Breathless

So this is Britain's answer to 'Mad Men'?  In that case we really are a fifth-rate, insignificant island off the corner of Europe.  Dan and I are not among those who think that MM is the best thing ever to have hit the screens, but it's pretty darned good, mostly, and in comparison to this it's searingly brilliant.  Lest anyone be confused here, this has only a kitsch title sequence and coiffed hair in common with Draper and co.  In every other sense, this is more akin to that pinnacle of UK prime-time, 'The Royal': smarmy surgeons, doe-eyed nurses, neurotic wives and a Best of the 60s soundtrack.  The saucy doctor's sideline in illegal abortions feels borrowed from 'Call the Midwife', and the presence of Davenport, Little, Parish and Glen merely reminds you how good they can be elsewhere.

It doesn't score highly on the factual front either.  Nurses in the 1960s weren't allowed out of hospital grounds in uniform, but 'Breathless' has them kitted out at home and in public.  Is this a budget restriction or lazy research?  It may seem a small point, but it's easy enough to ask any veteran nurse and we need look no further for one of the causes of those 'inexplicable' infections on the wards.

If Britain had an answer to the Madison Avenue antics of Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce...) it was shaping up to be 'The Hour'.  If this goes on beyond one series, we'll be Breathless... with indignation.

Hatfields & McCoys

They sure were ornery back in them days, way out West.  Well, west of the UK.  To Americans it's a sort of Eastern Western.  Everyone wore brown (or maybe they were just downright dirty); the men carried guns, spat tobacco at every opportunity and cussed all the time.  The women just looked about ten years older than they were and wore cross expressions, which is hardly surprising given the stupidity of their menfolk.

This is a feud so famous that their names have passed into a colloquialism for discord, but as this TV series shows, it had its origins in nothing very much more than a difference of opinion, and continued for decades to the detriment of several members of both families, who were either killed or, in one case, kept apart from their loved one.  (Not that Johnse Hatfield was exactly faithful to Roseanna McCoy - he eventually married her cousin Nancy.  Nice.)

The production features, under all those beards, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and a fair few English actors, who assume Virginian/Kentucky accents with varying success.  Sarah Parish (sans beard) also appears as Hatfield's long-suffering wife and matriarch of the clan, while Mare Winningham, ex-brat packer, is her opposite number in the McCoy tribe.  It's all quite fun in a so-glad-I-didn't-live-then kind of a way, and it looks and feels suitably grimy and backwoods, but... while at bottom it's a condemnation of the futility of violence, we can't quite get beyond the feeling that it's one lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards attacking another lot of ignorant hillbillies with grubby beards for no very good reason.  Well, it is a Western, so what did we expect?

Monroe

Remember this?  Nor do we, apart from a vague familiarity, but that could be from a number of other programmes about 'a brilliant, maverick... (add profession of choice)'.  Wasn't the first series in the 20th Century?  Apparently not. The eponymous  Monroe (James Nesbitt, who looks like he's visited a botox clinic and demanded to look as much like George Clooney as possible) is the brilliant, maverick surgeon with a troublesome ex-wife, children and colleagues.

This sits uneasily between not two but three stools: Casualty-style soapy patient and love lives complete with crooning soundtrack; serious drama and black comedy.  The result is an identity crisis.  Performances are slick, and the script sometimes witty, but there are the familiar moral dilemmas, gripes in the operating theatre and on the wards and from the trailer for next week, things progress pretty predictably.  As a mainstream ITV drama it's not bad, but the best moments show what a frustrating near-miss this is.