Gangland saga’s slow start lacks a real punch

Damian Gildea, Luke McQuillan, Thommas Kane-Byrne and Dane Whyte O’Hara in the slow- burning Darklands on Virgin Media One

Reviewed This Week

Darklands: Virgin Media One

Catherine the Great: Sky Atlantic

The Americas with Simon Reeve: BBC Two

Drone. It used to mean a monotonous noise. Or summer bees among the flowers. Or, along with the chanters, part of a set of pipes. Or young members of the idle rich from PG Wodehouse’s quintessentially English comic novels who formed the Drones Club.

Nowadays drones – the flying kind – do some of the heavy lifting in films and television, from dramas to nature programmes, offering extraordinary aerial viewpoints. This is the case withDarklands(Virgin Media One), a new crime thriller set in Bray, Co Wicklow. The title sequence opens with a monochrome drone shot of a group of young people at the cross on the rugged top of Bray Head, towering as it does over the beach and town below. Drone shots are seductive and were a feature of the first episode of Darklands. They can also be distracting.