The week in TV: Mare of Easttown; The Hunter; Shadow and Bone and more

Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic)
Make-up: a Glamorous History (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Hunter (Channel 4) | All 4
Lucy, the Human Chimp (Channel 4) | All 4
Shadow and Bone (Netflix)

Mare of Easttown (Sky Atlantic), completed despite lockdown snaggles over the past two years, manages the most remarkable of things: though it is set in modern times, it timeshifts us, devoid of CGI or props or an actual time machine, straight back to the Pennsylvania of the 1970s: of The Deer Hunter, of Billy Joel’s Allentown. Despite Reagan, Obama, Trump, it really hasn’t changed that much. Sure, there are cellphones. There’s an internet. But mainly snow, lonely barkeeps, the shavings of a living, the grinding of hopes: all of this and so much more is captured, with triumph, as is the constancy of poverty.

So: small-town US of A, and not one but suddenly two murders to solve, for a grumpy, dowdy, divorced everywoman, a young granny to boot, with family issues – some urgent, most of them tiresome – and a new limp after an ill-advised chase, played by the beauty who was Rose in Titanic. Kate Winslet has indeed grown up, even since her last, decade-old TV appearance (Mildred Pierce), and is exuberantly unafraid to show us she has.

This is, nominally, a detective thriller, in seven episodes, released weekly by HBO, thankfully, which means we have to wait. In truth it’s a story, as all the best stories tend to be, about not crimes but people, their infinite variety and teensy jealousies and gripes, and sudden forgivenesses, and as such works on every level. At the same time – crucially – it works on a basic whodunnit level. As ever, my suspicions fixate on monobrows, zealots, teetotallers, priests and weirdo, self-denying, gym-fit jocks.

Awards will follow, surely: it’s only April, yet I predict with confidence. But my suspicion is that the likes of Winslet, creator Brad Ingelsby, and director Craig Zobel know they have made something splendid, and that will be reward enough.

There was a delightful midweek thing, first of sadly only three, which might have offered some tips to Kate Winslet over at least spritzing the face, a dash of lippy. In this first outing of BBC Two’s three-part documentary Make-up: A Glamorous History, Lisa Eldridge – what a find; apart from being a true professional makeup artist to many stars, she’s warm and witty, an utter TV natural! – took us through the Georgians. Eldridge found, to her delight, that burnt cloves worked rather well on eyebrows, and mortar-and-pestled cochineal and rosewater worked rather well as blusher. This series is obviously not sponsored by L’Oréal. Because we’re not worth it.

We found, to our interest, that nothing changes under the sun: the snobberies of the 1760s, when rich women stood seven feet tall because of the hair and lead pigmentation led to a rapid death, we can see in our own age: with Insta and the rest, similar risks, just not with lead poisoning. But is, bizarrely, the same narrative being employed by new media, new women? Pretty lasses trying to make their way just as best they can?

If you thought the factional police infighting was bad in Line of Duty, you absolutely need to get a whiff of The Hunter, finally and belatedly arrived on Channel 4’s now-sainted Walter Presents strand. It’s the most masterly Mafiacentric drama since Gomorrah. Told from the point of view of warring police sections – the carabinieri, the polizia di stato, the polizia municipale, or the squadra antimafia, to which every alpha beast aspires – it’s the tale, slowly revealed, to allow it to breathe, of the frankly incredible war fought in Sicily in the 1990s in which, against most odds, the good guys seem to have triumphed.

I say the “good guys”. Both sides are portrayed with immense flaws and immense friendships: our antihero, the prosecutor Saverio Barone, is generally an unlikable gentleman, ambition clouding his every move. Yet Palermo has never looked more enticing, nor have the fields in its hinterland, swept by those skeletally dusty north-west winds, seemed more likely to be bone-strewn. Last weekend, I binged all 12 episodes in the first series (at least an hour apiece), so gave thanks at the end that there’s a second series to wait for: it’s like that good book you never want to end.

Lucy, the Human Chimp (Channel 4) was a fearful watch. It set out to be the story of a chimpanzee, adopted from an American circus, brought up by two kind(ish) psychologists who taught her to dress, to make G&Ts, learn sign language. It ended with a dead chimp released (wrongly, into a Gambian island, with zilch skills), and her long-term carer, graduate student Janis Carter, about whom much of this documentary revolved, becoming a determined chimp-loving recluse.

It should have thrown up huge questions: not, as the original experiment was to have been, about nature and nurture, but about the care of living beings. I ended up feeling as sorry for Carter as for Lucy. In the end, Lucy was torn apart by, in Janis’s brief absence, by poachers. American researchers have seldom suffered similar fates.

Shadow and Bone (Netflix) has been billed in some places as the new Game of Thrones, but aimed firmly at that slippery category known as “young adults”. In these times, how does a TV series set out its stall to so appeal to 12- to 18-year-olds, when everyone from eight to 50, it seems, is obsessed with relationships and identity, and taking part in their very own “journey”?

This eight-part adaptation of the whompingly bestselling Grishaverse books of Leigh Bardugo has been long awaited by some, and is gloriously realised, for what it is: a Land, obviously, riven by a mysterious Fold, in which those to west and east are split into variously distrusting tribes possessed of sniperly or map-making or fire-summoning skills, or simply a weird fondness for dressing in Victorian bowlers and swordsticks and inhabiting bawdyhouses. Into this wander Alina (Jessie Mei Li) and Mal (Archie Renaux), terrific young actors who it’s obvious from the off are our heroes.

You can tell they’re the protagonists because they’re both good-looking even when covered in mud, stand loyally by their pals, and have terrifically high ideals. They possibly even have a superpower or two, or at least have arrived on the scene in a timely fashion thanks to some ancient prophecy or other. They are unshakable best friends, with perhaps a frisson of smoulder. And crucially, are both utterly lacking in humour.

What is it with such “heroes”? Why make them so crushingly dull? I don’t think Frodo managed one genuine piece of wit throughout six hours on screen in Lord of the Rings, nor Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Other than that, Shadow and Bone has some rather well developed characters, grand CGI, moral quandaries: if it’s for you, it will enthral. Me, not so much: but the last piece of true fantasy fiction I consumed (at the age of 14) was the Old Testament.