Tag: television-tag/features

Part of Bennett’s work was also to ensure there was a coherence between the different generations of actors playing the same roles. One quality of Charles’s life Bennett focused on when it came to instructing both O’Connor and West was the abundance of time he has, as he waits to finally assume his destiny as king, and the debilitating effect that has on him in his life.

“[Charles] is literally waiting all the time. When you see him walking, he walks at a different speed to the [other] royals – you notice that his place in the world is not vibrant or fast because it’s subdued. It’s a helpful mantra to have… you’re in limbo, and my job is to go, ‘What does limbo feel like?’ That was a really gorgeous discovery.”

Embodying grief

Moving into the final season of The Crown – which has been split into two parts, with the first streaming on Netflix from 16 November – a key focus will be on the death of Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997. While the series will not explicitly show the crash, it will cover the aftermath, with the public outpouring of grief and the royals’ reactions to her death. In an interview recorded earlier this year, West explained: “There were some really heavy scenes this season and a lot of tears for Charles. There are a lot of scenes of Charles trying to come to terms with [Diana’s death] and breaking the news to his sons, trying to help his sons mourn and having varying degrees of success at that.”

There’s also one scene reportedly where a “ghost” of Diana will appear, although creator Peter Morgan himself has disputed that description saying that her posthumous appearance  is “more an indication that, when someone has just passed, they’re still vivid in the minds of all those close to them and love them.” While there has already been some controversy around the use of this device in the series, Bennett explains that this added a further emotional depth for characters, especially for West as Charles. “When grief strikes, when we get affected by a trauma, your body changes. So I would say there is a shift in our Charles when this happens because of an absence of a figure. Then, when you’re looking at your children and they’re looking like your partner is half of them, that changes how you look at them, as if you’re almost seeing a ghost.”

The lead image being used to promote the first half of the sixth season is actor Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Diana, in a recreation of an iconic shot of the Princess of Wales, then just weeks before her shocking death, sitting pensively on the diving board of a yacht, dressed in a turquoise swimsuit. For Debicki to arrive at this state and point in Diana’s frenetic “hunted” life, there was work Bennett did with her that harked back to her workshops with Emma Corrin’s previous younger Diana in series three and four – with both actors, she asked them to imagine the walls were lined with cameras.

“When I first started working with Elizabeth, it started being about not what Emma had done, but then it came full circle. I think there’s a beauty in that dialogue between the series and between the actors that haven’t worked together. I found similar imagery [for the two] in prey, the impact of the weight of cameras, of being seen, the paparazzi, when you think about being the most photographed woman in the world… it’s absolutely horrible. Imagining it, it must have made her feel embarrassed, worn out, exhausted, so aware of herself.

Here, it is impossible not to be reminded of today’s news cycle, where viral stories often include an element of public shaming. Like Fyre Festival, where the internet celebrated influencers being publicly humiliated. Or Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler, where a common reaction was to insist the victims of romance scammer Simon Leviev should have known better. Daniel says the experience has taught him not to judge people until you’re in their shoes. “If you want something to be real, you’ll find ways to make it real and to dismiss any of the red flags.”

This story would be unlikely to happen today, where so much of our personal information is on the internet and our first instinct is to Google something if it doesn’t feel right. At the heart of the documentary is working out what really drove “Nik,” now N Quentin Woolf, to deceive people in an era where the average person was more trusting.

The documentary suggests he had a troubled childhood and genuinely hoped to make the show into a success. “He is a damaged person who’s had a tough life,” Francis-Roy says. “He’s now able to look back and it’s complicated for him. It’s still not easy for him to process.” Dalton says he had “everything except the contacts” to make the show a reality, while even the contestants think he had the makings of a great TV producer. Two decades on, he seems scarred by what happened and haunted by guilt. But it’s never fully clear whether he’s genuinely sorry for his actions, or merely sorry for his own downfall.

A second chance

The Greatest Show Never Made is a full-circle moment. For Nik, it’s about realising that he didn’t ruin the contestants’ lives, and that they don’t harbour any ill will against him. Jane is finally experiencing the TV fame she always aspired to. “It feels like all my plans in 2002 are finally happening right now,” she says. Lucie has now let go of the shame she harboured after being duped. “The word ‘wannabe’ used to make me cringe, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be someone or something,” she says. “I feel proud of it – and I didn’t say that before.” Similarly, the series has helped Tim to “completely reappraise” what happened.

The group were brought together by shared ambitions of fame and money, but they ended up finding their dreams in the ordinary. Lucie had twins at 45. Jane started working as a TV extra. Rosy moved to Spain and became an olive oil farmer. “Nik” published a book of poetry. Daniel and John are living contently in the corporate world. Tim, who still works as an entertainer, has done very well financially out of the footage he shot. “I’m just really glad that I carried on filming,” he says.

