Category Archives: Irish Television

Dornan in 12 12 12

Dornan in 12 12 12

Irish Television

THE SPIRIT OF RORY at CIFF

When Apple TV dropped the trailer for 12 12 12 today, it did more than tease a new series. It announced a heist drama built on a gimmick that is also its backbone: every episode moves through three timelines at once, the twelve months of meticulous planning, the twelve hours of the job itself, and the twelve days of fallout that follow. It’s a structure that promises tension from every angle, since we’ll always know a little about where the story has been and a little about where it’s headed, while still wondering who comes out ahead.

At the centre of this eight-episode series are two men locked in a zero-sum game. Anthony Mackie, an Emmy nominee, plays a disgraced FBI agent with something to prove, while Jamie Dornan, a Golden Globe nominee, plays an American career criminal who has made a life out of staying one step ahead of people like him. Their cat-and-mouse chase stretches across Europe, but the true prize waits in Zurich, where a daring, epic raid targets a bank vault buried deep beneath the city’s streets. Heist stories have always thrived on the pleasure of watching clever people do impossible things, and a vault under Zurich is exactly the kind of impossible that audiences love to root for, whether they’re cheering for the thief or the lawman.

What makes the project feel even more personal is that its two leads are also behind the scenes. Mackie and Dornan both serve as executive producers, with Mackie’s Make It With Gravy banner involved alongside Samantha Corbin-Miller, David Knoller and Jason Spire of Inspire Entertainment. Paramount Television Studios and Anonymous Content produce, a pairing that suggests real muscle behind the ambition. When actors invest in a story as producers as well as performers, it often shows on screen, in the care taken with character and the confidence of the storytelling.

Viewers won’t have long to wait. 12 12 12 premieres globally on Friday, November 13, 2026, with the first two episodes arriving together, followed by a new episode every week until the finale on December 25, 2026. That release pattern turns the series into a holiday season ritual, a slow build of suspense that pays off on Christmas Day, which is a fitting gift for anyone who likes their entertainment with a little larceny. If the trailer is any indication, the countdown to November 13 is going to feel very long indeed.

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Irish Television

Bill Murray in A COURSE CALLED IRELAND

Bill Murray in A COURSE CALLED IRELAND

Irish Television

Bill Murray in A COURSE CALLED IRELAND

Bill Murray is heading to Ireland with a golf bag and no particular plan, and Paramount+ has just released the trailer and key art to prove it. A COURSE CALLED IRELAND, a six-part documentary series from Skydance Sports and Stellify Media, follows Murray and author Tom Coyne as they play their way across some of the most legendary golf courses on the island. The series premieres Sunday, October 25 on Paramount+.

Each thirty-minute episode takes in the kind of fairways that make even non-golfers consider buying a pair of ugly trousers. Murray is joined by the extended Murray family, including Joel and John Murray, along with celebrity friends Chris O’Dowd, Joanne McNally and Jason Kelce, and Coyne, his long-time golfing companion. Together they cover Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, and the show promises candid, unscripted moments steeped in the wit, warmth and wonder of the place. It is less a series about golf than a celebration of life going gloriously off course, which feels like exactly the right brief for a man who has built a career on charming detours.

Viewers around the world can catch A COURSE CALLED IRELAND on Paramount+ from October 25, with two exceptions: Latin America, and the UK, where the series will air on BBC Two, BBC One Northern Ireland and BBC iPlayer. Wherever you watch, expect plenty of green, plenty of craic, and at least a few shots that land nowhere near where they were aimed.

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Irish Television

Hinds in EAST OF EDEN

Hinds in EAST OF EDEN

Irish Television

Hinds in EAST OF EDEN

Netflix’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic novel EAST OF EDEN, with Florence Pugh playing the formidable Cathy Ames, arrives with a supporting cast deep enough to turn heads, and few names in it carry as much quiet weight as Ciarán Hinds, who steps into the role of farmer and patriarch Samuel Hamilton after a career crowded with unforgettable characters.

The Irish actor has been working in film and television for roughly fifty years, and his résumé reads like a tour through the best of modern screen storytelling. Many will remember him as Julius Caesar in HBO’s acclaimed historical drama ROME, while GAME OF THRONES devotees know him as the wildling leader Mance Rayder, a presence in the show’s third, fourth, and fifth seasons. He returned to fantasy for Prime Video’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, playing the so-called Dark Wizard across Seasons 2 and 3, and he went somewhere colder and far more harrowing in THE TERROR, where he portrayed the doomed polar explorer Sir John Franklin.

