For those of us who like to stay indoors, it has been a bad summer. The World Cup ate up all traditional television scheduling, and the streamers apparently declined to counterprogramme. The Bear came and went before anybody noticed, and House of the Dragon conclusively disappeared up its own bottom.
If you’re anything like me then you clung to the good stuff (basically Disney’s Furious and nothing else) like a life raft, eking out new episodes like someone in a desert sucking condensation off the underside of a tarpaulin. It is now autumn, and television is back. In fact, I can’t remember a time when television has come roaring back with quite the same ferocity as it has this month.
Everywhere you turn there is something new and unmissable. And I suspect you haven’t even seen your favourite TV show of the year yet. For me, the big one is Sky and HBO’s new divorce drama War (main pic).
Watching it feels like scratching an itch I didn’t know I had. About the messy divorce between a fading Hollywood star (played by Sienna Miller) and a tech billionaire (played by Dominic West), and the warring lawyers who represent them, it sits precisely at the midpoint between Rivals and Succession – knowingly trashy, but also hugely smart. It’s so unbelievably propulsive, every episode ends with a whopper of a cliffhanger scientifically engineered to give you whiplash.
And on top of that, Pip Torrens gets to play the haughtiest lawyer in all of recorded media. It is an absolute joy of a thing. But also – Slow Horses is back!
And that performs a little miracle of its own, too. The show is so long in the tooth that you would probably expect a significant drop off in quality. And yet its new run (its sixth) may very well be its strongest yet (despite the less than enthusiastic views of my colleague Jack Seale).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
