Alice & Jack (Channel 4) | channel4.com
The Space Shuttle that fell to earth (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The New Look (Apple TV+)
Bring the Drama (BBC Two) | iPlayer
What’s in the air with splashy, on-off romances right now? We just had the Netflix adaptation of One day (college couple surround each other for 20 years). Now, there’s Victor Levin’s Alice and Jack, a six-part Channel 4 drama devoted to romantic dysfunction spanning decades. Partially directed by Juho Kuosmanen (Compartment No. 6) and Hong Khaou, if intended as a TV valentine (the opener aired last Tuesday, February 14), it’s an emotionally visceral one, with cerebral guts hanging out.
I’m on board right away because the finance snoop Alice is being played Andrea Riseborough (To Leslie). I love the jagged edges she brings to roles. Domhnall Gleeson (The patient) is Jack, a deep-thinking biomedical researcher. After meeting through an app, their bond is obsessive, volatile and damaging. As time passes (spoiler alert), they keep reuniting, needing each other rather than wanting each other. Especially for Alice, a hard knot of scar tissue, there may be too much past trauma to handle.
Be warned, you may not like Alice, or indeed Jack. There are times when I think: what unbearable, self-indulgent drama queens! With a supporting cast including Aisling Bea, Aimee Lou Wood and Sunil Patel, it is more or less accepted that the title characters’ great love has the right to flatten everything and everyone in front of it. They waste a lot of beautiful people, while the obstacles for them to gather over time feel fabricated and thin. If you hang around long enough (another spoiler klaxon), you can feel a mite tricked by the bizarre, mangled happy-sad ending.
at the same time, Alice and Jack feels at once daring, cerebral (like a strange, long play chopped into six pieces), prickly and amusing (“I’m going to tell you this as nicely as I can – go away, please”). Riseborough and Gleeson convince as the perma-turbulent couple, their individual dysfunctions breaking together in roaring black waves. It’s not full of sex scenes, but there’s the feel of an older, more nagging one at times Normal People. Even if it only makes you wonder if we really need another anti-romcom for our cynical times.
On BBC Two, Lizzie Kempton’s three-part docuseries The Space Shuttle that fell to earth is a devastating exploration of the Columbia disaster in 2003. At the end of its 28th mission, the NASA spacecraft exploded as it re-entered Earth, killing all seven (male and female) crew members. Beginning with home videos of debris falling across east Texas, the episodes take on different parts of the grim story: the run-up and compromised launch (removed foam casing hitting a wing); the (repressed) concern on the ground; and, finally, the aftermath and the reckoning, with an investigation and damning report.
There are interviews with Nasa engineers, officials and journalists, as well as the bereaved families. Soon the shocking story emerges: the attempts to raise the alarm that were dismissed; the emails ignored or left undelivered; the suffocating chain of command that made it all possible; the pervasive feeling that costs and schedules have been favored over investigation and what amounts to a disturbing “fingers crossed” attitude to safety.
Even more difficult moments lie elsewhere. The spouses and children who are left behind. The footage of the crew training, bonding, working in space on science projects, all of them were excited to have the experience (for four of them it was their first mission). It’s eerie but moving to see the footage from inside the shuttle cabin, showing the crew calm and oblivious as they float around in zero gravity. An extremely tough watch, this riveting documentary series serves as a tribute to the impeccable astronauts and those who failed miserably.
Through all 10 episodes of Todd A Kessler’s new World War II meets high-couture drama The New Look on Apple TV+, I must declare myself superior. What did it set out to achieve?
It’s effectively two heavy (dare I say, bloated), stitched-together biopics about French designers Christian Dior and Coco Chanel, played by Ben Mendelsohn and Juliette Binoche. It is also about the Nazi occupation of Paris and how both designers were accused of collaborating. While sensitive, modest Dior helps the French resistance, which his courageous sister Catherine (Maisie Williams), Chanel is shown, among other scandals, fraternizing with Heinrich Himmler and embarking on a failed mission to get a message to Winston Churchill.
Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, The Zone of Interest, demonstrates how the horrors of Nazism can be used as an evocative, chilling backdrop. Such cleverness is completely absent in The new look shift of tone and focus. One moment it’s about couture (beautifully dressed Parisian characters, perfumes, rivalries, rebirths); the next it’s all Nazis, torture, executions and the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Similarly, one minute Chanel is presented as a soulless, grasping anti-Semite; the next, somewhat offensively, as a bitchy, but droll, camp, wicked queen – even a feminist heroine: “I’m not going to put up with this boys’ club any longer!”
Elsewhere, there is chronic overstuffing, with unnecessary detail and stand-up dialogue (“Your boyfriend is a Nazi”), while the cast, including John Malkovichspeak english with french accent (pourquoi?). Subtle performances, especially from Mendelsohn and Williams, end up submerged in a big, confused, ethically questionable soup of a narrative. Kessler was behind one of my favorite TV dramas – Damage – so I’m guessing he didn’t mean for any of this.
If you’re looking for something new and heartwarming, there’s the new six-part acting talent series Bring the Drama (BBC Two), presented by Bill Bailey. Here, a mixed group of eight hopefuls who never had the opportunity to go to drama school are mentored by casting director Kelly Valentine Hendry (Flea bag, Broad church, Bridgerton), whose observations include: “This industry is skewed toward privilege. I believe that must change.” Rather!
In the opening, the pupils try their hand at soap opera (which goes all out at the Albert Square set). The coming weeks include results after forensic drama (Silent Witness) and action drama (Peaky Blinders). Priced as an industry showcase, this is a sweet, heartfelt, nurturing show about daring to dream. No one is eliminated and everything relies on Hendry’s “magical pin-drop moments”. It reminds me of old school reality television (remember Fake it?) before the hysteria and disgust sets in.
Star ratings (out of five)
Alice and Jack ★★★
The Space Shuttle that fell to earth ★★★★
The New Look ★★
Bring the Drama ★★★
What else am I watching?
Chin
(BBC One)
Second series of the Dublin-based crime gang drama, created by Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly. Gritty, uncompromising and understated, it stars Charlie Cox and Clare Dunne.
Griselda
(Netflix)
Trending on Netflix since it launched last month, this drama about the real-life female Colombian underworld boss Griselda Blancostarring Sofia Vergara engulfed in prosthetics, is exciting, lavish and undeniably exciting.
bag
(BBC Four)
Ah, “Baggy, dear Baggy, old fat hairy cat.” Heartwarming 50-year tribute to the striped moggy and friends, including a repeat of the 2009 Time shift documentary on creator Oliver Postgate and two episode repetitions. No, you have always secretly wanted to be Emily.
