The Hour, BBC Two, review - Telegraph

The last series was marred by a silly Cold War subplot, as if the producers had got cold feet in an early focus group and felt obliged to tag on a thriller element. Now, we have a secondary story about Soho vice (beautifully filmed, in places resembling Michael Powell’s deliriously weird Peeping Tom) but this worked better as it was integral to the downfall of Dominic West’s Hector. Last time,tv series to buy, the rivalry between Hector and Ben Whishaw&rsquo,dvd online free;s Freddie Lyon was played along class lines. Hector’s patrician sense of entitlement chafing against ordinary Freddie’s hard work and talent. Now, the tables were turned as Freddie came back from a (none-too-convincing) journalistic world tour with a gamine Jean Seberg-esque wife in tow, to become co-anchor and rival, Hector’s “Sputnik II”, as Capaldi’s head of news put it. This gave West a chance to shine. Hector lumbered around like a wounded bear, the deep lines on his broad face resembling a relief map of Bhutan.

The performances are so rewarding that even minor characters like Lix (Anna Chancellor), Marnie (Oona Chaplin), and Randall (Peter Capaldi), feel as important and well drawn as the central protagonists,buy cheap dvd online, particularly in series two, when rival station ITV&rsquo,movies online new releases;s newly formed investigative outlet, Uncovered, adds a strand of maturity to the plot. And where the show fails as a thriller – the news journalists stumble across clues far too conveniently – the sophistication by which society and culture are not just portrayed, but dissected, makes up for it.