Redemption Review: Slow-burning crime drama doesn’t give us much to do

Speaking of authentic, I’m not quite sure Dublin’s top crime solvers are as diverse and multicultural as those we see in writer-creator Sean Cook’s moody, slow-burning miniseries. That’s the good news repayment marks a significant step forward for representation on Irish television. The bad news is that we still don’t know what to make of the blooming thing.

Set in beautiful Liverpool, DI Colette Cunningham (Paula Malcomson) is in the midst of a frantic drug crisis when she receives a call from Detective Luke Byrne (Patrick Martins) in Dublin. Hardly the best time to pick up the phone, but Byrne has some life-changing news: Colette’s estranged daughter Kate has apparently died of suicide, and though they haven’t spoken in 20 years, Kate – who changed her name to Stacey Lockley – her mother had listed as next of kin.

Colette takes a ferry to the capital and after identifying her daughter’s body, she is informed by Sergeant Jane Connolly (Siobhán McSweeney) that Kate was a nurse who had recently lost her job on suspicion of opioid theft. Colette is going through a lot, but she has to do her best, if not for herself then for her teenage grandchildren, Liam (Evan O’Connor) and Cara (Abby Fitz).

Colette is all they have now, so our hard-nosed protagonist does something that only happens on TV. Yes, she makes that one call that changes everything.

Before we know it, Colette has a new job at An Garda Síochána and hatches a foolproof plan to stay in Dublin for six months. The first episode ends with a nervous Moe Dunford looking super sneaky and super suspicious at Kate’s funeral. Oh, and Colette spots a big black money bag and – dum, dum, dum! – Opioids in Kate’s laundry basket (a terrible hiding place if you ask me).

Not the worst setup to be fair and listen Dublin looks fabulous in it and I think redemptionn’s opener does everything it’s supposed to. It slowly builds the story, sets up the plot, and sprinkles just enough breadcrumbs ahead of its second installment on Monday. But there are problems.

First off, it’s a little wooden in the performance department, its rickety, staged dialogue (always a problem in these things) needs a bit of polishing, it’s a bit of a stretch and it didn’t always grab my attention. It’s neither brilliant nor bad, and we haven’t seen enough of it to know which way it’s headed. We’re crossing our fingers, hoping for the best and giving it another week.

I’m not sure if I should return Roar (AppleTV+). An eight-part anthology series based on a short story collection by Cecelia Ahern, what we have here is a trippy and mind-bending selection of “feminist fables,” with elements of magical realism and sci-fi, not to mention a terrific A-listing .

video of the day

In The Woman Who Ate Photographs, the inimitable Nicole Kidman drives from one end of Australia to the other with her mother (Judy Davis), who has dementia. Along the way, she discovers that she can relive some of her most treasured childhood memories by eating old photos from her mother’s family album.
In The Missing Womana best-selling African-American author (Issa Rae), meets white film producers in Los Angeles and is horrified to discover that not only are they not listening to her, but she—and the other white people in Tinseltown—can’t see her either.
Elsewhere, The woman kept on a shelf tells the story of a professional model (Betty Gilpin) whose wealthy husband (Daniel Dae Kim) literally makes her his dream girl.
Developed by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch (the team behind Netflix’s amazing wrestling comedy drama glow), Roar occasionally plays out like a ponderous cross between The Twilight Zone (at least the Jordan Peele Revival) and black mirror. The problem is that all it has are its ideas, and the patchy execution is letting them down.

Regardless, half an hour of extravagantly budgeted television – there’s barely enough material in each vignette for a 15-minute short film. These are stories that go absolutely nowhere, conveying important themes and messages with cloying, clumsy metaphors. Given the level of talent, it should be better.

I could say the same about chivalry (Channel 4), Steve Coogan and Sarah Solemani’s oddly weak comedy-drama about a chauvinistic Hollywood film producer (Coogan) who hires a respected “indie darling” filmmaker (Solemani) to remake a romantic war epic after the original director croaked. Actually, she called beforehand to fix the love scenes, but don’t worry about the plot mechanics. Coogan and Solemani, chivalryThe creators, writers, and stars of , clearly haven’t.

This charmless and surprisingly clumsy endeavor has no idea what it’s about. I think it’s meant to be some kind of satire about filmmaking and gender politics in the #MeToo age, but a) it’s not half as clever as it thinks it is, b) wastes talented people like Aisling Bea and Sienna Miller, and c) plays out like a mindless version of Ricky Gervais extras. hard pass.