‘A total cringe-fest’: the TV letdowns of the year
(BBC One/iPlayer) “Shane Meadows’s first period drama” – those five words were enough to pique any real TV fan’s interest. Based on Benjamin Myers’ excellent novel of the same name, it told the grisly story of Calderdale’s violent and lawless 18th-century coin clippers. But the show actually turned out to be a prequel, in which absolutely nothing happened. Seriously – nothing. David Hartley (who is painted as a monster in the book, but is a daft, lovable rogue here) and his gang sit around and plan things. The cast – which featured promising names such as Michael Socha and Thomas Turgoose – were left to improvise so freely that it ended up being a totally pointless mess. Still, the drunken night at the pub scenes were fun to watch.
Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story
(Disney+) If the two TV attempts to document the high-court battle between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy have proved anything, it’s that this was a squabble played out on – and best enjoyed on – social media. A Channel 4 dramatisation of the saga managed to surgically remove all the uncanny hilarity from the dialogue, leaving just a husk. But this one-sided documentary was more humourless still, going into all manner of unnecessary detail about Rooney’s life but missing the essential truth about the trial: it was funny precisely because it didn’t matter. We await Vardy’s inevitable riposte with considerably less bated breath than we’d previously hoped.
The Idol
(HBO) Where do we even start? Watching The Idol was like not being able to tear your eyes away from rotting roadkill. The creator, Sam Levinson, (also behind Euphoria) proudly described it as “the sleaziest love story in Hollywood” and revelled in making what he considered would be the most controversial television show, like, ever. In doing so, though, he ended up making what has widely been dubbed the worst TV show in history. It followed pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) who meets self-help guru Tedros (Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye) on her quest to become the “sexiest pop star in America”. Both performances were skin-crawlingly bad. The gratuitous sex scenes between the pair – of which there were many – were so terrible you didn’t know whether to laugh or vomit afterwards, and there have been many valid takes on The Idol basically being torture porn. Was there a message behind the story? None to speak of. Give credit where it’s due, though: it provided excellent watercooler chat.
Frasier
(Paramount+) This reboot of Frasier wasn’t a complete write-off – in fact, it picked up once Kelsey Grammer took his place in the director’s chair. But given how justifiably adored the original series was, we held it to higher standards than most shows. On that basis, it felt unadventurous and predictable. Every character trope from the original had been handed down to a new representative, resulting in a show mining the exact same joke set-ups but with less beloved characters and inevitably diminished effect. Nostalgia is rarely as satisfying as it promises to be.
The Super Models
(Apple TV+) The prospect of getting an up-close look at some of the most famous faces of our time, the women for whom the term supermodel was coined – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington – was almost too thrilling to bear. Then the four hours started. This may have been a fresh blast of nostalgia for fashionistas who’d been obsessed with these women in their heyday ... but for the rest of us, there was frankly not enough substance to keep us hooked. Sure, it looked at the catwalks they strutted, the fun they had, the photographers they worked with. But none of their tricky choices were examined, let alone interrogated. Campbell was not pressed on her notoriously bad behaviour. They all claimed to know about copious horrors in their industry, and alleged abusers (including the one Evangelista was married to for six years) but they – these icons, still some of the most powerful voices in fashion – chose to keep shtoom. This was TV at its most airbrushed.
Wolf
(BBC One/iPlayer) One of the most perplexing dramas in recent TV history and not in a good way, Wolf had a severe and unresolved identity crisis. What exactly was it? A brutal home invasion horror? A musing on childhood trauma? An odd-couple buddy caper? This tonal chaos could have been productive, resulting in something satisfyingly unclassifiable. Instead, it meant that finally, nothing much about it stuck. In TV terms at least, there’s never really been anything like Wolf. But that isn’t necessarily a compliment.
The Reckoning
(BBC One/iPlayer) No blame should be attached to Steve Coogan, who reanimated Jimmy Savile with exceedingly creepy brilliance. But unlike ITV’s superb The Long Shadow, which brought a completely fresh angle to the narratives around Peter Sutcliffe’s murders, this slice of bleak 20th-century life didn’t really feel as if it needed to exist. Given the BBC’s culpability in both Savile’s crimes and the cover-up of them, this drama needed to go deeper. Instead, it felt like a wallow in horror when really, only a full exhumation of cause and effect was going to be good enough.
The Crown
(Netflix) Diana’s ghost! The Queen’s Tony Blair dream! The concluding split season of Peter Morgan’s once formidable royal saga strapped on the proverbial water-skis and sailed over the shark, offering a series of deeply peculiar solutions to the challenge of dramatising events most viewers can still remember very well. Worse still, these eccentric moments were surrounded by vast swathes of tedious detail (how diverting could the minutiae of Di and Dodi’s relationship have possibly been?) and greetings-card homilies where sharp dialogue used to be. A show whose ending will almost certainly come as a great relief to everyone involved.
