Old sitcoms have a “habit” of returning to our screens either “tired” or “lazy”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. “But that particular memo didn’t reach” the team behind the “Malcolm in the Middle” reboot. “Faster and funnier than before” with more emotional depth, it’s “miraculous how well it works”.

The action picks up 20 years after the original show. Frankie Muniz returns as Malcolm, “the child genius prone to fits of stress-induced sociopathy”. Nearing 40, he is now a single dad raising his teenage daughter Leah (Keeley Karston). Malcolm has turned out “alarmingly normal”, but we soon discover that’s because he has “put distance (physical and emotional) between himself and the full-blown chaos of his family life”.

“Unfortunately”, Hal (Bryan Cranston) and Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) are throwing a party for their 40th wedding anniversary, and they are “determined that it will be a full and inclusive family affair”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times.

Most of the original cast are back, giving the “short, sweet four-parter” the “confidence of a well-oiled machine”. It succeeds largely because it doesn’t try to “modernise itself” – instead, it feels like the team has “banded together to make another handful of ‘Malcolm in the Middle’ episodes”.

Over the four shows, we follow Malcolm as he attempts to reunite with his dysfunctional family “without losing his mind”. There is something “comforting about the sameness of it all”, and the “gently bonkers escapades are soothingly familiar”.

However, trying to “recreate the dynamics of a kids’ comedy with adult characters” does at times feel odd, said James Poniewozik in The New York Times. “The siblings often seem less grown-up than simply enlarged into adult-shaped versions of their recognisable selves.”

Cranston’s face is “as elastic and expressive as ever” and the actors are “still funny”, said Annabel Nugent in The Independent. But the plot “scatters the family members on individual paths” and when they do eventually come together for the family reunion, it’s “fleeting”.

Still, the final showdown between mother and son had me “clenching a pillow” for “emotional support”, said Kristy Puchko on Mashable. Occasionally, a reboot manages to recapture the “magic” while “providing fresh fun”. “Malcolm in the Middle: Life’s Still Unfair” does both with this “joyful celebration” of the original show. “I couldn’t have predicted how much it would mean to me to see Hal, Lois, Malcolm, and the whole gang back again.”

The majesty of the natural world and the incomprehensible vastness of space are almost infinitely rearrangeable variables for documentarians. We are lucky to have a long (and still-growing) library of superb television series that explore the landscapes, creatures and philosophical underpinnings of both the known and the unknown. Done right, the way these acclaimed series are, documentaries can be just as thrilling as any fictional narrative.

‘Cosmos’ (1980)

One of the most-watched documentary series in history, “Cosmos” leans heavily on the charisma and chops of its presenter, astronomer and public intellectual Carl Sagan. Its 13 episodes tackle everything from the Cambrian explosion to the nature of time and space.

It also presents a plea for people to take care of the planet while acknowledging our relative insignificance in the context of the universe. “There’s never a dull moment” in what emerges as a “complete science course, encompassing not just cosmology but also chemistry, physics, biology and the history of human discovery,” said James Kingsland at The Guardian. (Internet Archive)

‘The Blue Planet’ (2001)

A spiritual successor to “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” this BBC production outclasses its predecessors in every conceivable way. It introduces viewers to complex concepts like ocean currents and ecosystems like coral reefs, with narration from David Attenborough.

The 10 episodes took years to complete and, at the time, made up the most expensive nature documentary ever produced. The series is “unabashedly, poetically awestruck, yet unsentimental,” said Julie Salamon at The New York Times, featuring “images demonstrating the interconnectedness of life in the starkest terms.” A second season, “Blue Planet II” was released to great acclaim in 2017. (discovery+)

‘Planet Earth’ (2006)

The “11-part mother of all nature series” uses “helicopters, long lenses and all manner of cutting-edge film techniques to bring us the photographic spoils of a five-year global odyssey,” said Susan Stewart at The New York Times. It “often encourages you to root for the predator rather than the prey: fitting at a time when the planet itself seems as vulnerable as a newly hatched penguin.”

Rather than honing in on a particular animal or region, the series takes a kaleidoscopic look at life on Earth by visiting different ecosystem types, including plains, mountains, jungles, forests and the mysterious depths of the ocean. Collectively, the series leaves the viewer with a truly globe-spanning understanding of our home planet. It was followed by two additional series, “Planet Earth II” in 2016 and “Planet Earth III” in 2023. (HBO Max)

‘Frozen Planet’ (2011)

The forbidding landscapes and wildlife of the polar regions get the glowed-up documentary treatment in the BBC’s “Frozen Planet.” Attenborough narrates for the BBC, but the American version released on the Discovery Channel was recut with voice work by Alec Baldwin.

