Mike Barker

Watch the opening of The Testaments (2026) and you can see the job. The school sits in cold, even daylight; the Aunts' brown and the girls' pale dresses are placed against bare walls, and nothing pulls the eye from the faces. That is the work of the cinematographers, Greta Zozula and Marc Laliberté, but it is also the work of the man who directed the first three episodes and the last, and who has said he wanted this Gilead to feel almost perfect so that the cracks would show from the inside. It is a sound idea. Whether ten hours needed it is another matter.

Barker is what television calls a lead director: the person who shoots the opening block, settles the style and stays on as executive producer while others take the middle episodes. He came to it by a long road. He started in documentaries in the early 1990s, then made features, Best Laid Plans (1999) and To Kill a King (2003) among them, before moving to series work in the middle of the 2010s with episodes of Broadchurch, Fargo and Outlander. The turn was The Handmaid's Tale (2017), where he directed twelve episodes across the early seasons and led seasons two and three. Since then he has been the man producers call when a large, expensive series needs its first hours to look as if it knows what it is.

The strength is real. The Handmaid's Tale in its first ten episodes is as frightening as anything television has done with tyranny, built on Elisabeth Moss's face and Ane Crabtree's red cloaks, and Barker was there for a good many of those hours. His later job was to keep it going, and there is the difficulty. Our reservation about the series is that it keeps hurting June and letting her up again until the repetition dulls it. A lead director's task is to hold the style steady, and by the third season steady had become the problem.

The Testaments shows both sides. Barker, with Bruce Miller writing again, moves from one woman's point of view to an ensemble, and gets from Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday two faces worth following; he has a way with young performers in hard roles, and here it shows. We admired the first hour: the cold light, the bare rooms, Adam Taylor's score kept under the girls and out of the Aunts', the silence in Lydia's office doing real work. By the third episode we had stopped noticing the look, and it was Barker's third episode. Between episodes, the seams showed.

He goes on to lead The Sandman, and a Peaky Blinders sequel is among what comes next. The first block of anything Barker leads will be worth your evening. Whether the rest is depends on the people who take over the middle, and on whether the look he handed them was built to last ten hours or three.