ScreenScribe

The Little Drummer Girl | TVNZ OnDemand, from Monday ☆☆☆☆ “The first thing to say about The Little Drummer Girl is that it isn’t The Night Manager part two. The BBC’s last John le Carré adaptation was slickly contemporary when it aired in 2016 …  A very different atmosphere crackles through Little Drummer Girl, again based […]

Deep State | TVNZ 1, 9.10 Saturday ➢➢ “Mark Strong brings his strong-and-silent charisma to the role of a former spy whose family — two families, actually — becomes collateral damage in a conspiracy that stretches from the C.I.A. to MI6 to the Iranian power grid … Superficially entertaining and predictable … combining elements of […]

Troy: Fall of a City | Netflix, from Friday ➢ “Predictably enough for a Saturday night drama rumoured to have cost £16 million to make, Troy: Fall of a City had its comically overblown moments. That’s no bad thing – Greek mythology without a slice of silliness would be like Strictly Come Dancing without the sequins. […]

McMafia | Amazon Prime, from Tuesday ➢ “McMafia is an ambitious drama, spanning the globe, promising to be complex in its exploration of 21st-century organised crime and based on the 2008 book of the same name. Yet the first half felt stuck in second gear and merely like a procession of unpleasant rich men about […]

Amazon Prime Video will stream the global organised crime drama McMafia the day after it airs on the BBC. It will launch with a double-episode in the first week of January: the premiere will release on January 2 and episode 2 on January 3. The remaining six episodes will release the day after their UK broadcast. […]

The Secret Agent (SoHo, 8.30 Monday/encore, 9.30 Sunday) “The BBC can’t seem to leave The Secret Agent alone — it’s commissioned four adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel about the social and psychological underpinnings of a bomb attack. That probably says less about Conrad than it does about the continuing relevance of terrorism as a subject […]

BBC Victorian spy drama The Secret Agent will premiere next month on SoHo. Tony (Dickensian) Marchant’s three-part adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s reputedly unfilmmable novel will air 8.30 Mondays from September 12, as a curtain raiser to October’s launch of Westworld in the slot. Set in 1886 London, it starts Toby Jones as a Soho shopkeeper who spies for the Russian […]

“Fargo: Year Two carries a 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 encoding that’s even stronger than that of the first season, yet completely different in visual style. “Although shot digitally like season one, vintage lenses were used to give Year Two that classic ’70s look. Filled with pale oranges and browns, the colour palette matches the traditional look for the […]

NZ’s definitive guide to what’s airing nightly free-to-air in 1080i Saturday Robson Green’s Ultimate Catch (TV1, 5.00) Rheem Outdoors With Geoff (TV3, 5.00) Special: Ice Age: The Great Egg-Scapade (TV3, 5.30) Hyundai Country Calendar (TV1, 7.00) Movie: Pearl Harbor (TV2, 7.00, R) Movie: Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (TV3, 7.00, 5.1, R) Posh Pawn (TV1, 7.30) Movie: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (Prime, 7.30, R) Movie: Mission: Impossible […]

Could Prime have found its new Downton Abbey? The channel will screen in HD the new Julian Fellowes adaptation, Doctor Thorne, 7.30 Thursdays from March 31. His spin on the Anthony Trollope novel stars Tom Hollander (The Night Manager, Rev) as a village doctor in the 1870s and Ian McShane as an alcoholic railway baron; Humans’ Rebecca Front, […]