Tag: television-tag/tv-review-tag/features

There is clumsiness throughout, though, including the ongoing stark contrast between Diana’s sun-bathed days and the dark wood and shadows inside Buckingham Palace.  A paparazzo who photographs Diana says of his profession “You have to be like hunters, killers”, one more winking, leaden invitation to fill in the blank.

In episode four, Morgan enters the period of his 2006 film, The Queen, with Helen Mirren, about the aftermath of Diana’s death, and we are struggling through two layers of the past, history and that film’s version of it. This time it is Charles, rather than Tony Blair, who urges the Queen to leave Balmoral and go to London to publicly mourn, telling her she needs to be “mother to the nation”. Staunton is steelier than Mirren when she replies, “I’d rather not be lectured on how or when to grieve or show emotion”. 

Without making her any less the beloved Queen of recent memory, in a thoroughly convincing performance Staunton is positively beady-eyed and firm in her resistance, backed up fully by Prince Philip (Jonathan Pryce). If only we had seen more of what she might have thought. But she abruptly relents and heads to London, after she imagines ghostly Diana talking to her. The jarring change is as sudden as Charles’ appreciation of what Diana meant to the country. Such character swerves make it seem as if the series is racing along to catch up to the story points everyone expects and gets to see, whether we need to or not: William and Harry walking behind their mother’s coffin, the Queen finally giving her address to the nation about Diana, which in Staunton’s uncompromising portrayal displays the forced nature of it all.

Morgan’s elegant writing and penetrating, speculative psychology have been immensely intriguing, a joy to watch over the years. Too often in these predictable last seasons, though, we could have written the story ourselves.

★★☆☆☆

The Crown season 6 episodes 1-4 is released on Netflix on 16 Nov. Part two of season 6 is released on 14 December.

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So, we have new five episodes, two more than the 2019 series, and there’s as much of a focus on old tech – videotapes, digital cameras, an enchanted rune – as there is on new. However, some familiar themes are also present, such as AI, data harvesting and deepfakes.

In Joan is Awful, the titular character is shocked to discover that a popular streaming platform is carrying a dramatised version of her life, starring Salma Hayek. The show becomes a smash hit, having a huge impact on Joan’s life.

Loch Henry sees a young couple, Davis and Pia, stopping off in Davis’s rundown Scottish Highlands hometown on their way to the island of Rùm, where they plan to make a nature film. They are sidetracked instead into making a true-crime documentary, with disastrous results.

In Beyond the Sea, the central episode and, at 80 minutes, the longest, a pair of astronauts two years into a six-year mission in deep space are able to download their consciousness into android replicas of themselves at home on Earth to reduce the burden of their isolation and keep their families happy. Naturally, things do not work out swimmingly.

Mazey Day revolves around a troubled young film star hounded by a determined paparazzo who seems to be having doubts about the morality of her job.

And finally, in Demon 79, a quiet British Asian woman who works in a department store accidentally enters into a very binding contract with a demon.

Over the whole season, there’s a very starry cast including, among others, Aaron Paul, Josh Hartnett, Salma Hayek Pinault, Kate Mara, Myha’la Herrold, Annie Murphy, Rob Delaney and Paapa Essiedu.

Everyone will have their own favourite performance but, for my money, Aaron Paul is the standout as one of the astronauts in what is also probably the best episode, the retro-future Beyond the Sea. It’s not easy to convey emotion when playing a buttoned-up character who, for professional reasons, tries not to convey much emotion. Joan is Awful has the most Black Mirror-esque, mindbending story and Annie Murphy, from Schitt’s Creek, is good comedy value as the beleaguered Joan. Loch Henry is, arguably, the most disturbing and features a particularly bleak and troubling sequence.