The Third Day: What the Must Watch reviewers think

Thursday 24 September 2020, 16:00

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week, Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan share their thoughts on The Third Day on Sky Atlantic.

Jude Law and Naomie Harris star in the series about a man and a woman who arrive on a mysterious island near the British coast at different times. The second part of the production is planned to be told in a one-off live event in London.

Have you been watching it? What did you think? Leave your comments below...

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(Credit: Sky / HBO)

Hayley says: "I’m just so allergic to immersive theatre"

"It dials into a lot of those folk horror tropes that you’ll know by heart if you’ve watched movies from the 1970's like The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan’s Claw. As a premise, I absolutely love it. But folk horror is a very specific kind of weird and to get it right takes a lot of work. I'm not sure if this got it right.

"This show was so deliberately mysterious that there wasn’t enough information to keep me hooked, and instead of drawing me in and making me want to find out more, it lost me and I started to resent it. It was also dropping crumbs of stuff I’d seen before in a sort of Stranger Things way which annoys me — where you're relying on someone's borrowed affection for another movie or TV show instead of creating something new. And literally everything felt like an omen of doom, which is okay for a 90 minute film, but when it's hours and hours of a TV show you sort of become numb to doom and when doom occurs you feel nothing.

"I’m also just so allergic to immersive theatre that the idea of the second part of this being a '12 hour major immersive theatre event' makes me want to run screaming for the hills. I don’t want to become emotionally involved in this story because I know I’ll never finish it, because I'm just never going to sit through that. I thought with a pandemic we'd be safe from the horror of immersive theatre but now it's coming at us through our TV screens."

(Credit: Sky / HBO)

Scott says "Takes itself too seriously and lacks lighter moments"

"This was supposed to air earlier in the year - this is definitely a drama that was delayed because of the Coronavirus pandemic. So it was supposed to happen in April or May then it got pushed back. This was in part because of the immersive element and how they wouldn’t have been able to do it in the same way. So you wonder how they’re now going to have this massive 12 hour immersive theatre event - now socially distanced.

"I just couldn’t get over the whole plot angle about tides and irregular tides. Basically, Jude Law’s character has to be over at specific times. As someone who has lived by a coastal region - low tides last longer than you think! As well as that, I just couldn't get into it. It just takes itself too seriously and lacks lighter moments. Not every show needs to have lighter moments, but it does need to have spaces for us to mentally breathe."