Even though it didn’t work out as planned, there is a hopefulness in these people having a dream and following it. They are forever bonded by what happened. But there is also a lingering sadness in how some of them didn’t think their lives were special enough without fame. How much they were willing to risk for it. How brutal the reality medium turned out to be. Not just for them, but for so many others – on the shows that were actually made.

The Greatest Show Never Made is out now on Prime Video.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

“I think that to a big extent, people like GVFÖ because they feel that the programme is real,” viewer Casper Törnblom tells BBC Culture. He discusses the programme both with his colleagues at work, where a separate messaging channel is dedicated to the show, and on a popular Facebook thread that garners 700-1,000 comments every season. “The programme becomes a bit of a mirror or canvas for people to use to look at how relationships work,” he says. “I know that it is TV, which means that you can’t ignore the dramatic aspects, you have to make matches where there can be tension. But the experts and those who are behind it – when I have spoken to them [through work], I feel that they are actually motivated to succeed. They are serious people.”

Another GVFÖ fan is Jenny Eriksson from Malmö, an educator focussing on culture. “I’ve watched a little bit of Love is Blind, but it is a bit like The Bachelor, the men are so masculine and the women so feminine,”, she tells BBC Culture. “That is often very far from the world I live in.” Eriksson talks a lot with friends about personal relationships, and programmes like GVFÖ give her new angles to discuss. “I am very interested in attachment theory and other types of relational theories, and read up on those things. So it’s interesting to analyse the series both from the perspective of my own experiences and from the perspective of the conversation that is happening in society right now about how relationships work. And also to see how the participants are affected by that conversation.”

As an example, she mentions groom Alex from this year’s GVFÖ programme, who said he would start asking his new wife questions, something he had never done in previous relationships. “Maybe he meant more that he has been told that he doesn’t ask enough questions – I doubt that he has not asked anything,” she says. “That is something that is discussed a lot in various relationship forums.” It is also something she can relate to herself. “There are men who I have dated who think they are [being] interviewed for a job, and then they don’t remember they are supposed to ask questions, because they are so busy telling me how good they are themselves,” she says. “I once dated someone who, already in the queue to order our beers, went: ‘Well, I have studied this, and I am now working on this… my mum has coronary disease…’. I was like: ‘Uhm, yes, should we sit down?’”

Mattias Lindholm and Elis Larsson work at equality and anti-violence organisation MÄN, which was chosen by US indie band Bon Iver as their collaboration partner for a Swedish gig earlier this year. Over the past few years, MÄN has arranged two discussion evenings for people of all genders about GVFÖ, covering communication, gender norms and relationships.

“The first event was in 2021,” Lindholm says. “That particular season in Sweden caused a lot of debate about relationships and gender roles. We wanted to capture that.” Even though both discussion evenings covered themes from GVFÖ, with on-air expert Kalle Norwald coming along as well, that was just the starting point. “This year, we found that the men were generally better at the emotional work than in previous seasons,” Larsson says. “So one of the questions we had [to the expert] was: ‘How can you do that type of work, how do you practise it?’” adds Lindholm.

New conversations

But Swedish MAFS still battles some of the same issues as its reality programme siblings. “[GVFÖ] is a sadistic experiment,” said a prominent author and sociologist in a comment article in the country’s biggest daily paper earlier this year. “Marrying strangers to each other under the pretext that they have been scientifically matched by experts will never be done ethically.”

Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered 50 years ago, in September of 1973 during Saturday morning cartoons, but the show wasn’t written for children. Instead, it was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones. Other episodes include How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth (the first Star Trek episode to win an Emmy award), in which an alien claiming to be a Mayan deity captures the Enterprise, as well as The Infinite Vulcan, written by Walter Koenig, in which a scientist tries to clone Spock.

Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That’s why the show didn’t catch on – while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children’s series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

As a result, Star Trek: The Animated Series was largely forgotten by all but the most ardent Trek fans, sandwiched between the iconic original series and The Next Generation, which premiered in 1987. Because it was animation, and aired in a time slot aimed at children, many people who enjoyed The Original Series wrote it off as immature kids’ fare. But in recent years, The Animated Series has reasserted itself as an important part of Star Trek history.

A new history

Its status as a part of the franchise is still somewhat uncertain: fans have long-considered the two-year show as the latter years of the Enterprise’s five-year mission, but reportedly Gene Roddenberry himself did not consider The Animated Series to be part of the Star Trek canon. For many years, Paramount respected Roddenberry’s wishes, but since the rebirth of the television franchise with 2017’s Star Trek: Discovery, the show appears to be solidly ensconced within Star Trek’s history.

