After just one episode, you can already see the kind of flack that Channel 4’s The State might face. This brutal, densely researched four-part drama following the lives of four Britons who join Islamic State in Syria is likely to stand accused of propagandising for the death cult. Channel 4 received calls to postpone the opening episode, as the daughter of aid worker David Haines, brutally beheaded by Isis, asked executives to delay following the recent Barcelona atrocity, in which 13 were killed and more than a hundred injured in a horrific, Isis-inspired vehicle attack. This series is relentlessly uncomfortable viewing throughout, offering no explanations and little backstory to the characters depicted, thereby raising more questions than it answers. As it should.
Related: The State review – this Isis drama is clever, gripping and genuinely enlightening
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