On the big screen, he has been just as versatile, appearing as opera house manager Richard Firmin in the 2004 film THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and as the Mossad agent Carl in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 political thriller MUNICH. Yet his most significant film performance may well be Pop in BELFAST, a story set in the very city where he was born, which earned him an Oscar nomination and cemented his standing among the finest character actors working today. Blockbuster audiences have seen him too, sporting an impressively long beard as Aberforth Dumbledore in HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2, and admirers of prestige cinema will recall his turns as Fletcher in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and Roy Bland in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY.

Perhaps the most fitting connection of all is that Hinds and Pugh have shared the screen before, four years earlier in the Netflix film THE WONDER, which suggests that their reunion in EAST OF EDEN is less a coincidence than a reunion of two performers who clearly know how to bring out the best in each other.

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Irish Television

Sharon Horgan’s YOUTH now on HBO

Sharon Horgan's YOUTH now on HBO

Irish Television

Sharon Horgan's YOUTH now on HBO

Television has no shortage of shows that could plausibly be called YOUTH, most of them stocked with casts in their teens and twenties chasing the chaos of early adulthood. One such show is literally titled ADULTS, its joke being that its postcollegiate characters are anything but grown up. So when HBO’s actual YOUTH arrived on September 20th, centered on a divorced fifty-year-old squeezed between a college-aged son and aging parents, you might expect a similarly ironic title. You’d be wrong.

As with everything Sharon Horgan touches, and this Irish comedy powerhouse has touched plenty, from CATASTROPHE to BAD SISTERS, the wry humor in the title is a Trojan horse for something far more emotionally layered. YOUTH isn’t a joke about a woman clinging to a title that no longer fits her. It’s a sharp, genuinely funny meditation on the tug-of-war between wanting the vitality of youth and craving the hard-won comforts that only come with age. Horgan has built a career on finding the ache inside the punchline, and by every early account, YOUTH continues that streak. For Irish audiences who’ve followed her from CATASTROPHE through the acclaim of BAD SISTERS, this is another must-watch, and one more reminder that Horgan remains one of the sharpest voices working in television comedy today.

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Irish Television

McSweeney on THE TRAITORS IRELAND

Siobhan McSweeney on TRAITORS IRELAND

Irish Television

Siobhan McSweeney on TRAITORS IRELAND

Siobhán McSweeney has built a career on commanding a room, and her turn as host of THE TRAITORS IRELAND puts that gift to work in one of television’s most psychologically charged formats. In this conversation, the BAFTA-winning star of DERRY GIRLS opens up about the intense dynamics that unfold when strangers are locked into a game of trust, suspicion, and deception, and about the creative process of guiding a show where every glance and pause can shift the balance of power. Hosting a series like this demands timing, instinct, and a firm grasp of tone, and McSweeney’s approach shows just how much craft goes into making the drama feel effortless for viewers at home.

The conversation also turns to something bigger than the castle walls. McSweeney speaks about using her public platform to advocate for the memorialization of historical sites, a cause that reflects her long-standing commitment to social issues and to making sure difficult chapters of Irish history are remembered with dignity. It is a reminder that visibility can be more than a professional asset, and that a celebrated television career can also become a powerful tool for keeping important stories in the public conversation. From the theatrical tension of THE TRAITORS IRELAND to the moral weight of remembrance, this is a wide-ranging look at an artist whose work on and off screen carries real purpose.

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Irish Television

Neeson on THE LATE LATE SHOW

Liam Neeson on THE LATE LATE SHOW

Irish Television

Liam Neeson on THE LATE LATE SHOW

Few actors carry a filmography as vast as Liam Neeson’s, which is why a sit-down on THE LATE LATE SHOW feels less like a routine chat-show slot and more like a guided walk through cinema history. Across a career that stretches over a hundred films, Neeson has been the grieving father, the reluctant hero, the quiet moral centre of stories that mattered. Watching him look back on all of it, with the ease of a man who has nothing left to prove, is a reminder of just how much ground he has covered.