Captain Robert April, a key character from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (a series that debuted in 2022, set a decade before The Original Series), was named as the first captain of the Enterprise in The Animated Series. Star Trek: Lower Decks (a series that launched in 2020) regularly references its animated predecessor as well – for example, Dr T’Ana is a Caitian, a species that was introduced on The Animated Series.

In fact, Lower Decks has a direct connection to The Animated Series – it’s another animated show for adults, but this time the franchise has embraced it. They’ve even gone so far as to do a live-action crossover between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks in the episode Those Old Scientists.

Caryn James picks out the biggest offerings – from Taylor Sheridan’s spy thriller Special Ops: Lioness, with Zoe Saldana and Nicole Kidman, to the comebacks of classic series Futurama and Justified.

1. The Horror of Dolores Roach

Is Dolores horrified or is she the horror? Maybe both in this dramedy, the latest to jump on the trend of podcasts turned into television series. Justina Machado (One Day at a Time) is the title character, recently released after a 16-year-prison stint, who returns to her now-gentrifying New York City neighbourhood. Her shady old friend gives her a place to stay and a massage table, but if you’ve ever heard a murder podcast you’ll know that her new life won’t go smoothly and her nickname of Magic Hands will only get her so far. If the title weren’t clue enough, the series is produced by the horror masters at Blumhouse, and is being described as “Sweeney Todd-inspired”. Yum?

The Horror of Dolores Roach premieres on 7 July on Prime Video

2. The Afterparty

Season 2 of the slyly comic whodunnit series brings back Tiffany Haddish and Sam Richardson as detectives who can’t seem to agree on anything, with a new cast of murder suspects and a new crime. The format, a delight for movie lovers, is the same: each episode is told from a different character’s point of view, in a different cinematic style, this time ranging from noir to 19th-Century costume drama, and apparently including a take on Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. When a bridegroom is killed – worst wedding ever – everyone at the ceremony is a suspect, including the bride, her family and their friends, played by John Cho, Paul Walter Hauser, Ken Jeong, Elizabeth Perkins and Zach Woods.

The Afterparty premieres on 12 July on AppleTV+

3. Full Circle

Steven Soderbergh never takes a breath. He has tended to direct at least one film or streaming series a year recently, from 2019’s underrated High Flying Bird to this year’s best forgotten Magic Mike’s Last Dance. Some of his strongest work has been in television drama, notably The Knick, and his latest is a crime series full of promise, suspense and first-rate actors, including Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant, Zazie Beetz and Jharrel Jerome. Danes and Olyphant play a couple who receive a call that their son has been kidnapped, and Beetz investigates, turning up family secrets involving crime, cash and the country of Guyana.

Full Circle premieres on 13 July on Max

4. Survival of The Thickest

The very funny comic actress and stand-up Michelle Buteau is familiar as the what’s-her-name best friend in films including Always Be My Maybe and Marry Me with Jennifer Lopez, and as part of the ensemble on BET’s First Wives Club. She gets the starring role here in a series she has created, loosely based on her book of comic essays, also called Survival Of The Thickest. Her fictional character, Mavis Beaumont, leaves her cheating partner when she finds him with another woman. Single at age 38, she tries to restart her romantic life and jumpstart her career. She may not make the best choices, however, as is evident in the fact that she is a fashion-challenged stylist.

Survival of The Thickest premieres on 13 July on Netflix

5. Justified: City Primeval

Proving the theory that nothing on television has to stay dead forever, the beloved 2010-15 crime series Justified, based on Elmore Leonard’s stories about US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens, has been rebooted with new locations. Timothy Olyphant (pictured) is the constant as Givens, who has the same swagger and same Western hat as in the original series. Now Givens has moved from Kentucky to Florida, and is taking his feisty 15-year-old daughter (Olyphant’s real daughter, Vivian Olyphant) to camp when some thugs get in their way. Raylan and daughter end up in Detroit, where he has to track down a killer known as the Oklahoma Wildman. Inspired by Leonard’s 1980 novel City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit, the new location adds urban grit to Givens; Western dynamic, a smart way to reinvigorate a familiar show.

