He melted hearts as Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid, but his latest role couldn’t be more different – playing an Auschwitz tattooist in an epic Holocaust drama. The actor opens up about how his own family’s plight inspired him

It’s not every day that I meet a real-life Disney prince. It’s even more discombobulating when he tells me he spent the weekend cheering on Clapton CFC women’s team in windy east London. “Before The Little Mermaid , a lot of people told me, ‘This is going to happen! That is going to happen!’” says Jonah Hauer-King, who starred as Prince Eric in last year’s remake. “It’s just really not the case. I wouldn’t say my life has changed much. Honestly.” It’s probably about to, though. Massively.

The 28-year-old lifelong Londoner is sharply suited and booted in the capital’s Corinthia hotel, ready to take on a full day of press with the poise and charm that clearly helped him bag that wide-eyed royal part (he even convincingly claims that these interviews are worth missing his beloved Arsenal’s Champions League game in the evening for). His next project, however, is a world away from Disney dreams.

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The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

As a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.

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The cop show set in post-Troubles Northern Ireland will leave you holding your breath constantly, not knowing what perils await our beloved ‘peelers’

Is it a stretch to call Blue Lights, which is back for season two, the United Kingdom’s answer to The Wire? Well, yes. In all honesty that would be a bit much – it’s more like a cross between The Wire and Holby City. But the police drama was one of the breakout hits of 2023 because, beneath the soapy surface of its interactions between rookie cops, it has a clear-eyed, humane view of policing as an impossible job. Whatever we might think of the force generally, a combination of societal breakdown on the streets and corruption/mismanagement in the corridors of power makes any attempt to carry a badge and maintain order a futile gesture, like standing on a beach trying to mop away the tide. As it was in Baltimore, so it is in Belfast.

Blue Lights comes at this recipe for bracingly pessimistic drama from a particular angle, sitting itself as it does in modern Northern Ireland. We are post-Troubles, which is to say that the schisms and resentments that caused the Troubles are still there, being carefully – or perhaps not so carefully – managed to prevent embers again becoming flames. Season one revolved around the police’s battle with a local Republican crime family, the McIntyres, who it turned out were being propped up by the British security services, meaning any effort to do the simple work of arresting these criminals for committing crimes was met with the show’s insidious catchphrase, “double-oh bee”. Messing with MI5’s mysterious and probably misguided work was, for the humble bobby on the beat, out of bounds.

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Kate Winslet and co are all at sea in Sky’s directionless political satire; British Asians recall the bleak 1970s; a stalker steals a very dark comedy; and heads roll (and bounce) in Disney’s Samurai epic

The Regime ( Sky Atlantic )
Defiance: Fighting the Far Right (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Baby Reindeer ( Netflix )
Shōgun ( Disney+ )

Chapeau (of sorts) to The Regime , Sky Atlantic’s new HBO political satire(ish) starring Kate Winslet, who did HBO’s Mare of Easttown . It’s been a while since something so rammed with illustrious names and production pedigree capsized with such gusto.

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Is it unwatchably dark? Too stuffed with uninspiring characters? A humorous joy that conjures up cosy nostalgic feelings? Read on for your thoughts on the world’s longest-running TV soap

After more than six decades on our screens, the world’s longest-running TV soap Coronation Street has become something of a national institution. Since it first aired in 1960, the show has built up a fiercely loyal fanbase not just in Britain but around the world, proving particularly popular among audiences in Canada and New Zealand. But recently some fans have become increasingly disillusioned . From an over reliance on issues-based plots to its warm familiarity, readers tell us what they think about Coronation Street in 2024.

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Ryan Murphy’s star-studded 60s extravaganza brings alive a dreamlike portrait of a legendary writer, while the world’s biggest cartoon launches its most epic episode ever

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Scottish comedian Richard Gadd’s borderline horror about a female stalker is brilliantly eerie. It’s tense, creepily filmed television that will stay with you for a long time to come

Never have the words “sent from my iPhone” been so chilling. Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s acclaimed one-man play, which hammered out the horrifying story of his experience of being stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha, who he meets at the pub where he works. She gets hold of his email address, and starts to message him, incessantly, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, all through the night, every night. The emails end with, “sent from my iPhone”. In the show, Gadd’s alter ego, Donny Dunn, has a realisation: Martha doesn’t have an iPhone. At first, Baby Reindeer is chilling in small instances like this. But as Martha’s behaviour becomes more obsessive, and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two become locked in a terrible downward spiral. This is a self-loathing horror that is relentlessly bleak.

It is a true story, it tells us at the outset, very Netflixishly. Gadd first took Baby Reindeer to the Edinburgh fringe in 2019 as an hour-long play, crunching the story down into its harrowing essentials. Martha existed only as an empty bar-stool, and Gadd used multimedia and recordings of messages she had left him and people close to him, in order to flesh it out. I saw it that year, and was left stunned by the palpable fear it left in its wake. The ending was devastating. You can only pity the people who might have heard of Gadd as a standup and popped in to see if he was going to make them laugh.

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This immaculately made, supremely witty post-apocalyptic drama is yet another brilliant video game adaptation. It’s funny, self-aware and tense – an astonishing balancing act

The first thing to note is that, as with The Last of Us, there is no need for any viewer to be au fait with the source material of Fallout, Amazon’s new competitor in the field of hit video game adaptations (though a fan of the game who watched it with me assures me that there is much to enjoy in addition to the basic narrative if you are).

For newcomers such as me, this intelligent, drily witty, immaculately constructed series set in the Fallout universe fully captivates and entertains on its own terms. It opens in 1950s America, at the height of the cold war and the “red scare”, with former TV star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) reduced to appearing at a children’s birthday party after being tarred with the pinko brush. A mushroom cloud appears on the horizon, the blast wave hits, the apocalypse arrives.

Fallout is on Prime Video

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A decade after it was first shown, an episode of cold war drama The Game, starring Brian Cox, is causing a surprising flurry of excitement …

Name: The best hour of TV.

Age: Ten years old.

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