Who's behind bars

Two top British prison dramas return for another lag.

- RUSSELL BROWN

TIME

Streaming: Neon and Sky Go from Sunday, November 19 

SCREW

Streaming: TVNZ+from Monday, November 2

It's not the people who are bad, it's the system that's brutalising. If there is any message from Time, it is this.

Sean Bean earned a Bafta for his lead role as a man thrown into the prison system in the first season of veteran writer Jimmy McGovern's prison drama and Time was named the best mini-series of 2021. There were no plans to extend the story and the writer's job appeared to be done - until the BBC suggested that he create a second season set in a women's prison.

McGovern agreed but he wanted to bring aboard a woman to co-write. He chose Helen Black, who was coming off the TV movie Life and Death in the Warehouse, in which the fact of being female - a woman's unborn child is endangered as she struggles to keep up with productivity targets in a giant online dispatch centre focused the broader social issues of work in the machine.