This Is a Bomb: The Nevada Casino Heist; Berlusconi: Condemned to Win

“This Is a Bomb is about a bomb, but mostly it’s a testimony of abuse and how Birges used threats of violence at home and on a mass scale to control and hurt people. Even with a surfeit of evidence against him in the casino case, he protested his innocence, claiming that Harvey’s had enlisted him to carry out an insurance job. That would have been a twist big and unexpected enough to justify all of the quirks of this series, but, alas, it wasn’t true. It was a “wacko TV universe” detail dreamed up by Birges, says Ed Kane, then an assistant US attorney. Of course, two things can be true at once. While the bomb wasn’t part of a plot between Birges and Harvey’s, the blackmail threat proved a boon for the casino, thanks to a huge insurance policy that paid out from the second they reported it. Amid all the darkness, there’s a comic irony to the fact that the plot to bring down Harvey’s only made it bigger and better. It’s probably the only thing, in fact, to smile about in a tale so thoroughly tragic.”
Hannah J Davies, The Guardian

“What made me shiver, though, was a 16-year-old clip of John Jr on a U.S. television talk show, with the caption: ‘Using an interview John gave in 2010, the filmmakers recreated his voice using an AI program.’ The results did not sound entirely convincing - slightly expressionless, literally lifeless. Concentrating on what ‘John’ was actually saying was all but impossible: the weirdness got in the way. Hiring a human actor to read the lines would have been far less distracting. If ever a true-crime tale deserved a weird retelling, though, it was this one.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“A documentary mixing football and politics is a rarity. Certainly one can’t imagine series about, say, the success of Harold Wilson told through his support of Huddersfield Town or Gordon Brown’s career refracted through his love of Raith Rovers. But then this series is as much for anyone who enjoyed Channel 4’s Gazzetta Football Italia in the Nineties, stuffed as it is with intoxicating clips of the Milan stars Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Andriy Shevchenko in their pomp.”
James Jackson, The Times