Daisy Jones & the Six
(Prime Video) Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel about a fictional 70s band (read: it’s 100% Fleetwood Mac) was a juicy, stylish musical romp through time. So why was it such a snorefest on screen? Riley Keough – Elvis’s granddaughter – was magnetic as the titular star singer. But her counterpart Billy Dunne was a dull performance by Sam Claflin, and hard to believe as the ultimate rock’n’roll sex symbol. Still, the outfits were fabulous and there were some decent songs.
The Full Monty
(Disney+) There wasn’t a single naked bottom in this Fully Monty sequel series. That alone was enough to politely ask Disney+ to leave your hat on and take the show with you on the way out. But it got worse. The original cast members from the 1997 film returned – including Robert Carlyle and Mark Addy – and there were admirable attempts to explore prevailing social issues on screen. And yet, a cheesy, onthe-nose script made it a total cringefest.
Three Little Birds
(ITV1/ITVX) Lenny Henry’s attempt to tell the origin story of his mother’s arrival in England on the HMT Empire Windrush was likable and well-intentioned. It also felt like a drama tailored for a particular, early evening demographic. The problem was, in attempting to be accessible to people who might not otherwise engage with this kind of immigrant story, Three Little Birds lost its fire and bite and eventually just felt a little anonymous. Approachable doesn’t need to mean anodyne.
Fatal Attraction
(Paramount+) Joshua Jackson and Lizzy Caplan in a steamy, modern remake of 80s erotic thriller Fatal Attraction? This should have been a lot of fun. But what a flaccid flop! It’s essentially the exact same story: family man-hotshot lawyer Dan has an affair with colleague Alex, who becomes obsessive and eventually ends up dead. The so-called “feminist twist” was that Alex was given a predictable backstory (traumatic childhood, of course). But it never subverted the bunny-boiler trope. What even was the point?
Robbie Williams
(Netflix) In which the former Take That star rolls around on a bed in his pants looking at a laptop and we wonder if we’ve accidentally stumbled on something too personal for broadcast. But no: in fact, this series was a good example of a concerning trend in documentary-making – the celebrity tell-all that aims to have its cake and eat it. Not particularly flattering, but also giving away nothing particularly meaningful. Similar criticisms could be levelled at this year’s series exploring the life and times of another 90s icon, David Beckham – but the difference is, Beckham never lost the essential joy he took in his primary function of playing football. For Williams, it’s usually a case of looking back in anger.
Ahsoka
(Disney+) You need to create a megabucks, mainstream-pleasing adaptation of a Star Wars animated franchise beloved only to uber-fans. How do you make it have mass appeal? “Don’t bother,” seems to have been the approach of this series about Jedi Ahsoka Tano. It functioned like a sequel to the animated series, was packed full of tedious lore-heavy references and forgot that the leads are so little-known to most viewers that filling the screentime with petty squabbles isn’t a brilliant way to get audiences to warm to them. The slow, occasionally baffling results somehow made the titular character and her padawan Sabine less likable than any of the evil forces they were meant to be battling. What a waste of Star Wars’s first liveaction franchise focused on a female character.
Bodies
(Netflix) Stephen Graham’s presence in a drama may have long been shorthand for “this one’s going to be great”, but no more. This sluggish scifi thriller about time-travelling murder victims failed to capitalise on its hooky premise – one identical dead body being investigated in four separate timelines – and dragged on, endlessly. By four episodes in, you wished they’d cut all the backstory and hurry the plot up. By five episodes, you no longer even cared what the central mystery was. By episode six, you’d given up completely – if you knew what was good for you. Why, Stephen, why?
All the Light We Cannot See
(Netflix) This big-budget, longawaited adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s bestselling and Pulitzer prize-winning second world war novel should have been a sweeping sensation – especially with Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight at the helm. It followed the parallel and eventually intertwining stories of a blind Parisian girl who takes refuge in St Malo with her father, and a German orphan whose knack for radio engineering catches the attention of the Nazis. There’s also a subplot about a diamond that everybody is looking for. But whittling down a 500+ page decades-spanning book into four episodes was a terrible move, and the story lost all its nuance and depth. Instead, they went heavy on the schmaltz, using such corny dialogue that it was enough to make you dry-heave.
The Great British Bake Off
(Channel 4) The moment Saku left it was game over, really. She was the biggest character in the tent this year, and she went far too soon. At first, it seemed as though there might be some new life breathed into a format rapidly becoming stale – thanks to the ace new host Alison Hammond. Then judge Paul Hollywood started being cruel and the challenges seemed designed to make the bakers fail, despite all those complaints last year we were assured had been dealt with. But when every contestant is serving up plates of raw sludge instead of treacle puddings, you know something terrible has gone amiss. Must try harder next year, Bake Off!