Why you can trust TechRadar
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you're buying the best. Learn more about how we test.
A few days before I start watching. AmadeoAn influx of young people flooded my TikTok For You page, playing various Bach pieces on different orchestral instruments while remixing each song with modern music. It was all thanks to a passing trend, but it briefly made me wonder if classical music was making a resurgence in digital pop culture.
If those same children saw Sky TV's new five-episode series, I think they would be amazed. Amadeo goes far beyond a musical education for the uninitiated, delving deeper into the supposed rivalry between composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri than previous accounts, including Miloš Forman's 1984 film.
Sky has saved its best show of 2025 for last with Amadeus
Look
If you look at the YouTube comments on the video above, fans of the original work (by Peter Shaffer) and the subsequent film (directed by Miloš Forman) are not happy that the same story is about to be retold. Honestly, I don't blame them. We can hardly opt for film and television adaptations that do not add any cultural value of their own, but I don't think Amadeus can be tarnished with the same brush.
Even if our two previous versions were flawless (in my opinion, the three-hour long film is far from being structurally sound), another adaptation would need to add a new perspective. Luckily for us, that's exactly what Amadeo does.
Without giving too much away, the TV series includes Shaffer's own journey to writing his play, with the final scene of episode 5 breaking the fourth wall in a way I'm not sure I've ever seen on TV. Sky's creative risk-taking has gone unnoticed, and the rest of the series is just as ambitious.
Sharpe captures Mozart's supposed fiery temperament as if it were the easiest thing in the world and is the basis for the rest of the story's chaos. No episode can contain the multitude of emotions bursting at its seams, with Mozart or Salieri (or sometimes both) breaking down, celebrating, or threatening to jump out a window (that's our unintentionally hilarious opening, so stay tuned).
Amadeo he throws everything and the kitchen sink into his narrative, and the charged atmosphere is almost a character in itself. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's the main reason you need to watch it.
Some of our cast have 'iPhone faces', and that's a problem
None of this is to say that our leading trio isn't exceptional in its own right. Congratulations to our destructive duo are well deserved, as both Sharpe and Bettany gave the performance of their careers. I wonder if Bettany will make more of an effort to distance himself from the upcoming Marvel series. vision questbut maybe it's just that I'm a franchise cynic.
While Gabrielle Creevy (Constanze Mozart) hits the mark as the long-suffering go-between for the musical rivals, there's something about the cast that bothers me. To me, all the younger members (and by this I mean those under 40) seem to have an “iPhone face”. What I mean by this is that just by looking at them, you can tell that they have never seen an iPhone in their life.
Makeup and costumes Amadeo They're beautiful, but they don't hide the fact that some of the cast are too modern just by existing. Still, Sharpe particularly surprised me with how wonderful his strident, bawdy, ridiculously arrogant version of Mozart is… I just have to leave out that he clearly knows how WiFi works.
The five-episode series suffers from the classic problem of narrative lag between episodes 3 and 4, but when everything else has such frenetic energy, it's not hard to overlook. This, of course, includes the music, which Sharped learned to play (instead of just waving his hands while the camera is cleverly positioned to hide the truth).
As captivating as the scandal, drama and complexities of 18th-century Viennese society are, it all comes back to the music. It helps us understand the world, the struggles of Mozart and Salieri, and ourselves in the process, and prompted me to make some conscious additions to my regular Spotify playlists.
Their work is what both tortured composers ultimately wanted to be remembered for, and thanks to Amadeo' Mixing almost everything in their lives, music is still the best.
Stream Amadeo starting December 21 in the UK using the following offers:
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to receive news, reviews and opinions from our experts in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
