TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG (THE WALSH SISTERS & STEAL)

 

THE WALSH SISTERS

What is it about dramas in recent years with dysfunctional Dublin families?

First we had the Garveys in Sharon Horgan's Apple TV series 'Bad Sisters'.

Then there we got the Sheridans in Nancy Harris' ITV and RTE collaboration 'The Dry'.

Then, of course, there was the murderous Kinsellas in AMC and RTE's gangland drama 'KIN'.

Now we've got 'The Walsh Sisters,' RTE's six part adaptation of a series of Marian Keyes' books.

At the heart is Louisa Harland's Anna Walsh, a great girl altogether whose life of bliss is suddenly overturned when her American boyfriend, Samuel Anderson 's Aidan is seriously injured in a car crash.

Then there's Danielle Galligan's single mum Claire who is struggling with raising a young kid weekdays and sharing custody with her ex husband at weekends while desiring his more carefree life.

Stefanie Preissner's Maggie desperately wants to conceive and is trying to do so with her husband, Stephen Mullan's Gav with little success.

Mairead Tyers' youngest sibling Helen is a student who seems content to live like a teen and occasionally puts her foot in it.

Caroline Menton's Rachel has the toughest time of them all.

A party girl, her addiction issues bring her into conflict with the family and her boyfriend, Jay Duffy's Luke Costello, with Anna blaming her for the accident.

Rounding off the dysfunctional family dynamics are Carrie Crowley's domineering matriarch Mammy Walsh and Aidan Quinn's genial Jack 'Daddy' Walsh.

Adapted for the screen by Preissner and Kefi Chadwick, 'The Walsh Sisters' ambles along at a pretty relaxed pace under the direction of Ian Fitzgibbon.

It's bland, inoffensive stuff - lacking the acerbic humour of the first series of 'Bad Sisters' and both series of 'The Dry'.

Fans of Keyes' books will feel it doesn't quite do justice to her characters - most notably, Mammy and Daddy Walsh.

Jack is reduced to being a nice man whose solution to every problem his daughters bring him is opening  his wallet.

With more to work with than their fellow cast members, Harland and Menton probably emerge with the strongest performances in the show.

Galligan, Tyers, Preissner, Duffy, Mullan, Anderson and Debi Mazar and Diarmuid Noyes who play two residents in an addiction treatment centre Rachel ends up in punch in and punch out of their roles 

Quinn's star power and talent is wasted, while Crowley's Mammy Walsh is simply irritating.

If 'The Walsh Sisters' is to continue beyond this series, its writers and director will need to be a bit braver.

The show needs more bite and they need to trust Keyes' approach to her characters in the source novels a lot more.

With 'The Dry' due to come to an end this year after three seasons, the show could also learn a lot from Nancy Harris' series if it wants to take its place.

('The Walsh Sisters' was broadcast on RTE1 between September 28-November 2, 2025 before being made available for streaming in the UK on the BBC iPlayer on February 21, 2026)

STEAL

Amazon Prime's 'Steal' is one of those six part dramas that might have in the past wound up on BBC1, ITV, Channel 4 or Channel 5.

The fact that it hasn't tells you everything about how the power dynamics have shifted in British television.

Sophie Turner stars as Zara Dunne, an ambitious financial sector employee working for Lochmill Capital, a pension management company in the City of London.

Arriving for work, she is landed with Eloise Thomas's intern Myrtle Clarke but their day is upended when an armed gang storm their high rise office, hold the staff at gunpoint and order them to digitally transfer pension money into an account.

Zara and her co-worker Archie Madekwe's Luke Selborn are chosen to make the deposit before the gang led by Jonathan Slinger's London make off with their digital spoils, threatening the future of Lochmill.

As word of the daring raid hits the media, Jacob Lloyd Fortune's Detective Chief Inspector Rhys Covaci starts to focus on the possibility that employees were involved and becomes particularly interested in Zara.

And while his gut instinct is not wrong, the more he probes the more other factors come to light, with MI5 and Anna Maxwell Martin's unnamed senior operative also taking a real interest in the case and in the Lochmill employee.

With Zara under suspicion, can she stay one step ahead of the authorities?

Will all the focus on her result in her falling foul of the robbers?

Or is she being set up as a fall girl by colleagues that she trusted?

Created by Zotiris Nikias, who wrote the scripts in conjunction with Poppy Cogan and Shyam Popat, 'Steal' gets off to a stunning start with the armed raid and never quite hits the heights of the opening episode which plays our line a  cross between 'Heat,' and 'Wall Street'.

Directors Sam Miller and Hettie Macdonald do a pretty good job throughout the run but the former's work on the first episode is so taut, is so nerve shredding that the show never really recovers.

'Steal' is blessed to have Turner in the lead role and she and Madekwe are particularly good at achieving the requisite level of shiftiness that their roles demand.

Lloyd Fortune doesn't fare as well, with his character saddled with a not quite convincing gambling addiction storyline.

Unusually, Maxwell Martin alao turns in an underwhelming performance as the unnamed MI5 official which is so perfunctory, it seems straight out of the stock spook drama playbook.

Patrick O'Kane is also remarkably stiff as Covaci's boss in a drama whose authority figures are all a bit cardboard.

Harry Michel is wonderfully slimy, though, as a senior Lochmill executive called Milo.

Anastasia Hille is pretty good value too as Zara's unreliable alcoholic mum Haley and Slinger does a decent job as the head of the armed gang.

Asked to play the part of a greedy brutal henchman, Andrew Howard does what is required of him which is scowl and growl.

Peter Mullan makes an all too brief appearance as the arrogant CEO whose money is stolen digitally.

Occasionally 'Steal' ventures down predictable and unnecessary paths - do Covaci and Zara have to have a fling?

However in the end, it is Turner who mostly keeps you invested as it becomes a real testament to her star power.

('Steal' was made available for streaming on Amazon Prime on January 21, 2026)