Dolly Wells and Emily Mortimer are a treat in their understated LA sitcom Doll & Em. And what is it with Death in Paradise?
*Doll & Em* (Sky Living) | Sky Go
*Death in Paradise* (BBC1) | iPlayer
*The Necessary War* (BBC2) | iPlayer
*The Pity of War* (BBC2) | iPlayer
In an effort to boost its drama output and get the talent onside, Sky has produced more than its share of vanity projects in recent years. You know, the kind of half-hour whimsies that actors have always wanted to write or direct or appear in to show that they are serious artists but which, by any reasonable commissioning criteria, would be kicked unopened into the slush pile.
So it was with a certain trepidation born of toe-warped experience that I approached *Doll & Em*, a six-part comedy on Sky Living co-written by and co-starring the actors Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells and produced by Mortimer's husband, the actor Allessandro Nivola. There was also the question of the setting and target of the comedy: Hollywood.
It's very hard to escape the smugness that creeps into any LA-based show that is self-satirising. Even something with the British self-deprecation of Episodes couldn't help but trade on the shock value of a major celebrity (Matt LeBlanc) acting as we believe actors to act: spoilt and cynical. And yet, no matter how vile and superficial the stock pool party in the Hollywood hills is made to seem, the overriding impression is: but wouldn't you like to be here?
One such pool party duly made an appearance in the second episode of Doll & Em, which centres on the semi-autobiographical relationship between successful actor Em (Mortimer) and her best friend Doll (Wells), who has come out from England to work as her personal assistant. There were even some major film star celebrities present in Chloë Sevigny and Susan Sarandon. Was it going to be another dose of self-celebration masquerading as oh-so-cool irony?
That it worked a treat was partly because no big deal was made of it. There were no outrageously philistine producers or predatory starlets. The comedy was not in the manner of the party but its manners – the missed air kiss, the curious asides, the desperate passive-aggressive anxiety that goes into maintaining the unspoken hierarchy of stardom.
In truth, the Sarandon plotline wasn't particularly amusing, but the observation elsewhere was subtle yet forensic, like a sensitive but thorough strip search. It was particularly revealing of the intimate competition surreptitiously conducted between female friends.
As both women fell under the rakish spell of a smooth producer called Buddy (Jonathan Cake), they traded sob stories of their dead fathers in a semi-naked battle to be seduced. That we know in real life they are the daughters of the late John Mortimer and John Wells only added to the comedy of unsayable truths.
It's an awkward, funny and deceptively clever confection that is saved from Hollywood hipness by the unmistakable warmth of the complex relationship at its heart. Perhaps it also helps that it's made by HBO.
Glancing at some viewing figures last week, I noticed that *Death in Paradise* comes out near the top of the charts. I've seen a few episodes now, although it's one of those shows that is so perfectly formulaic that you might just as well watch the same one over and over again.
Set on a Caribbean island, it stars Kris Marshall, the bloke who played the Adam in the six-year-long BT ad-as-soap-opera, as a bumbling but brilliant detective – sort of Columbo in the tropics. Each week there's a murder and he solves it through whizz-kid deduction and lots of CSI-style flashbacks.
To say that it makes Midsomer Murders look like the work of GF Newman would be to underplay its bovine pace and plotting. The actors speak pure exposition, as if explaining the story to each other, and are shot in theatrically static ways in case we might become confused by movement.
But what makes it a watchable curiosity are the guest stars. Last week saw Joseph Marcell, who used to play the plummy butler on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He lasted only a few minutes before being shot dead, and spent the rest of the show doing a very persuasive job as a corpse. No doubt it beats pantomime.
Most surprising of all was Caroline Proust, best known as police captain Laure Berthaud in Spiral, arguably the grittiest cop show made in Europe. She was, of course, fabulously wasted – a lawnmower could have stood in for her without impeding the action. But it was good to see her all the same. The scenery looked nice. And that's enough for seven million viewers.
We're only two months in and already it seems as if the first world war centenary commemorations are in danger of outlasting the war itself. As is the way with war, so far it's been marked by long periods of boredom interspersed with sudden skirmishes. None more brutal than that which took place last week between the two historians Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson.
Fortunately neither man had to leave his trench, as the battle was conducted in separate programmes. In *The Necessary War*, Hastings argued that, while hugely murderous, the first world war had to be fought to protect Europe from a German expansionism not so different to Hitler's.
He appeared to make his case in a series of ever more grand drawing rooms. You knew he'd reached his conclusion when he ended up in the hall of mirrors in Versailles. Even a man of Hastings's undisguised distinction would struggle to move upwards from there.
