A spy with a superhumanly good bladder, a crime-fighting rodent who lives in a postbox, and piles of dodgy 80s wigs … we rate the best small-screen spooks. Who comes out on top?
With Tom Hiddleston up to his old racy tricks in The Night Manager – not to be confused with Netflix hit The Night Agent, which also returns in February – espionage thrillers are all over our TVs. Anyone would think we lived in unstable times with growing public distrust of governments.
So who is the all-time top small-screen spook? We’ve rated the Top 20. Just make sure you destroy this list after reading …
The explosive popularity of the gay hockey TV drama reveals women’s desire for sex and romance without violence or hierarchy
The first time gay hockey romance crossed Mary’s radar, she was warned off it. A 64-year-old non-profit executive from Toronto, Mary recalled mentioning the Canadian author Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series to her son, a twentysomething queer writer and fellow hockey obsessive, a few years ago.
“I said: ‘Have you heard of these books?’ and he said: ‘Yeah.’ I said: ‘Should I read these books?’ And he said: ‘No. They’re not for you.’”
Fans of Normal People and One Day will adore The New Years, which follows a relatable on-off couple in Madrid. It is the best relationship drama you haven’t seen yet
It is rare to watch a fictional romance and feel genuinely invested in the question of will-they-won’t-they – and even rarer for it to reflect familiar relationship turbulence. Many love stories on TV skip straight to wish-fulfilment, delivering instant chemistry, no challenges that can’t be overcome within the runtime and glib reassurance that Love Conquers All.
Netflix’s Nobody Wants This, for instance – based on a real couple, and ostensibly exploring whether a relationship can survive differences of faith – didn’t wait to resolve that question before bringing its leads together. In real life, promising connections fall at much lower hurdles, for such banal reasons as incompatible schedules.
Wild success of television series drives huge demand for Game Changers novels, with Australian booksellers reporting significant customer orders
A seventh book in Rachel Reid’s gay romance series that inspired the TV drama Heated Rivalry will be out later this year but Australian fans are still struggling to get their hands on a physical copy of any of the preceding six books.
Unrivalled, the next instalment in the Canadian author’s Game Changers series, will be released internationally on 29 September, the publisher HarperCollins announced on Tuesday.
Rafael Espinal was chosen by Mayor Zohran Mamdani because of his political background, but he also is nearing completion on a short film about broken families.
Emmy-winning actor and director allegedly touched child inappropriately on set of The Cleaning Lady TV series
Authorities in New Mexico issued an arrest warrant recently for the director and Emmy-winning actor Timothy Busfield to face a child sexual abuse charge.
An investigator with the Albuquerque police department filed a criminal complaint in support of the charge, which says a child reported that Busfield touched him inappropriately. The acts cited in the warrant – issued on Friday – allegedly occurred on the set of The Cleaning Lady, a TV series Busfield directed and acted in.
Most dramas show characters searching for pulse and giving breaths but experts say chest compressions on their own can save lives
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a dramatic intervention, but researchers say TV portrayals are often misleading – potentially influencing whether viewers feel able to carry it out themselves.
One Battle After Another and Adolescence have led this year’s Golden Globes with four wins apiece.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture epic took home best comedy or musical film. It also earned him best director and screenplay, marking his first-ever Golden Globe wins.
This year sees films such as Sinners, One Battle After Another and Marty Supreme and shows including Adolescence and The Pitt compete
It’s not an awards ceremony without a pregnancy reveal is it? Wunmi Mosaku, the British Nigerian star of Sinners is wearing a canary yellow bespoke gown and sheer veil by Matthew Reisman, and the colour is steeped in meaning. “In Yoruba, we say Iya ni Wúrà which means ‘mother is golden’”, she wrote in Vogue. Top tier stuff. More colour please.
Wanda Sykes is the first celeb I’ve seen on the red carpet tonight with a “Be Good” pin, which some are wearing in honor of Renee Good, the unarmed woman shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week, sparking national outrage. Others are wearing “ICE OUT” pins as part of an ACLU-endorsed protest of the Trump administration’s persecution of undocumented immigrants and larger $100m recruitment campaign aimed at expanding ICE presence in communities across the country.
