News Atlas

GuardianOct 3Preview

‘Happy Christmas, Ange’: why we have always loved a dramatic TV divorce

Untying the knot is having a television moment with the launch of the HBO legal thriller War and BBC’s The Split UpThere were 105,002 divorces in England and Wales last year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Right now, it feels like there are almost as many on TV.The new HBO legal thriller War, which launched on Sky Atlantic on Friday night, chronicles what it calls “the highest-profile divorce case in UK history”. This enjoyably juicy eight-parter is joined in the weekend schedules by the BBC drama The Split Up – a Manchester-based spin-off from Abi Morgan’s The Split – following a British Asian family law firm specialising in elite divorces. Continue reading...

Michael HoganTelevisionCulture

GuardianOct 3Preview

‘Brave from the beginning’: 20 years of Friday Night Lights – the sports drama that dared to be different

It launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B Jordan, and let its stars improvise in a way that was fresh and new. This show about smalltown US football was confident, trailblazing – and wonderfulI’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come.Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017. “The high schools used to play each other at footba

Michael HannTelevisionTelevision & radio

GuardianOct 3Preview

Behemoth! review - Pedro Pascal classical music drama hits all the wrong notes

New York film festival: The actor stumbles through Tony Gilroy’s forgettable film marred by stylistic gimmicksTony Gilroy has built a sturdy career as the director of the Bourne films and show runner of the popular Star Wars spin-off Andor. He directed Tilda Swinton all the way to an Oscar for her remarkable performance in the legal potboiler Michael Clayton.As the first feature film he has directed since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, the classical music drama Behemoth! promised to be an intriguing return from a master of threading the needle between slick action and deeply felt drama. His new film comes with a score from nine A-list composers who have banded together and called themselves The Behemoth! Collective, a stacked cast and a womanizing central character who looks phenomenal in a tux: “Tár for straight men”, as a friend of mine put it. Continue reading...

Owen MyersNew York film festival 2026Pedro Pascal

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