This celebrity show trial was utterly depressing viewing
Televised trials have always attracted a keen audience. Think back to OJ Simpson or the nanny Louise Woodward. But those were the olden days, when you shared your opinion on the accused’s innocence or guilt with nobody but the people you knew. Now, you can comment on a live-streamed trial in real time, to a global audience of strangers, on Twitter, on Tiktok, on your own Youtube channel. This was territory explored in Depp vs Heard (Channel 4), and it was profoundly depressing.
A quick recap: Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard, his ex-wife, for defamation after she wrote a Washington Post op-ed referring to herself as “a public figure representing domestic abuse”. Heard counter-sued, saying Depp’s lawyer defamed her by claiming that she fabricated allegations. The $50million case played out last summer in Fairfax, Virginia.
This three-part series neatly boils down six weeks’ worth of evidence, setting the testimonies of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard side by side. It begins with the couple recounting the start of their love affair, when they were cast together in The Rum Diary. With their age gap, and Heard’s old-school glamour, he thought of them as Bogart and Bacall. “I acknowledged the fact that I was the old, craggy Bogey and she was this stunning creature,” he said.
But then it all turned vicious, resulting first in a London court case that ruled against Depp, and then the Virginia case, which found in his favour. Some sided with Heard, citing it as another #Metoo moment. But the public mood was overwhelmingly pro-depp, with fans queuing outside the courthouse every day to show their support and many more supporting him online.
A balanced view is that both of these people are awful. That there was shocking behaviour on both sides; that Heard was not a saintly figure, that Depp was a charming film star but a nasty drunk. Unfortunately, we’re now in a world where everything has to be black and white, where taking sides and shouting loudly is the route to likes and subscriptions.
This was the focus of the programme, as much a study of toxic social media culture as a toxic celebrity marriage. Moronic “influencers” filmed themselves watching the trial, turning it into their own version of Gogglebox. Heard, Depp and their lawyers became the subject of countless Tiktok memes. This wasn’t the Wagatha Christie trial, where the only things at stake were the reputations of two silly footballers’ wives and the subject matter was comically trivial. It was a serious case, turned into a social media circus. Anita Singh
Palaeontologists are not, on the whole, a dazzlingly photogenic bunch. Perhaps that explains why Prehistoric Planet decided to sex things up by relegating the actual experts to the last five minutes of each episode, instead filling airtime with lots of CGI footage of dinosaurs flying, waddling and chomping.
Yet the trouble with the second season of Apple TV+’S Cretaceous doc is that these segments are the best bit. They reminded me of those “making of ” featurettes in other nature shows. We’re treated to brief digressions into, say, how the biomechanics of a Mosasaur allowed it to become the fastest marine predator that ever lived, hitting its prey with the force of an articulated lorry. It’s fascinating stuff.
The rub lies in the rest of the show. For a production backed by the financial might of Apple, the computergenerated imagery is weightless and penny-pinching. Mostly, the dinosaurs seem to float above their live-action backdrops: less real animals of flesh and heft, than sad digital ghosts hauled back to environments they vanished from 66million years ago. That said, the camerawork does contrive some striking scenes. The dark bulk of a Mosasaur looming shiveringly at the end of a coral canyon. An overhead chase through a snowy forest, shot like an outtake from a Bourne film.
Part of the difficulty is we have little idea how these animals lived. This leaves the scriptwriters with a problem. There’s some attempt to vary the action, but largely it follows wearyingly familiar beats – hunt/mate/be hunted/ repeat. David Attenborough’s narration does its best to inject some wit and surprise. But you sense even he must tire of yet another plucky mother defending her threatened brood.
Towards the end of one of the five episodes, we cut to footage of a crocodile ambushing a wildebeest in the Serengeti. It’s meant to illustrate a comparison between the wondrous power of prehistoric predators and their diminished, modern counterparts. Rather, it becomes a reminder of how skin-prickling nature documentaries can be. And how creaky Apple TV+’S series is by contrast.
Depp vs Heard ★★★ Prehistoric Planet 2 ★★