Alexander Larman

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise.

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón announced that his next project would be a seven-part adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel Disclaimer, it was met with a mixture of excitement and surprise. Excitement, because anything that Cuarón involves himself with tends to be an event; surprise, because after a series of high-profile recent projects that have included everything from a near-experimental sci-fi blockbuster (Gravity) to a black-and-white Mexican drama he shot himself (Roma), it seemed almost mundane, rather as if Stanley Kubrick, at the peak of his success, had decided to make a movie out of a Harold Robbins potboiler.

The news that Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice has flopped in its first weekend at the US box office, taking in a mere $1.6 million from 1,740 locations across the country, may not be as surprising as liberal critics might suspect. The film received decent rather than adulatory reviews, many of which suggested that its portrayal of the young Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn was either too generous or unfairly maligned the younger Trump, depending on where your individual politics stood.

To nobody’s very great surprise, the much-anticipated, very expensive Joker sequel, the pretentiously entitled Folie à Deux, has flopped, and then some. The original film opened to a staggering $96 million on its opening weekend in 2019, and went on to earn more than a billion dollars worldwide, eventually winning an Oscar for its lead Joaquin Phoenix. It was that rare movie that appealed as much to cineastes and critics as it did to the Saturday-night popcorn crowd. Never mind that its director Todd Phillips ripped off Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver so much that it was virtually actionable; it was heralded as a vital, incendiary piece of cinema. Its sequel has not been.

The death of Dame Maggie Smith at the age of eighty-nine represents not just the end of a very English tradition of acting that she exemplified, but a passing of a generation. With the exceptions of Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, there are no few grand dames of British stage and screen surviving; there is a distinct difference between, say, Smith and Helen Mirren, who pivoted early to the cinema and has largely remained there ever since. Smith was a consummate actress for film — she won two Oscars and was nominated for plenty more — but it was the smaller environs of television and stage where she truly excelled. A misapprehension about Smith is that she was a camp, OTT presence. This impression is largely derived from her latter-period work in Gosford Park (in which she was superb..

Two of the highest-profile show launches of the past month are also two of the least original. If your taste runs to hard-bitten, Sopranos­-accented crime, then you might enjoy the new HBO series The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman as Oswald Cobb, the so-called “Penguin,” a Mafioso who is attempting to gain control of Gotham City’s crime underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone. And if you’re more interested in female-driven whimsy, then Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the latest genre-hopping comedy-drama-fantasy-horror on Disney+, will allow Kathryn Hahn ample opportunity to chew the scenery as the witch Agatha Harkness, who forms a new coven after the misadventures of WandaVision.

Now that The Crown has finished (for the time being, at least), production companies are scrabbling about for replacements. Perhaps inevitably, the biggest royal story of the past few years — Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on the BBC’s Newsnight program — has now been made into two separate shows this year. The Netflix offering, Scoop, focused on Sam McAlister — and was, far from coincidentally, based on McAlister’s memoir. Now Amazon Prime has entered the fray with a three-part series that follows in the wake of the peerless A Very English Scandal and the lesser A Very British Scandal. Whatever next?

It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a patron of what used to be euphemistically called “blue movies” at the beginning of 1980, during the so-called “Golden Age of Porn.” The previous few years have seen pornography enter the mainstream in the form of such hugely popular pictures as Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas, which saw such stars as Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers briefly achieve nearly the fame (or notoriety) of their Hollywood peers, as their films came close to becoming, if not respectable, at least part of the cinematic fabric of the day. Then you hear tell of something truly remarkable: a big-budget Roman epic with an A-list cast, scripted by Gore Vidal and combining intricately recreated scenes of classical debauchery with envelope-pushing sexual content.