who wrote the film Drive) and James Watkins’s subtle script delves deep into the realities of being an outsider and Norton makes for a charismatic, complex leading man. Watkins also directs with verve, allowing us to see that far more is at stake than one man’s soul. Sarah Hughes