What makes the conversation land is how personal it gets. Rather than reciting a highlights reel, Neeson reaches for the roles that mean the most to him, the ones that stayed with him long after the cameras stopped rolling. Anyone who knows his work will feel the weight of that. It is hard to think of him without thinking of SCHINDLER’S LIST or MICHAEL COLLINS, performances rooted in real history and real loss, where the stakes were never just a matter of box office. He speaks about that kind of work with a reverence that suggests those projects shaped him as much as he shaped them.

Then there is the surprise: the humour. For an actor whose name has become shorthand for steely intensity, thanks in no small part to TAKEN, Neeson clearly relishes the chance to be funny, and he talks about tapping into comedy with a boyish delight. It is a lovely contrast, and a fitting one, because the same instincts that make him so convincing in a tragedy, his timing, his stillness, his willingness to play it straight, are exactly what make him so effective when the joke arrives, as THE NAKED GUN proved. The gravitas is the punchline.

Taken together, the interview paints a portrait of an artist who has never let one reputation define him. He can move from the sombre to the silly without losing his footing, and he does it with a warmth that makes the long road behind him feel earned. If you have ever wondered what keeps a performer of his stature going after so many years and so many films, this is a conversation worth your time. It is part reflection, part celebration, and entirely Neeson.

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Irish Television

Domhnall Gleeson on THE TONIGHT SHOW

Domhnall Gleeson The Tonight Show

Irish Television

Domhnall Gleeson The Tonight Show

Domhnall Gleeson had the internet talking in February when Taylor Swift dropped the music video for her song “Opalite,” and the THE PAPER star had a starring role of his own. The song itself is about self-reflection and shaking off old habits, but the video takes a completely different route to get there, leaning into a retro, 1990s-style infomercial aesthetic packed with dance numbers from Gleeson and Swift. Fans of either star will find plenty to love, and when Gleeson stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on September 10, he finally explained how he landed the gig.

In the video, Gleeson plays a lonely young man whose only real companion is a pet cactus, until he sprays it with a product called Opalite and Swift’s character appears in his life as if by magic. What follows is a string of dates that swing between corny and genuinely sweet, all wrapped in that same nostalgic ’90s packaging.

The centerpiece of the whole video is a big dance sequence, with Gleeson and Swift matching in jumpsuits as they compete in a local dance competition. The in-video judges weren’t impressed, handing them straight zeroes, but real-world audiences felt very differently, Fallon included. He told Gleeson flat out that his dancing in the video was fantastic, delivering the compliment with a wide grin.

Gleeson was quick to admit it wasn’t exactly effortless. He only found out about the dance two days beforehand, and Swift’s choreographer, Mandy, spent an entire evening drilling him on the steps the night before filming. He called it a simple routine on paper, but one that took forever to nail down, joking that nobody truly understands sadness until they’ve watched a red-headed Irishman rehearsing deep into the night. Terrifying as it was in the moment, he said, it all came together in the end.

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Irish Television

Murphy to produce PEAKY BLINDERS sequel

Cillian Murphy to produce PEAKY BLINDERS sequel

Irish Television

Cillian Murphy to produce PEAKY BLINDERS sequel

Cillian Murphy is heading back into the world of PEAKY BLINDERS, though this time he’ll be working behind the camera rather than in front of it. Netflix and the BBC have confirmed a two-season sequel series set in postwar Birmingham, giving fresh life to one of British television’s most successful crime dramas nearly a decade after its original six-season run came to a close. Murphy is joining as executive producer, working alongside series creator Steven Knight to shape the next chapter of the Shelby family saga.

Don’t expect to see Murphy back on screen as Tommy Shelby, though. The new series is set to center on a younger generation of the family, so his involvement this time is purely creative. Still, he’s spoken warmly about returning to the world he helped build, saying simply that it seemed Tommy Shelby wasn’t finished with him yet. It’s a line that has struck a chord with fans, many of whom have spent years wondering whether the character had truly said his last goodbye after the original series and its follow-up film.

That follow-up film is PEAKY BLINDERS: THE IMMORTAL MAN, the bridge between the show’s original run and this new sequel series. Set during the Second World War, it follows the Shelby family through one of the most turbulent chapters in their story, with Murphy sharing the screen alongside Barry Keoghan and Rebecca Ferguson. Critics have responded well, with the film landing a Certified Fresh score of 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a strong signal that the Shelby name still carries serious weight both on the big screen and, soon, back on television.

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Irish Television