Television highlights of 2013
Apparently it was Lord Byron who said ‘Show me a man who’s tired of Don Draper and I’ll show you a man who’s tired of life’. He obviously hadn’t seen the current series. RTÉ’s decision to show the advertising drama in a midweek graveyard shift looked justified at last, as Mad Men suddenly looked past its sell-by date. In 2014 we get the first half of the final run. About time.
The drug-dealing drama bowed out in appropriately solid fashion, with Bryan Cranston at last getting the plaudits he deserved for his portrayal of a terminally ill teacher who turns to drug manufacture. Along the way, homegrown distributor TG4 was usurped by the moneyed Netflix cartel for the big finale, but at least the Irish broadcaster will get to show it in the months ahead.
Netflix also signalled a new era in the evolution of TV when this series, with Kevin Spacey, made its debut. As well as being a fine political drama populated with an incredibly cynical cast of characters, the big attraction for viewers of this and other shows such as Orange Is The New Black, was that you could watch as many episodes as you liked in one sitting.
As a Belfast serial killer, Jamie Dornan provided us with one of the most odious characters of the year, while Gillian Anderson’s detective was one of the most interesting. Atmospheric and slow-burning — at times painfully so — the failure to catch the killer split the audience between those who wanted a nice tie-up and others who look forward to doing it all again this year.
Perhaps a measure of how Irish people feel about dentists was the way the brutal suffocation of one of their number caused far less controversy than the shooting of a cat. Overall, however, this series didn’t quite satisfy, with a distinct ‘tune in next year’ feel to the final episode. We also got a real-life garda who may have boosted his acting credentials, but may not be working undercover at any time in the near future.
Surely no drama could get away with wiping out many of its best and most popular characters in a chilling wedding massacre?
All together — Oh yes it can. Especially when there are so many others waiting in the wings.
This series, filmed in Ireland, continues its onward march to attaining a reputation as one of the best TV shows ever.
How we are eagerly counting down the days to series four in the spring.
You are one of the 10 McConville children sharing the one bedroom in east Belfast in the early 1970s. Loyalist gangs force you from your home because your dad is a Catholic. You move to the Divis Flats in the west of the city where your dad gets cancer and dies. Your mother (Gene McConville) does her best but suffers a breakdown and then makes the literally fatal mistake of helping an injured British soldier. A gang of male and female IRA members enter your flat. You and your brothers and sisters cling to her legs and scream as she’s being dragged away. You will never see her alive again. Those that killed her will even put out rumours she’s still alive, to deflect outrage from their actions. They won’t reveal where her body is buried until 1999.
This was one of the tragic tales from The Disappeared, a joint RTÉ/BBC documentary that had Gerry Adams (inset, below) looking uncharacteristically ruffled as he was questioned about some of the events. While the Sinn Féin leader is reluctant to discuss his role in the Troubles, not everybody is so reticent. Panorama found a group of British soldiers who felt their undercover work in the North hadn’t been given the credit it deserved. They spoke enthusiastically about their days in the Military Reaction Force (MRF), “hunting down” known IRA members. As Panorama showed with impressive dramatic reconstructions, however, some of the drive-by shootings the secretive unit was involved in may also have taken the lives of innocent civilians.
Few would have predicted Brendan O’Connor would have been part of the most moving interview of the year, but his encounter with terminally ill Kerry 16-year-old Dónal Walsh was well-handled, and managed to be both heartbreaking and inspiring. On a lighter note, Graham Norton (right) retained his position as king of the chat shows, and in April had the perfect guest in an effervescent Michael Bublé, charming all around him and singing to an audience member’s baby bump.
It says so much about our society when some of the sharpest satire from Irish Pictorial Weekly isn’t in the surreal scripts from Barry Murphy and his cohorts. Instead, it’s often the bits where they simply state facts or play recordings of statements by politicians. When you hear those retirement awards for some of the better paid people in the public sector, or Bertie Ahern’s account of his financial affairs, or the current coalition’s promises, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
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