Black Doves review – Ben Whishaw, Keira Knightley and Sarah Lancashire are spine-tinglingly good
Why This Matters
Key context: <p>Series two of this rambunctiously entertaining espionage drama might be implausible. But it’s a magnetically acted tale of friendship, with moments of genuine poignance</p><p>Is Helen Webb Britain’s busiest mum? Or Britain’s least busy mum? On the one hand, she’s got two kids, is the wife of the recently promoted prime minister and also a deep cover spy, who spends her days passing information about her husband’s work to a shady intelligence organisation and her nights on covert missions which often involve acts of bloody slaughter. Yet the reason she can do all this is that nobody expects her to do anything at all: she doesn’t have to look after her children (she has an ever-present nanny – who, unbeknown to Helen, is in fact another spy), manage the household, hold down a job or even sleep in her own bed at night. Forget getting away with murder – how does she get away with not doing the school run?!</p><p>I don’t think you’re meant to spend Black Doves obsessing over Helen’s domestic arrangements, but if you like cataloguing the ways spy dramas stretch credulity to its absolute limits, Joe Barton’s thriller will certainly scratch that itch. This is a show so relentlessly preposterous it’s practically nihilistic: not just because Black Doves’ excessive body count makes life itself look cheap and worthless, but because searching for coherence in its bewildering storylines quickly starts feeling like a waste of time too.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/nov/05/black-doves-review-keira-knightley-ben-whishaw">Continue reading...</a> This development from The Guardian highlights ongoing changes in the sector.
Series two of this rambunctiously entertaining espionage drama might be implausible. But it’s a magnetically acted tale of friendship, with moments of genuine poignanceIs Helen Webb Britain’s busiest mum? Or Britain’s least busy mum? On the one hand, she’s got two kids, is the wife of the recently promoted prime minister and also a deep cover spy, who spends her days passing information about her husband’s work to a shady intelligence organisation and her nights on covert missions which often involve acts of bloody slaughter. Yet the reason she can do all this is that nobody expects her to do anything at all: she doesn’t have to look after her children (she has an ever-present nanny – who, unbeknown to Helen, is in fact another spy), manage the household, hold down a job or even sleep in her own bed at night. Forget getting away with murder – how does she get away with not doing the school run?!I don’t think you’re meant to spend Black Doves obsessing over Helen’s domestic arrangements, but if you like cataloguing the ways spy dramas stretch credulity to its absolute limits, Joe Barton’s thriller will certainly scratch that itch. This is a show so relentlessly preposterous it’s practically nihilistic: not just because Black Doves’ excessive body count makes life itself look cheap and worthless, but because searching for coherence in its bewildering storylines quickly starts feeling like a waste of time too. Continue reading...
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