Justified: City Primeval premieres 18 July on FX and 19 July on Hulu

6. Praise Petey

After so many serious exposés of cults, the time seems right for an animated comedy on the subject. Anna Drezen, a former head writer on Saturday Night Live, has created this series, which puts an absurdist spin on the old fish-out-of-water and woman-starting-over stories. Petey, voiced by Schitt’s Creek star Annie Murphy, is a cosmopolitan New Yorker who takes over her father’s small-town cult after her city life falls apart. John Cho is the voice of cult member and possible romantic interest Bandit, who was raised in the organisation. Stephen Root, so chilling and ruthless as hitman handler Monroe Fuches in the later seasons of Barry, is Petey’s father, and Christine Baranski is her sophisticated, non-cult-following mother.

Praise Petey premieres 21 July on Freeform

7. Special Ops: Lioness

Far from the ranches of Yellowstone and 1923, prolific showrunner Taylor Sheridan takes on the CIA in his latest series, set in the world of counterterrorism. The title refers to his fictionalised version of a CIA programme. Zoe Saldana stars as Joe, the head of a team (like Carrie in Homeland). She sends an agent, Cruz Manuelos (Laysla De Oliveira) undercover to get close to the daughter of a suspected terrorist, so the CIA can, as Joe says in the trailer, “kill the target”. Nicole Kidman has a supporting role as a CIA supervisor, and Morgan Freeman is the US Secretary of State. Intrigue and suspense should drive the plots, but Sheridan-watchers will be looking for the subtext too. Sheridan has always said his shows have no political slant, while many commentators see a conservative streak. It will be fascinating to see what the series might say about US policy and terrorism.

Special Ops: Lioness premieres 23 July on Paramount+

8. Futurama

After 10 years away, the long-running animated sci-fi satire returns with new stories and the same off-the-wall characters. In the original, Fry (Billy West) was cryogenically frozen in 1999, only to thaw out in the year 3000, where he met the love of his life, Cyclops Leela (Katy Sagal), and the robot Bender (John DiMaggio), among other eccentrics. The new episodes pick up 23 years later, with an updated spin on social trends. A newsreader reports on a recently discovered virus, Explovid-23, which can be tested for with a gigantic cotton swab up your nose. A banner at an outdoor event says “Back-to-Normal Fest 2021”, with 2021 crossed out and 3023 hand-written in. The series was created by Matt Groening of Simpsons fame – and a family resemblance can be seen in the character’s wide-jawed faces, and humour that is both skewering and silly.

Futurama premieres 24 July on Hulu

9. Dark Winds

One of television’s best under-the-radar series returns for a second season, with Zahn McClarnon (Reservation Dogs and Fargo) as Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Police. Based on Tony Hillerman’s crime novels set in the US South West during the 1970s, the first season revealed that Joe’s son had been killed in a suspicious oil drilling explosion. The new series has him tracking the man he suspects of causing the tragedy. Joining him is Sgt Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten) and his former partner Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), now a private detective. McClarnon makes Leaphorn an iconic figure, a Native American update on the Western hero, tough, wise and not necessarily beyond taking revenge. Dark Winds’ executive producers include Robert Redford and George RR Martin, but it stands on its own as taut, atmospheric and deeply humane, with the texture of life on the reservation and the vast desert landscape vital parts of the show.

Dark Winds premieres 27 July on AMC+ and 30 July on AMC

10. Twisted Metal

Following recent HBO hit The Last of Us, here comes another video-game adaptation set in a post-apocalyptic world. Anthony Mackie, best known as Falcon (and soon to be Captain America) in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is at the centre of this action comedy inspired by the PlayStation title, a demolition derby with lethal weapons. Mackie plays John Doe, who has amnesia, and agrees to deliver a mysterious package. He loads his gun, gets in his beat-up car and races off across the US. Stephanie Beatriz plays a car thief named Quiet, Thomas Haden Church is the villainous highway patrolman Agent Stone, while Sweet Tooth, a demented killer clown, is played physically by the wrestler Joe Seanoa (Samoa Joe) with Will Arnett’s voice. The game has been around since 1995, with various further instalments appearing over the years, so the series has a built-in fan base.

Twisted Metal premieres 27 July on Peacock

11. Good Omens

This odd-couple comic fantasy, based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, continues for another season, with Michael Sheen as the fussy angel Aziraphale and David Tennant as the brash, anything-goes demon Crowley. Last time they saved the world from the Antichrist. This time their comfy London life is interrupted when they team up to get the angel Gabriel out of trouble after he vanishes from heaven and pops up at Aziraphale’s bookshop. Jon Hamm returns as the often befuddled Gabriel, who Gaiman has called “everyone’s worst boss”. For all its religious and spiritual allusions, Good Omens is the most light-hearted of all the Gaiman adaptations (Netflix’s The Sandman and Amazon Prime’s American Gods among them), which makes it the most fun.

Good Omens premieres July 28 on Prime Video

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

;