MAE MARTIN

CANADIAN MARTIN MIGHT BE BEST KNOWN AS A STAND-UP COMIC AND AS THE CREATOR AND STAR OF BITTERSWEET COMEDY FEEL GOOD, but they’re entering the world of thrillers for their latest project, Netflix’s Tall Pines Martin is the creator, co-showrunner and star of the limited series, which is set in a bucolic but sinister town and explores the insidious underbelly of the “troubled teen industry” and the eternal struggle between one generation and the next. Martin describes it as “an insane roller coaster and so different from anything I’ve done before.”

Docudramas

latest project, Netflix’s co-showrunner but and the next. Martin

ONCE THE HOME OF STAGEY DRAMATIC RECONSTRUCTIONS THAT FILLED SEGMENTS BETWEEN ‘TALKING HEAD’ HISTORICAL EXPERTS, docudramas have evolved in recent years. This is best exemplified by producer Nutopia’s approach to its recent Netflix series African Queens, which in two seasons has dramatised the stories of Njinga and Cleopatra (pictured above). The historians and voiceovers – here from executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith – remain, but Nutopia has honed a “creative mash-up” that flips the script on docudramas by bringing together factual producers and academics with top writing talent to create dramas that use historians to add context or move the story forward. With interest in fact-based scripted series at an all-time high, this approach to history docs looks set to be the future.

WHEN BARBARA MET ALAN AND HELP STAR HUGHES IS SADDLING UP FOR SHARDLAKE, a Disney+ adaptation of CJ Sansom’s Tudor mystery novels. He plays Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer with an acute sense of justice and one of the few honest men in a world beset with scheming and plots. Despite Shardlake’s unwavering loyalty to his boss Thomas Cromwell and the Crown, his position in 16th century English society is unfavoured due to his appearance – as a person living with scoliosis during the Tudor period, he suffers the indignity of being abused as a ‘crookback’ wherever he turns.

The series, based on the first novel in Sansom’s series, sees Shardlake called to investigate the murder of one of his commissioners at a monastery in the remote town of Scarnsea.

Hughes, who became the first disabled actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Richard III, has also starred in The Innocents