The North Water: What the Must Watch reviewers think
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 North Water on BBC Two. Stephen Graham, Colin Farrell and Jack O’Connell star in the period drama about a whaling expedition to the Arctic.
BBC/See-Saw Films/Nick Wall
Scott says: "You can’t help but be taken away by the characters"
"You’ll see a lot of similarities between this and 'The Terror', which was a show we reviewed a few months ago. That looked at Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to the arctic in 1845, but that one was more supernatural, it went beyond the kind of facts of what actually happened. This series is so impressive because of how they filmed it - they went so far north for those pack ice sequences than any television drama has ever filmed.
"It takes about 40 minutes to get into it and there’s a lot of preamble, as they start from Hull on this expedition. When you see how bitterly cold and miserable they look out in the ice, it really comes through.
"One slight frustration for me is there’s quite a lot of old 18th century language, that takes a little while to exactly hook onto, it really requires your full concentration, but Andrew Haigh, behind 'Weekend' and 'Looking' is behind this and what he is so great at is characterisation. You can’t help but be taken away by the characters! You want to know what their true intentions are and why they’re on this voyage. I absolutely loved it."
BBC/See-Saw Films/Nick Wall
Hayley says: "There is something very special here"
"It looks amazing and it also sounds amazing: the soundtrack is like very un-calming whale song. The cast is also excellent, and Colin Farrell is almost unrecognisable as this kind of The-Hound-from-Game-of-Thrones character.
"It's very heavily influenced by things I love: Moby Dick (pretentiously one of my favourite novels, and set a few years after it was published), and Heart of Darkness. It's also very much like the TV show The Terror that we both recommended many times, but only in the sense that it's also on a doomed ship and everything goes wrong. So while you’re watching it you are aware of it being like things that have been done or said before, and sometimes better (I think some of the characterisation is better in The Terror than it is here), there is still something very special here. I love these stories that go deep into the madness of men, and the unforgiving world of sea and ice, and I love this show."
BBC/See-Saw Films/Nick Wall
The North Water will air on BBC Two on Friday 10 September at 9:30pm. You can also catch up on the BBC iplayer.
Must Watch is released as a podcast every Monday evening from BBC Sounds and all other good podcast providers.
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