Anne Frank’s incredible story deserves better than these ill-judged historical details

It was a place of unimaginable terror: summary murder by guards, epidemics of typhus and terrible starvation. The British and Irish soldiers who came upon it soon after Frank’s death, filmed and photographed it, providing the public in the West with evidence of the holocaust.

Over the following decades, Frank became a symbol of that terrible period in history but the many books and television adaptations that her life spawned drew a veil over the horror of her end. By then she had stopped writing her famous diary, and most people’s knowledge of her life centres on the period when she was in hiding.

Belsen never appears in A Small Light (Disney+), which focuses instead on the pre-war back story to Frank’s period in hiding and deals with what feels like a very modern dilemma: when refugees are in danger and on the move, how would we behave?

The eight-part series, created by Tony Phelan and Joan Rater, deals with those who helped Frank and her family, with an emphasis on a brave young Austrian woman, Miep Gies (Bel Powley).

Before the war, Miep’s adoptive family is concerned about her future and has two options for her: get a job or marry her brother, who isn’t a blood relation, after all, but is probably gay. She goes for the job option.

She’s hired by Anne’s father Otto (Liev Schreiber) who, after the Nazis march into Amsterdam, begins resorting to any number of dodgy expedients in order to help his wife Edith (Amira Casar) and teen daughters Margot (Ashley Brooke) and Anne (Billie Boullet).

There are a lot of brave decisions here and some work and some don’t. The gamble to relegate Anne herself to a sort of supporting character pays off as Schreiber and Powley charge their performances with incredible power. The historical details, by contrast, feel very ill-judged. The Dutch characters speak in crisp modern British tones, with little allowance for the period or the setting (Powell clearly learned some German for the role, but she doesn’t sound like a native speaker).

The Germans have campy ‘vays-of-making-you-talk’ accents, which is perhaps meant to put some distance between them and the viewer but seems deeply old-fashioned in 2023. A confusing interweaving of subplots complicates matters quite a bit – at one point Miep becomes an unlikely leader in the Dutch resistance – and there’s a sense that this series sentimentalises the horror of the holocaust. Anne Frank’s story is one that always deserves to be told, but it deserves better material than this.​

Wanda Sykes is sometimes described as the female Chris Rock, but they are not really all that similar. While Rock has arguably fallen off since the heyday of his stand-up, Sykes has come into her own even as the menopause gives her a new fold of stomach fat (which she has given the nickname “Esther”).

Through the entertaining 80 minutes of her new stand-up special she goes after the absurdities of conservative America (“until a drag queen walks into a school and beats some kids to death with a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird I think you’re focussing on the wrong shit”), and she sketches out her own life story in hilarious detail.

The title comes from a segment where she laments the fact she “could have saved myself a lot of unnecessary d**k” if she had come out earlier. As a closeted adult she had sex with men she wasn’t attracted to, without them noticing. “What can I say?” she asks. “I’m an entertainer.”

There’s inevitably a lot of material about race and systemic inequality in America. She sees the dynamics of privilege play out when her wife, who is white, inspects the neighbour’s construction site without getting arrested – and at times it can feel like a rehash of points we’ve heard made elsewhere (by Rock, among others).

There’s no denying she’s at her best when the material is personal, but throughout it feels like a show that’s full of ideas, and a fitting testament to a comic at the peak of her powers.

Nukes and noir: The rest of the best new releases

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson Netflix At times this sketch show is surreal, bordering on baffling, but when it works – as with last season’s brilliantly bittersweet scene with Bob Odenkirk – it taps into a type of comedy like nothing you’ll find anywhere else.

Deadloch Prime Video This Australian crime drama brings together a pair of mismatched detectives and mines a dark seam of humour in a story of murder and mystery from two writers – Kate McLennan and Kate McCartney – who rose to fame with their online parodies.

The Days Netflix A little like Chernobyl, this series attempts to dramatise a dreadful disaster – the Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011 – and explores events from various perspectives. At times the special effects are dodgy but the performances and writing are superb.