Episodes follow animals like polar bears through multiple climatic seasons, and the series is full of awe-inspiring observations about the critical importance of the region to the Earth’s general health, like the fact that a third of the trees on the entire planet exist in the circumpolar belt called the Taiga. “Frozen Planet” is “gorgeous to behold: lump-in-throat, tear-in-eye beautiful,” said Robert Lloyd at the Los Angeles Times, “made to reveal a world few people will ever see.” (HBO Max)

‘Wonders of the Universe’ (2011)

A series presented by the “incongruously boyish and immediately watchable Professor Brian Cox,” this BBC production is meant to show us “just how insignificant our little solar system is when presented with the enormity of space and time indefinite,” said Luke Holland at Den of Geek. Cox’s “deft ability to simplify a concept without patronizing an audience” results in a “profound triumph.”

The four-part series tackles the origins of the universe, the pivotal role of stardust in all living things, and the nature of space-time, among many other cosmic mysteries. Buoyed by sharp special effects and meditative insights, “Wonders of the Universe” is gripping television. (Prime)

‘Africa’ (2013)

This is yet another stellar series from the BBC, coproduced with the Discovery Channel and narrated by the extremely prolific Attenborough, who turns 100 on May 8 this year and is still working. The six episodes of “Africa” each look at one of the continent’s regions, starting with a tour of the forbidding Kalahari and Namib Deserts and traveling through the Congo Basin, the southern tip of the continent, and the savannahs of East Africa.

Forest Whitaker deftly presents the series in the U.S. market. The series “abounds in jaw-dropping visuals on a scale that, like the best fictional dramas, infuses the epic with the up-close-and-personal,” said Sheri Linden at The Hollywood Reporter. (HBO Max)

‘The Hunt’ (2015)

Viewers might want to steer little kids out of the room before pressing play on BBC’s “The Hunt,” which takes a long look at the dance between predator and prey in different kinds of environments, like grasslands and coasts. It’s not ideal for people who are sensitive to violence and gore, but it is riveting. Some cherished illusions will be shattered, including what chimpanzees eat, which is not exclusively fruit but sometimes other, weaker primates like red colobus monkeys.

If you can stomach it, “The Hunt” is full of such revelations, rendered lovingly and narrated by (who else?) Attenborough. “The footage is truly extraordinary and gorgeous and, for the most part, artfully edited,” said Ken Tucker at Yahoo Entertainment. (HBO Max)

‘Our Planet’ (2019-2023)

You will never guess who narrates this Netflix production about habitat loss and the consequences of human encroachment on the natural world. Attenborough, well into his 90s when the series was shot, did some of the best voiceover work of his long career here. The series’ 12 episodes across two seasons visit a dizzying array of locales, from the Congolese rainforest to the Arctic, where polar bears are struggling to adapt to climate change and the loss of their icy homes. A series that “plays notes of an elegy,” it also “contains the saddest scene perhaps ever shot in a nature documentary,” depicting an “enormous gathering of walruses that have been forced onto a tiny stretch of dry land due to the shrinking sea ice in the Arctic,” said Brian Resnick at Vox. (Netflix)

Stefan Golaszewski specialises in uncomfortably hard-hitting dramas, said Vicky Jessop in The Standard, such as his 2022 series “Marriage”. But “Babies” might be the most “hard-hitting of them all”.

Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen star as Stephen and Lisa, a couple in their mid-30s who are reeling from a miscarriage, and enduring the “endless, draining slog of trying, trying and trying again to conceive”. It’s a “gruelling” watch, but Essiedu and Cullen deliver “fantastic performances” to create what might be one of this year’s “most powerful” TV shows.

“Every moment is here” in this heartbreakingly realistic BBC drama, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. There’s “the realisation that you’re bleeding as you sit at your office desk”, and “the silence of the sonographer before she tells you there is no heartbeat”. But eight episodes is just “too many”, and the long stretches where Lisa and Stephen “wordlessly watch TV”, or have an “interminable conversation about poached eggs, will sap your will”. There’s also a secondary storyline – about Stephen’s best friend Dave (Jack Bannon) and his girlfriend Amanda (Charlotte Riley) – which is “truly, bafflingly terrible”.

I had a few quibbles, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. Some themes, such as toxic masculinity, are “overplayed”, and it’s best to ignore the “busker-ish theme tune” (performed by Golaszewski himself). But overall, this is “a very special” series – “unsettling, compassionate, funny, moving, wildly unpredictable and beautifully acted”.

The TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was so “relentlessly bleak”, I had to stop watching, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now, the showrunner behind the original series, Bruce Miller, has brought Atwood’s Booker-Prize-winning sequel to the small screen. “Brace yourselves.”

“The Testaments” picks up a few years after the events of the first book, when we meet the “next generation of Gilead women”. Agnes (Chase Infiniti) is the daughter of a Commander, attending an “elite preparatory school” run by the formidable Aunt Lydia. “Yes, that Aunt Lydia.” Ann Dowd resumes her role from “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a “genuinely savage Miss Trunchbull”.

Agnes is put in charge of new student Daisy (Lucy Halliday), a “Pearl Girl” brought to the school by Gilead missionaries and “generally suspected by the other pupils” of spying for the teachers. The two girls’ increasingly “close and complicated” relationship forms the “backbone” of the series.

Like its predecessor, “The Testaments” is a “disturbing” watch, said Aramide Tinubu in Variety. An “exemplary” follow-up to the original show, this is both a powerful tale of “girlhood, survival, rage and friendship”, and a “magnificent coming-of-age” story.

The teenagers are waiting for their first menstrual period, when they will become “officially eligible for the marriage market”, graduating from Plums to Greens and “eventually into the teal blue of the Gilead wives”. Despite the “palatial houses” and manicured gardens, “something horrific is always just within frame”.

Following her starring role in “One Battle After Another”, Infiniti brings “electric A-lister aura” to Agnes, said Ed Power in The Telegraph, while Aunt Lydia is the “same disturbing mix of contradictions” she always was. Despite its dark subject matter, there is “fun to be had watching young people navigate the trials of growing up”. The school might be “hell on earth, but it’s also ‘Mean Girls’ with a dystopian twist”.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” became “murky and frenetic” but this sequel “pops” with the pupil’s jewel-coloured robes, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. The tone is lighter and the pace quicker but it keeps intact the depiction of how a society can “backslide into regression and repression”. This is a “young adult epic for the ages”.

“There’s no case of sequel-itus here,” said Vicky Jessop in The Standard. “‘The Testaments’ feels just as urgent as its predecessor – and just as darkly enjoyable.”

“The medical drama that took its native US by storm last year has finally crossed the pond,” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, and it’s well worth the wait.

“The Pitt” is made by some of the same team that created the gritty Chicago-set drama “ER” – and it stars one of its biggest talents. Noah Wyle appeared in the pilot episode of “ER” as fresh-faced intern John Carter, in 1994, and bowed out in the season finale, in 2009.

Here he plays Dr Robby, a Carter-like senior physician working in an emergency room in Pittsburgh known to its staff as the Pitt. Each of the first season’s 15 episodes (on HBO Max) covers a single hour of a brutal 15-hour shift.

It takes “supreme confidence to drill down into this level of minutiae”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. “It could get boring, yet never does.” And I’m not surprised that the show has been praised for its accuracy, because as well as being thrillingly immersive, “The Pitt” is incredibly naturalistic. Watching it is like being dropped into “an emergency department in real time with all its blood, gore and chaotic urgency”.

As in “ER”, “there are moments that are heartbreaking, there are moments that are shocking, there are moments that are amusing”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. (There are also dashes of heavy-handed social commentary.) In other words, it all feels designed “to hit its beats”. It is good TV. But I wouldn’t call it great.

Well, you’ll have to go a long way to find better, said India Block in London’s The Standard. Written and directed with aplomb, “The Pitt” is “prestige” drama for an audience not distracted by their phones. It deserves to be seen.

The Duffer brothers’ new Netflix horror series takes “pre-wedding jitters” and ramps them up to “supernatural extremes”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. The result is a “surprisingly thoughtful, satisfyingly bloody take on the impossibility of absolute romantic certainty”.

Nervous bride-to-be Rachel (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco) appear at first like a happy, “promising match”. The action begins five days before their wedding – an intimate affair set to take place at Nicky’s parents’ holiday cabin in the woods.

But Rachel soon begins to sense “something is not right”. Driving to the venue, “ill omens seem to abound”: the couple overhear “snatches of a disturbing conversation” and pass a car “scribbled with ‘just married’ in paint the colour of blood”.

“Wait until she gets there,” said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. The “creepy” cabin is decorated with “taxidermied Irish wolfhounds” which Rachel is told never to look directly in the eye, and each one of Nicky’s relatives is “awful, emotionally disturbed, or plain loony”. Disturbing tales of “evil” monsters lurking in the woods don’t help things. “Run, Rachel!”

“Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” is a “macabre and unsettling” show filled with plenty of “blood and gore”. But the “real horror”, it transpires, would be “realising that you’ve married the wrong person”. As the “claustrophobia and hysteria build”, it is Morrone’s stand-out performance that “grounds everything in some sort of reality”.

I couldn’t help feeling “this would have worked better as a feature film”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. At times the pacing dragged and some of the “tortuous plotting” felt like it was “simply stalling for time”. There were issues too with the lighting: many of the scenes were so “dark and colour-washed that it’s hard to tell what you’re even looking at”.

The poorly lit cabin does leave you wondering how the family are “reading cooking instructions”, said Rhik Samadder in The Guardian. But I found it “terrifying”. The show has “fun with the trappings of weddings from hell” and excels in its “limbo-like scenes suffused with dread”. Above all, “it gives a chilling new meaning to having cold feet”.

It clearly tickled Donald Trump’s fancy. The debut episode of live sketch comedy “Saturday Night Live UK” went down so well with the US president, he treated his Truth Social followers to a clip mocking Keir Starmer for being scared to talk to him about the war in Iran.

But British reviewers were not so amused – and several were not afraid to find fault with the UK version of the long-running US show.

‘Tepid cosplay’

That “laughter-free yawn” was “not a patch” on the US original, said Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye. “What is it?! Painful, that’s what.”

“I do not want to condemn this whole endeavour outright,” said Charlotte Ivers in The Times. “But the spark is not there yet.” We and “our US cousins” have “wildly differing senses of humour”, and, watching this, you feel it “like a physical ache”.

No one “cried” or “fluffed their lines”, said Alison Rowat in The Herald, but “you could almost smell the tension in the studio”. There was “good” but also “bad” and “so-so”. Nothing was “hilarious”, but “some sketches raised a smile”, like the “movie junket interviewer who dares to tell stars their movie sucks”.

Saturday Night Live “represents the quintessence of the American comedic establishment” but its name doesn’t have “much Clapham omnibus cut-through here in Britain”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. So “it’s a bit of a shame” that the team “plays it so safe” with the imported formula. It seemed like “tepid cosplay”.

British comedy shows used to be hammy and contrived like this, said Nicholas Harris in The New Statesman but they’ve become “more stylised, ironic”. I suspect the “failure” of “Saturday Night Live UK” has “more to do with the UK than ‘Saturday Night Live’”.

‘Stinging gags’

“It could have been a lot, lot worse”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. And it’s likely to become “a lot, lot better” as it settles in over the coming weeks. It was “refreshing” that “an ambition/piece of madness like retooling a legacy US brand for this septic isle” was “even being attempted”, so “let’s hope it can build towards real success”.

The first episode was “competent, untroubled by either annoying American-isms or annoying Americans – and occasionally hilarious”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Guest host Tina Fey was “effortlessly commanding”, thanks to her “visible ease with the format” but the “real highlight was the Weekend Update section”, with its “stinging and completely non-woke gags” about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Trump and the Strait of Hormuz.

The schadenfreude with which social-media users were predicting it would “crash and burn” was “wide of the mark”. I’d say it “was off to a flying start”.

What happened

ABC on Thursday canceled its ready-to-broadcast 22nd season of “The Bachelorette,” hours after TMZ posted a leaked video of this season’s star, Taylor Frankie Paul, attacking the father of one of her three children in 2023. The season premiere had been scheduled for this Sunday. Paul, a breakout star of the Hulu series “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” is facing a separate domestic assault investigation involving the same former partner, Dakota Mortensen, police in Draper City, Utah, said earlier this week.

Who said what

The new police investigation also prompted Hulu — which, like ABC, is owned by Disney — to pause production of the fifth season of “Secret Lives.” ABC “had appeared to be committed to continuing its plans” to air “The Bachelorette,” The New York Times said. But the video of Paul kicking, hitting and throwing metal chairs at Mortensen in front of her 5-year-old daughter “rapidly shifted” the “calculus” for Disney, trumping the “significant financial hit” the company will take for pulling the season.