Created by two uni mates whose last gig was a David Hasselhoff comedy, the series has become a star-making transatlantic hit. Now it’s back for an intense fourth season that heads everywhere from Ghana to Sunderland
Spoiler alert: this article contains references to major events in the previous three series of Industry
Industry is not for everyone. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s drama about young City bankers is zeitgeisty, iconoclastic and slightly inaccessible. “It is niche,” says Down. “We don’t write to any kind of brief. We don’t write what we think is going to be interesting to other people – or commercial.” For every 10 people that don’t understand a “reference or the thing we’re trying to do with the costume or the subtle hint we’re making about someone’s class, there’ll be one person that gets it. The show’s for that one person.”
And for that one person, Industry is hard to beat. “Not to toot my own horn,” says Myha’la, the mononymous 29-year-old who co-stars as daredevil American trader Harper Stern, “but I think there isn’t anything better than this show out there right now.”
Award-winning screenwriter tells Desert Island Discs that success has not silenced self-doubt
The award-winning screenwriter Jesse Armstrong has said a writers’ room can feel like “walking on the moon” when it is working well, but has admitted to experiencing impostor syndrome during his career.
Armstrong was behind the hit HBO drama Succession, starring Brian Cox as the global media tycoon and family patriarch Logan Roy, who sets off a power struggle among his four children.
This steamy queer romance between ice hockey rivals is packed with constant shots of muscular bottoms in fancy hotel rooms. But a bit more character development or emotional investment wouldn’t go amiss
I suspect that Chala Hunter is still on a recuperative retreat somewhere. Until about May, I would think. For she was the intimacy coordinator on Heated Rivalry and she has earned a break.
For those not aware: intimacy coordinators gained prominence in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, when assorted testimonies from actors (largely female) made public and unignorable the shocking fact that actors (largely male) and directors (largely male) will often (largely always) try to get away with more than has been contracted for once they are naked with A N Other person. An intimacy coordinator is there to help arrange scenes and advocate for actors. Think of them as somewhere between a bureaucrat and a contraceptive.
Sometimes you want television that challenges you. Something that’s genre bending, envelope pushing, plot twisting. Something that’s the screen equivalent of an exercise routine. But other times, you want a show that carries adjectives you’d use for a sweater — cosy, comforting, familiar. Something built around a good yarn. Read More
When it first returned to our screens, people said Gladiators was a tired format. They had clearly forgotten the joy of watching half-clad hulks with silly names go to battle, says superfan Helen Pidd as she heads backstage
When Gladiators is filming at the Sheffield Arena, it feels as if everyone is in on the joke. The woman in the ticket office looks at me gravely. “Before I give you these,” she says, “I need to ask a question. These are very good tickets. You’re in the camera block, near the red contestant’s friends and family. So there’s something I need to know. If the camera is on you, are you going to duck and hide and get all embarrassed? Or are you going to go absolutely flipping mental?”
I’ve been up until the early hours painting portraits of my favourite Gladiators with the precise hope of making it on to the telly. Of course I’m going to go absolutely flipping mental! I’ve been waiting for this day since 1992.
Ravishing actors, charged glances, buttocks like pneumatic hams … this is one steamy love story. But it’s far more than just a porny sport-based bodice-ripper
I was surprised to learn that ice hockey romance is a genre, a popular one. Surprising, but it makes sense. Love in a cold setting has a fairytale quality. It’s why the great Russian romances endure, though they aren’t relatable. Most of us don’t sit by windows, waiting for a horse to bring word that our cousin has survived the winter in Smolensk. Perhaps it’s time for a modern Doctor Zhivago? Enter Heated Rivalry (Saturday 10 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), a Canadian queer romp so hot it threatens to scorch the ice it skates upon.
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are star players from Montreal and Moscow respectively, mysteriously drawn to each other on the rink, in the full glare of the media. Well, not that mysteriously. The co-leads get down to business almost immediately, with a not-quite meet cute in a shower room. Every episode thereafter features charged glances, sweaty necks and muscular pumping. Even the camera feels as if it’s in lust, gliding over 8%-fat sports star bodies and the glass walls of luxury flats. It’s an audacious feat, making ice hockey sexy. Those padded uniforms usually make wearers resemble the Thing from The Fantastic Four.
An afterlife sitcom, an angry penguin, tossed salad and scrambled eggs, and a Corby trouser press … our writers pick the shows they would happily watch on a loop for ever
I love every character and every aspect of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. There isn’t a weak link in the cast and they work together as seamlessly and apparently joyfully as you could wish.
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