“Flowers of evil are growing in the stony Yorkshire soil“

The New Yorker's take on Red Riding.

Amazingly, Channel 4’s Red Riding trilogy (based on the novels by David Peace) has been released as a five-hour film in the US.

David Denby, writing in the New Yorker, finds it “an exhausting, morbidly fascinating, and finally thrilling experience”, proving that while the export of television dramas across the Atlantic has been a one-way trade in recent years, it doesn’t have to be.

Red Riding was part of a mini-blossoming early last year for the beleaguered Channel 4, one of a handful of adventurous commissions that also included Samantha Morton’s debut feature film and a docudrama about the end of apartheid. Our television critic, Rachel Cooke, wrote about Red Riding here, and about the other two here.