“The Bachelor” and its offshoots “are no stranger to controversy,” The Washington Post said, but this is the “first time an entire season of the show was canceled before it aired.” ABC had “heavily promoted” the show, “hyping the ‘Secret Lives’ tie-in” and counting on Paul’s 6 million TikTok followers to boost viewership. Unfortunately for the network, its “bet big on a Paul-fronted season” to reverse plummeting “ratings and cultural relevance” was “over before it started,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

ABC will “not move forward with the new season of ‘The Bachelorette’ at this time” in light of the “newly released video,” said a Disney spokesperson. It was “not immediately clear whether Paul’s ‘Bachelorette’ season would air at a later date,” the Journal said.

“Mr Bates vs the Post Office” showed that TV dramas have the power to “intensify public disgust at a scandal, forcing official attitudes to change”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. If Channel 4’s drama-documentary “Dirty Business” fails to move the needle about water pollution, “perhaps nothing will”.

Set partially in 2016, it follows neighbours Ashley Smith (David Thewlis) and Peter Hammond (Jason Watkins), who turned detective after noticing that their local river, the Windrush, had filled with “brown murk”. A parallel storyline focuses on the death, in 1999, of eight-year-old Heather Preen, who’d developed E. coli soon after swimming off a beach in Devon.

In less skilled hands, there would have been a “tonal clash” between the two strands – the 2016 story is filled with “lovely faux-mocking banter” between Ash and Peter, while the earlier events “are pure horror”. But it works, thanks in no small part to the series’ intelligent use of comedy.

It’s not surprising that “Dirty Business” has been likened to “Mr Bates”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times; and it certainly packs a punch about corporate obfuscation and failures of regulation. But it’s “less tethered to convention” than “Mr Bates”: the drama is spliced, for instance, with “real-life footage of sewage spills”, as well as with scenes in which actors deliver versions of actual statements from the Environment Agency.

There is quite a lot to take in, said Ben Dowell in The Times. But ultimately, it’s a relatable human drama, with poignancy as well as bite. “And gallons and gallons of dirt.”

David Morrissey takes on “glowering”, “gloomy” characters with such ease, “you do rather start to worry for him”, said James Jackson in The Times. In ITV’s new crime drama, “Gone”, he stays true to form as Michael Polly, the “brooding” headmaster of a prestigious private school who becomes the prime suspect when his wife vanishes.

“Despite his buttoned-up surliness, surely he’s a good guy deep down, because isn’t Morrissey always that, too?” As with any crime drama worth its salt, “we really don’t know”. Polly displays troubling behaviour from the outset of this “sombre thriller”, showing a peculiar lack of concern when his wife goes missing, and failing to report her disappearance early on.

But perhaps this “stoic and inscrutable” demeanour is just Polly’s way of keeping disruption at the school to a minimum, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles) isn’t so sure; she “immediately suspects he was a controlling partner”, and watches with “scepticism” as he appears at a press conference appealing for his wife’s return.

George Kay’s “slow burn” drama isn’t “just a domestic story”, though, said Phil Harrison in The Independent. There’s an “unfolding back story” about Cassidy’s own troubled relationship and, “more intriguingly, the repercussions of an unsolved case from eight years earlier”. After reeling us in with a “deliberately obvious premise”, the show’s “real cleverness” lies in the way it continuously asks viewers to “question their own judgement”.

What seems at first glance to be a straightforward missing persons case soon unfurls into a “multitude of wrigglier, trickier things” – from the “nature of guilt and co-dependancy” to the “banality of evil”, said Sarah Dempster in The Guardian. “It’s a hugely taut show that will totally subvert your expectations.” Clues are slowly threaded into the narrative from “unexpected angles”, as the tension continues to build. “How long until the elastic band snaps?” This will surely be the most “engrossing” drama of the year.

In 1972, the artist L.S. Lowry, then in his 80s and a “reluctant celebrity”, sat down in his living room for an interview with a young fan, said James Jackson in The Times. It was meant to be a one-off encounter, but it turned into an ongoing “four-year project”.

In this one-hour BBC2 programme, Ian McKellen appears as “the great Mancunian observer of ordinary lives”, lip-syncing to the freshly unearthed audio from those meetings. This takes some “getting used to”, but after a while it is “impossible to look away”.

We learn about Lowry’s relationship with his parents, “how he found his niche painting Pendlebury’s townscapes after his family were forced to downsize from their middle-class neighbourhood”, and his bachelorhood. But the film is not just about him; it also serves as “an epitaph” for his subject: “an industrial Manchester obliterated by the slum clearances”, a place “of hurrying crowds and tightly bonded communities. A vanished North.”

