By Paul Bradley
House Of The Dragon – Sky Atlantic, Monday, 9pm
Declaration – BBC2, Sunday, 9pm
Heart Of A Servant: The Father Flanagan Story – RTÉ1, Monday, 9.35pm
Elle – Amazon Prime
Well, we’re back. After a break long enough to forget who half the characters are, and what was actually going on, House Of The Dragon has returned with one big promise: this season, the third season, is the season in which something will actually happen.
And, in fairness to it, it certainly opened at a pace: in the very first episode we had subterfuge, betrayal, rogue dragons sharing a barbecue, minor lords losing their heads in the background, and a sea battle that was as big as anything we ever saw in the parent show, Game Of Thrones.
It’s often impressive. And yet, it’s often not very impressive. That sea battle, big as it was, had nothing of the texture and heft of GOT’s old setpieces, which always felt reliably real: there was far too much obvious greenscreen footage, and weird lighting that might have just been a budget problem, but might have been an attempt to hide the amount of motion blur. At no point did you actually believe it was taking place on the sea.
Worse than that is that there is still barely a character to identify with or care about in this whole series (Matt Smith’s unreadable Daemon Targaryen is at least the most consistently interesting). That’s not helped at all by some of the weak dialogue and teen-soap acting we got in an episode much more concerned with its spectacle. The character Shorako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) is a good example of both problems: a cartoonish creation to begin with, Lohar has little place in a show that wants to be taken seriously, but is poorly acted to boot.
Still, you have to admire its energy as it launches its dragons at us again, and among the leaps of logic and distracting editing there were good moments too, such as that perfectly quiet and unremarked death (no spoilers) in the water of a significant (but bland) character.
But it’s going to take a lot of good character development (and a lot less CGI) to get us actually involved; so far the moments of often whiny plotting, and the scenes of empty spectacle, make up the vast majority of the show.
Declaration
It was hard to escape this year’s 250th birthday for America’s Declaration of Independence – I mean, even behind the World Cup and Taylor Swift’s wedding, it was noticeable.
Naturally, that’s a perfect time for a documentary about the Declaration itself, and BBC2 has just given us one with a more local view than we might have expected.
Declaration on BBC2 looks at the founding of the United States.
Declaration doesn’t try to reinvent how we think about the birth of America, but really it doesn’t need to: the familiar story but less familiar angle makes for a solid film. After all, it seems immediately strange to see a group of Ulster men helping the new country break away from Britain (who looked on the Declaration as treason).
The two-part film looks at the founding of the United States, from the 1776 Declaration of Independence through to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, through the often-overlooked story of the Ulster-Scots emigrants who helped shape it. It’s a smart choice of focus, at least for viewers from this part of the world, giving a well-worn story some fresh texture that is ultimately justified.
The talking-head interviews with American historians are the backbone of the show, and they’re used effectively: not just reciting dates and names, but bringing real colour to figures who rarely get much airtime: the philosopher Francis Hutcheson and his influence on Jefferson, the physician-agitator Thomas Young at the Boston Tea Party, the Strabane printer John Dunlap printing the Declaration’s first copies.
The second episode, tracing the immediate aftermath, takes in the roles of people like James McHenry (an Antrim man who ended up signing the US Constitution in 1787), and clearly recounts the Presbyterian influence on ideas of liberty and church-state separation, right through to William Findley’s push for a Bill of Rights.
Nothing revelatory, but that’s OK: it’s a solid, well-researched documentary with a genuinely interesting local thread running through it. Worth catching up with, and, if you’re not enjoying the football, certainly an interesting alternative.
The Father Flanagan Story
Another Irish man who had a notable impact on America, though not quite so long ago, was Father Edward J Flanagan (known widely in America as “Father Flanagan”), about whom RTÉ broadcast a Monday-night documentary called Heart Of A Servant.
I must admit, I was unfamiliar with the man, but his life and his backbone were certainly notable.
He was born in Roscommon in 1886, ordained a priest in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1912, later settling in Nebraska.
In 1917 he opened a home for homeless boys, and four years later founded Boys Town, a self-governing community where residents elected their own mayor and officials. Flanagan’s guiding belief, “there is no such thing as a bad boy,” shaped a model built on respect and support, rather than all-too-familiar punishment.
Boys Town was also racially and religiously integrated, something that even drew death threats from the Ku Klux Klan.
Fr Flanagan’s life was actually made into a film called Boys Town in 1938, which won Spencer Tracy a Best Actor Oscar.
Though he died in 2026, Pope Leo XIV has recently declared him “Venerable” (a step toward possible sainthood), which is presumably why this film has been made.
And as a film, it’s OK, but hardly perfect for an Irish audience. Which is to say, it’s clearly American: he’s better known there than he is here, and the film has the syrupy, oversweet tones of a certain kind of American documentary.
It does have some footage from, and reactions to, the 1938 film, some jazzy music, and some warm recollections from people he helped. It remains a bit remote, though, so while it makes a good case that he did great things, you don’t really feel you learned much about him as a man.
Elle
It’s been 25 years since Reese Witherspoon’s star-making turn as Elle Woods in the film Legally Blonde, so it was probably inevitable that someone was going to try to reinvent it.
So here we are on Amazon with a new, younger version of Elle played by the excellently-named Lexi Minetree, and we join her in the mid-1990s: she’s only approaching adulthood but, as she says herself, she already knows who she is and what she wants.
As you have probably guessed, most of that is pink – though actually that might remind you more of Barbie than the original film.
It does make you wonder a little who this is really for – today’s teens who don’t remember the original, or corporate types just hoping to cash in on two familiar titles?
Really, I don’t think the adults who remember 2001 will be that interested, because it’s a little bit too twee and shrill, too much an exercise in frothy nostalgia, to really engage. It does look the part, and Minetree is sometimes strikingly good at impersonating the young Witherspoon – but it’s all more bland than blonde.