The success of 'War and Peace' and 'The Night Manager' on BBC1's 9pm Sunday slot has left big shoes to fill. 'Undercover' treads confidently, if a little predictably, in its opener. A juggernaut narrowly misses crushing Maya (Sophie Okonedo) within the first few minutes (she was fumbling for her phone on a desert highway, as you do). She's a lawyer, fighting for client Rudy (Dennis Haysbert) facing execution on Death Row. We don't quite know what he's done, but Maya likes him and he's played by the cuddly President in '24', so we feel he has to have been unjustly sentenced. Maya lives in London and is happily married to Nick (Adrian Lester) with three teenaged children, one of whom is autistic, but Nicky has a secret that threatens to expose the basis of their relationship as a lie....
Good so far. Just enough hints and flashbacks to keep us guessing what happened, why and to whom in 1996. This clearly takes its cue from the recent, controversial court cases involving long-term undercover cops who engaged in relationships with those they were investigating, even in some cases having children from those relationships, in addition to ongoing relationships under their own names. We hope it holds its nerve and becomes an outstanding drama, since it is tackling such major themes as justice, prejudice, public and personal trust and betrayal in the modern democratic state.
Seemingly as long as there is British Television there will be new adaptations of Gerald Durrell's Corfu novels, particularly 'My Family and Other Animals'. Five minutes (OK, a few years) after the last one, along comes another on ITV, with charmingly illustrated credits and a new generation of child actors . Keeley Hawes plays put-upon Mrs. D, who decides to end her dreary suburban penury in favour of eking out an existence with her four unruly children in sunny Corfu. Thanks to the book and all the previous versions, we mostly know what happens next, but there's no reason newcomers to the tale shouldn't enjoy this adaptation. That is, unless they are pedants and wonder what on earth young Margo (Daisy Waterstone) is doing sunbathing in a bikini in 1935.
Rowan Atkinson assumes the mantel of Simenon's pipe-smoking French detective in ITV's new adaptation - the first of two - shown on Easter Monday. Atkinson wisely underplays the Inspector, but we found it hard to put Mr Bean and various Edmund Blackadders thoroughly behind us. All credit to him for those lasting creations, but it hindered our immersion in the lively, rather seedy Montmartre of the 1950s.
This story concerned that modern crime drama staple, the serial killer, and naturally the victims are women who happen to be out alone late at night. Maigret's team are stricken at their inability to catch the culprit, and threatened with being taken off the case, until the great man comes up with a daring ruse to smoke out the killer. Will it work, or go horribly wrong...?
An oddity, is all we can say. Ponderously slow except for a chase which feels like it was crowbarred into the midst of proceedings to liven things up. Most of it looked expensive, but the chase appeared to have been filmed on a camcorder. Maybe it's the nature of its dated source material, but the dialogue was as stilted as if it had been lifted directly from the French, and the interior scenes had the staged feel of a forgotten drawing-room play. A waste of a very good cast and some lovely couture.
Marcella (with a hard 'ch' rather than a soft 's' sound), is a murder squad detective who has taken a long career break to raise her children, but now finds herself abandoned by her husband and compelled back to work on her old unsolved case of - what else - a serial killer. Anna Friel has a serious line in angsty, gutsy ladies and she gives it her all here. Every modern detective needs a quirk, it seems, and Marcella's is that she loses her temper and blacks out. Not a great trait for a cop, we think, but then the team behind this were responsible for 'The Bridge. The autism spectrum was used to great effect in the character of Saga, and in today's supposedly touchy-feely police force, that's an equally unlikely asset for a detective.
It's nasty and not particularly new, but may shape up, and if Ms Friel's particular brand of angsty, gutsy character makes you reach for the remote, there is a more than decent supporting cast to distract you.
More 4's latest Friday foreign drama takes up where 'Spin' left off. Paris is replaced by Stockholm but the skullduggery, betrayal and downright dirty politics are all present and (in)correct. Disgraced former Chief of Staff Elin (Louise Peterhoff) is waitressing when she is re-recruited. The previous occupant has supposedly gone on sick leave but we know that Sarah was tailed and that her abandoned car is in the woods. She was last seen pleading with Annika, a middle-aged mum who supports the far right. When Annika is threatened, things start to look conspiratorial. And intriguing. And generally like a timely and engrossing drama. Hurrah.
Joe is five, and spends most of his time belting out his dad's favourite music while listening to the songs on his headphones. He doesn't get invited to his classmates' parties. His mum and dad reluctantly consult doctors as to whether their son is somewhere on the spectrum of the 'A' word.
We seem to recall a similarly-themed one-off drama on ITV a few years ago with Keeley Hawes and Ben Miles as worried parents of a young boy. As there, the wider family get involved (the boy's brewer uncle and his adulterous doctor wife, the un-pc granddad played by a surely-too-young Christopher Eccleston) and there's clearly a rocky road ahead. It's watchable, has great performances and beautiful Cumbrian scenery, but at the moment it feels a little by-numbers and predictable. It's true we've been spoiled with the likes of the second series of 'Happy Valley' - better than the first - and the upcoming third series of 'Line of Duty', but we're not yet sure what this will have to offer to offer above and beyond another exploration of autism.
The latest Saturday night Scandi offering from BBC4 is 'Follow the Money', which is less a noir than a conspiracy thriller. The Corporates Dun Bad again, and this being the 21st Century and Denmark, the Bad Corporates are in supposedly sustainable, clean, renewable, green energy. The adjectives may seem superfluous, but apparently they don't all mean the same thing, and they are anything but clean in the hands of Sanders, whose company Energreen has a wind turbine empire staffed by itinerant workers too scared to refuse to work in unsafe conditions.
Meanwhile nice cop Mads is on the case of one of them who turns up dead, and his efforts to convince his father to talk result in the father's death too. Luckily, a colleague in the fraud squad turns up to rescue him from the gloom and guilt - and the similar feelings engendered by his wife's MS - and they embark on an investigation which encompasses Sanders' ambitious new head lawyer and, we suspect, will eventually engulf the mechanics with criminal sidelines.
This is shaping up well, albeit not along unexpected lines. We're hoping for some moral grey areas writ large over the next month.
