Ripley Netflix
This Town (BBC One) | iPlayer
The Assembly (BBC One) | iPlayer
Mammals (BBC One) | iPlayer
I felt nervous about the new eight-part adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 psychological thriller, The Talented Mr Ripley. Would Netflix stuff it up? We’re all hardened to botched streamer adaptations, but this is Tom Ripley, the reptilian anti-hero grifter of Highsmith’s five (“Ripliad”) novels. Would they soften Tom up, make him (I can hardly bear to type these words) “more likable”? Of previous adaptations, I loved Anthony Minghella’s glossy, shattering 1999 film starring Matt Damon (even if liberties were taken with the text). Anyway, I needn’t have fretted. Ripley is intelligent, mercurial, beautiful and devastating. It’s what it needed to be: a work of art about a nasty piece of work.
Steven Zaillian (Oscar-winning writer of the screenplay for Schindler’s List; creator of The Night of…) is at the helm, and Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers; Sherlock) stars as Ripley. Many will know the bare bones of the plot (spoilers ahead): a New York shipping magnate unwittingly sends con artist Ripley to 1960s Italy to entice home his faux-bohemian son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn). Ripley ingratiates himself with Dickie and his partner, Marge (Dakota Fanning), and murder ensues, followed by cover-ups, identity theft and more killing across Italy.
It’s not so much what Ripley does, it’s what he is. It’s up to Scott to illuminate the darkness, rage and hypervigilance behind Ripley’s surface charm, and does he ever deliver. Here’s a cold, sly, unknowable Ripley, with a gift for hollow people-pleasing. As the net closes in, the story pulses with themes: class; avarice; obsession; queerness – though Scott’s Tom is never in love with Dickie (just with what he’s got).
Ripley is filmed in chilly, elegant black and white, and, at first, I wondered if it was an absurd waste of the sumptuous Italian scenery. However, as well as nodding to classic cinema (Fellini/Hitchcock), Zaillian teases different moods out of the monochrome (suspense; resignation). Sometimes the likes of urbane Dickie and Marge, and Dickie’s suspicious friend Freddie (Eliot Sumner) feel flat (characters with the volume bafflingly turned down). However, as well as being closer in tone to the novel, the drama’s overall subtlety helps build tension: an understated but chilling early scene involves Tom softly mimicking Dickie in front of a mirror.
It isn’t as lean as it could be (there are prolonged lulls in Rome and Venice; an overblown diversion about Caravaggio), but what a sublime character study for Scott, what luscious photography, what prestige cat-and-mouse storytelling. It’s a triumph.
On BBC One, Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) returns to his working-class Midlands roots for This Town, a six-part drama (all episodes are available) about early 1980s youth/music culture (ska, 2 Tone, punk, reggae), extended family, racism, social deprivation and politics.
This Town is unorthodox from the start, as dreamer and poet (“weird fucker”) Dante (a charismatic performance from Levi Brown) strolls obliviously into a Birmingham riot, his head churning with his own scattergun rhymes. His brother (Jordan Bolger) is serving in the British army in Northern Ireland. In Coventry, their cousin Borden (Ben Rose) is fending off his father (Peter McDonald), who’s determined to enmesh him in the IRA. Borden’s mother (Michelle Dockery – Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary) is an alcoholic who staggers into the funeral of her mother (Geraldine James) to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow (beautifully, it must be said).
This Town is soaked in music (Leonard Cohen; the Specials; Phyllis Dillon; Desmond Dekker; the Clash) and Peakys-level ultraviolence (one horrific scene involves a nightclub owner and a severed finger). It’s also about the younger characters (including Freya Parks as a record shop worker) getting a band together (their tracks are by Kae Tempest and Dan Carey). Trouble is, it takes them so long to get into the band (nearly five hours!), by the time they do, you are past caring and unkind questions start to occur (why do they sound like a speeded-up version of the Beat?).
I end up loving what This Town is trying to be (a sociopolitically charged, racially blended take on the brutal early 1980s UK youthscape) more than what it is: a convoluted spaghetti junction of plots that takes an age to introduce the supposedly pivotal band. For all that, I’d be up for a second series: Knight has created a roster of characters with passion to burn.
I implore you to watch The Assembly (BBC One), a 30-minute special for Autism Acceptance Week. The premise is that a famous person (here, actor Michael Sheen) is interviewed (like a one-man Question Time) by a wide-ranging audience of neurodivergent people, with “no subject out of bounds”.
This is as warm-hearted and golden as television gets: the questioners sweetly passing around the microphone (“Good to see you, Michael Sheen”), and bashfully asking unusual questions (Is he scared of bats?). At other times, they get stuck in, like tabloid rottweilers, grilling him on the age difference between him and his wife, the royals, his height, rude celebrities, and more. (I won’t divulge Sheen’s responses, but some of the questions make him blink.)
The Assembly is based on a French TV format (which included president Emmanuel Macron among its interviewees). This British debut episode includes a recitation of Dylan Thomas’s poetry and a stirring rendition of Here Comes the Sun. Sheen is a total sport, gamely answering all the questions, but the questioners are the stars. The result is a touching, funny, revelatory TV curio.
Also on BBC One, the tireless David Attenborough (97 years old!) returns for the new six-part series, Mammals, which looks at a modern world dominated by “the most successful mammal of all – us”.
The opener is the usual natural history smörgåsbord of fascinating creatures (from Etruscan shrews to spotted hyenas to urban coyotes), beastly ruthlessness (even filmed in night vision, it’s tough watching a leopard munch on a baboon), and facts (about 200 million years ago, the aim was to avoid dinosaurs, and two-thirds of the Earth’s mammals remain nocturnal).
Thrilling, illuminating, unnerving, Mammals delivers yet another precious helping of high-grade natural history. Attenborough business as usual.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ripley ★★★★★
This Town ★★★
The Assembly ★★★★
Mammals ★★★★
What else I’m watching
Sugar
(Apple TV+)
Stylish new thriller starring Colin Farrell as a modern-day private investigator pursuing a case in Los Angeles. A noir-drenched mystery with Philip Marlowe-esque flourishes, the concept is a little bumpy but it’s interesting.
Avoidance
(BBC One)
Second series of Romesh Ranganathan’s sitcom about a separated dad who has trouble facing up to conflict. Bittersweet and amusing, it also stars Lisa McGrillis and Aisling Bea.
ABBA Night
(BBC Two)
Break out the satin knickerbockers and take a chance on this … an entire Abba-themed night on the BBC, including performance footage and a documentary on the Swedish quartet’s longstanding love affair with the UK.
