All posts tagged: escapist

Rivals season 2 review – Thrusting buttocks and heaving bosoms… Jilly Cooper’s escapist romp is back

Rivals season 2 review – Thrusting buttocks and heaving bosoms… Jilly Cooper’s escapist romp is back

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter “I like persons better than principles,” Lord Harry Wotton, the libertine mentor in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, tells his impressionable friend. “And I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.” This manifesto of decadence could well serve as the county motto for Rutshire, whose randy residents form the ensemble of Disney+’s Rivals, returning this week for its eagerly awaited second outing. In the wake of the first skirmish between Corinium Television – led by Lord Baddingham (David Tennant) – and Venturer – proposed by the ragtag trio of Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner) and Freddie Jones (Danny Dyer) – the battle for the airwaves is heating up. “1987 is a franchise year and we are at war,” Baddingham tells his staff, as he recovers from a head injury sustained in …

Where to Find a Better Housewife Escapist Fantasy

Where to Find a Better Housewife Escapist Fantasy

Published by José Betancourt

If the new Apple TV show Imperfect Women had premiered in the 2010s, it would probably have commanded the zeitgeist. The thriller, about a group of old friends whose cushy suburban lives unravel after one of them is murdered, has all the makings of an addictive watch. The whodunit comes riddled with beguiling red herrings and sordid twists. The cast is stacked with Emmy winners and hey-it’s-that-guy! actors. It’s the kind of glossy, elevated soap opera that would have fit neatly alongside Scandal and the rest of ABC’s melodrama-heavy programming a decade ago—and not just because Kerry Washington is one of the show’s stars. Middle-aged women caught up in wildly dramatic and morally gray predicaments once spelled easy success in ratings and critical acclaim. Just look at Desperate Housewives. Or How to Get Away With Murder. Or Big Little Lies. As it stands, Imperfect Women isn’t likely to join their ranks in popularity. Although the series has risen to second place on Apple TV’s viewership charts, it hasn’t cracked the top-10 most-watched streaming titles overall …

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials review – A country house mystery crackling with wit and escapist glamour

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials review – A country house mystery crackling with wit and escapist glamour

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is all about time running out. Clocks tick throughout: on mantelpieces, in pockets, and – most ominously – in a circle of seven around a handsome corpse. It’s a motif that haunts this adaptation of Christie’s 1929 novel: the sense that something precious is slipping away, that the Roaring Twenties won’t last for ever. That body, found the morning after a lavish country house party, belongs to Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), suitor to Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce). The police call it misadventure. She calls it murder. What follows is playful and lighthearted, but deceptively shrewd. Fifty years after Christie’s death, Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall mines this early work for something more spirited than her Poirot mysteries. Far from being another moustache-twiddling, drawing-room whodunnit, here her first venture into literary espionage crackles with wit and intrigue. …