Ferguson took a very different route in *The Pity of War*. He delivered a lecture in front of an audience of experts, maintaining that Britain would have been better off had it stayed out of the war. The Q&A session saw him shot down from all sides, leaving the impression that he'd done the academic equivalent of going over the top. Forget the argument, give the man a medal. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
*Doll & Em* (Sky Living) | Sky Go
*Death in Paradise* (BBC1) | iPlayer
*The Necessary War* (BBC2) | iPlayer
*The Pity of War* (BBC2) | iPlayer
In an effort to boost its drama output and get the talent onside, Sky has produced more than its share of vanity projects in recent years. You know, the kind of half-hour whimsies that actors have always wanted to write or direct or appear in to show that they are serious artists but which, by any reasonable commissioning criteria, would be kicked unopened into the slush pile.
So it was with a certain trepidation born of toe-warped experience that I approached *Doll & Em*, a six-part comedy on Sky Living co-written by and co-starring the actors Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells and produced by Mortimer's husband, the actor Allessandro Nivola. There was also the question of the setting and target of the comedy: Hollywood.
It's very hard to escape the smugness that creeps into any LA-based show that is self-satirising. Even something with the British self-deprecation of Episodes couldn't help but trade on the shock value of a major celebrity (Matt LeBlanc) acting as we believe actors to act: spoilt and cynical. And yet, no matter how vile and superficial the stock pool party in the Hollywood hills is made to seem, the overriding impression is: but wouldn't you like to be here?
One such pool party duly made an appearance in the second episode of Doll & Em, which centres on the semi-autobiographical relationship between successful actor Em (Mortimer) and her best friend Doll (Wells), who has come out from England to work as her personal assistant. There were even some major film star celebrities present in Chloë Sevigny and Susan Sarandon. Was it going to be another dose of self-celebration masquerading as oh-so-cool irony?
That it worked a treat was partly because no big deal was made of it. There were no outrageously philistine producers or predatory starlets. The comedy was not in the manner of the party but its manners – the missed air kiss, the curious asides, the desperate passive-aggressive anxiety that goes into maintaining the unspoken hierarchy of stardom.
In truth, the Sarandon plotline wasn't particularly amusing, but the observation elsewhere was subtle yet forensic, like a sensitive but thorough strip search. It was particularly revealing of the intimate competition surreptitiously conducted between female friends.
As both women fell under the rakish spell of a smooth producer called Buddy (Jonathan Cake), they traded sob stories of their dead fathers in a semi-naked battle to be seduced. That we know in real life they are the daughters of the late John Mortimer and John Wells only added to the comedy of unsayable truths.
It's an awkward, funny and deceptively clever confection that is saved from Hollywood hipness by the unmistakable warmth of the complex relationship at its heart. Perhaps it also helps that it's made by HBO.
Glancing at some viewing figures last week, I noticed that *Death in Paradise* comes out near the top of the charts. I've seen a few episodes now, although it's one of those shows that is so perfectly formulaic that you might just as well watch the same one over and over again.
Set on a Caribbean island, it stars Kris Marshall, the bloke who played the Adam in the six-year-long BT ad-as-soap-opera, as a bumbling but brilliant detective – sort of Columbo in the tropics. Each week there's a murder and he solves it through whizz-kid deduction and lots of CSI-style flashbacks.
To say that it makes Midsomer Murders look like the work of GF Newman would be to underplay its bovine pace and plotting. The actors speak pure exposition, as if explaining the story to each other, and are shot in theatrically static ways in case we might become confused by movement.
But what makes it a watchable curiosity are the guest stars. Last week saw Joseph Marcell, who used to play the plummy butler on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He lasted only a few minutes before being shot dead, and spent the rest of the show doing a very persuasive job as a corpse. No doubt it beats pantomime.
Most surprising of all was Caroline Proust, best known as police captain Laure Berthaud in Spiral, arguably the grittiest cop show made in Europe. She was, of course, fabulously wasted – a lawnmower could have stood in for her without impeding the action. But it was good to see her all the same. The scenery looked nice. And that's enough for seven million viewers.
We're only two months in and already it seems as if the first world war centenary commemorations are in danger of outlasting the war itself. As is the way with war, so far it's been marked by long periods of boredom interspersed with sudden skirmishes. None more brutal than that which took place last week between the two historians Max Hastings and Niall Ferguson.
Fortunately neither man had to leave his trench, as the battle was conducted in separate programmes. In *The Necessary War*, Hastings argued that, while hugely murderous, the first world war had to be fought to protect Europe from a German expansionism not so different to Hitler's.
He appeared to make his case in a series of ever more grand drawing rooms. You knew he'd reached his conclusion when he ended up in the hall of mirrors in Versailles. Even a man of Hastings's undisguised distinction would struggle to move upwards from there.
Ferguson took a very different route in *The Pity of War*. He delivered a lecture in front of an audience of experts, maintaining that Britain would have been better off had it stayed out of the war. The Q&A session saw him shot down from all sides, leaving the impression that he'd done the academic equivalent of going over the top. Forget the argument, give the man a medal. Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.