But the makers of Sky Atlantic’s Britannia starring David Morrissey, Mackenzie Crook and Zoe Wanamaker took a more imaginative and freewheeling approach to their costume creation.
The series is set approximately 2000 years ago when the Romans are attempting to stamp their bloody authority on a tribal land made up of Celts and Druids.
What a difference two years makes. In 2017, Sky was one of the crown jewels of the vast Murdoch media empire, beloved by investors and publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Spool forward to 2019 and Sky is part of Comcast, the US cable conglomerate, which successfully outbid Disney to buy Europe’s biggest pay-TV provider for a staggering $39bn.
Musician and comedian Tim Minchin writes and stars in Upright, a series about the unlikely friendship forged by two misfits in the middle of the Australian Outback.
Upright follows Lucky Flynn (Minchin), a self-destructive yet talented pianist struggling to make ends meet. On discovering that his mother has only days left to live, the estranged son embarks on a 4000km journey across Australia, from Sydney to Perth, armed only with his battered but beloved upright piano.
I Hate Suzie follows Suzie Pickles (Piper), a celebrity whose career is put in jeopardy when she becomes the victim of a hacking scandal that causes a compromising photo of herself to be leaked.
The eight-part series follows Suzie’s excruciating journey to hold her life together alongside her best friend and manager Naomi (Farzad), as she struggles to keep her career afloat and her marriage to her husband, Cob (Ings), begins to hang by a thread.
Shocking. Bleak. Controversial. Devastatingly brilliant. All these descriptions are true of HBO and Sky’s five-part retelling of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The HBO and Sky series has been one of the most talked-about dramas of the year so far, lauded by critics and helping to confirm the current golden age of TV.
At times, the events depicted in the programme were so incredible that many viewers have questioned what was real and what is made up.
Based on the famous London heist which took place in April 2015, Hatton Garden follows Brian Reader (Kenneth Cranham) as he leads a gang of ageing thieves organising the theft of a lifetime.
Sex on Trial examines high-profile student sexual assault cases in the US and explores the impact they have had on the people making the accusations and the accused.
“I wanted to make a drama unlike anything else, because Chernobyl was unlike anything else. I wanted it to be as unique as the event itself.” That was the ambitious goal set by writer and producer Craig Mazin for his epic mini-series about the Soviet power plant that caught fire on 26 April 1986, triggering the most disastrous nuclear accident in history. And Mazin has succeeded.