“Lip-syncing can be toe-curling to witness,” said Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. But McKellen’s “is a thing of bleak and beautiful northern wonder, all obfuscating harrumphs and carefully placed blows on his hankie”. The show tells a “fascinating” story, about the artist and our “attitudes to art and heritage”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent. When he died, Lowry’s estate was valued at less than £300,000; in 2022, one of his works sold for £7.8 million. The factories he painted are gone; and he “couldn’t have imagined… the sparkling Lowry gallery” that now stands in their place.

Competitive sports are a reliable foundation on which to build solid comedy and drama. The great thing about these eight superb shows is that you don’t need to know much of anything at all about sports to enjoy them.

‘Sports Night’ (1998-2000)

Creator Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived but beloved cult classic followed the hosts and producers of a fictional nightly sports recap show trying to compete with ESPN’s pioneering “SportsCenter.” Josh Charles starred in a breakout role as the show’s co-host Dan Rydell, alongside Casey McCall (Peter Krause), as the pair and executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) chase the ESPN ratings behemoth.

Looking back, it is truly hard to believe that ABC saddled the series and its witty, fast-moving dialogue with a laugh track in its first season. A show “populated by characters whose jobs define who they are,” it was “full of walk-and-talks, clipboards and very important meetings,” said Ciara Moloney at Paste Magazine. The result was “unadulterated Sorkin — with all of his strengths and none of his weaknesses.” (Prime Video)

‘Friday Night Lights’ (2006-2011)

Adapted from the hit 2004 film, “Friday Night Lights” is an intimate look at a Texas high school football team and one of the last truly magnificent network television shows before the streaming era gave us the concept of “prestige TV.” Kyle Chandler is the show’s moral center as Coach Eric Taylor, whose team is the pride of fictional Dillon, Texas. Connie Britton plays his wife, Tami, and the strength of the pair’s performances covered up for some uneven acting from the high school ensemble. The first season of the show was “great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red,” said Virginia Heffernan at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘The League’ (2009-2015)

Fantasy sports are an enormous, if niche, industry, and FX’s “The League” might be the only sports show ever to focus on a group of friends and their sometimes relationship-wrecking obsession with this odd little hobby. Mark Duplass stars as Pete, the reigning champ of the titular fantasy football league when the show starts, and Katie Aselton is a consistent standout as football savant Jenny, who competes in the league with her husband, Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi).

Featuring “time-honored elements of screwball comedy,” the best humor in this fantastic series comes not from the league but “from equal opportunity humiliation that is the basis of their friendships,” said David Wiegand at SFGate. Like the amoral gang in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” no one in “The League” ever grows or learns — and that’s part of the fun. (Disney+)

‘Eastbound & Down’ (2009-2013)

Washed-up major-leaguer Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) returns to his hometown to take a job as a substitute gym teacher after yapping his way out of professional baseball in creators Ben Best, Jody Hill and Danny McBrides’s cringe-inducing HBO Max comedy. The show’s gamble is that rather than a redemption arc, Powers’ “very public crash and burn is only the beginning of his downward spiral,” said Wired, exacerbated by him having the “capacity to care about and even love others, but he’ll sacrifice anyone if it means he can step back into the spotlight.” Harboring dreams of returning to baseball, he crashes with his brother Dustin (John Hawkes) and tries to reconnect with high school flame, April (Katy Mixon). (HBO Max)

‘GLOW’ (2017-2019)

The 1980s-set “GLOW” gave us three superb seasons of wrestling and drama before Netflix axed it. Alison Brie is Ruth Wilder, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles whose career is going nowhere. She accepts an invitation to audition for the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, where she is cast along with her estranged friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), and directed by aging film director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), who looks like he would rather be literally anywhere else.

But when Ruth takes on the moniker “Zoya the Destroya” she transforms her professional life and finds a path she can really throw herself into while trying to repair the damage to her relationship with Debbie. Together their exploits create a “quiet and simple masterpiece that deserves to be the most popular show on television,” said Matt Gannon at TV Wasteland. (Netflix)

‘Brockmire’ (2017-2020)

A decade after a drunken, on-air meltdown caused him to lose his job as a major league baseball announcer, Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) returns stateside to take a job with the woebegone, minor league Morristown Frackers. The team’s owner, Jules James (Amanda Peet), thinks that hiring the washed-up Brockmire will put her team and its rust belt town on the map.

This somewhat familiar set-up is elevated by the show’s surreal sense of humor, as well as by the foul-mouthed Brockmire’s endless antics. The show works “both as a snapshot of this aging oddity of Americana and a universal story about a washed-up person coming to terms with himself,” said Sonia Saraiya at Variety. (Netflix)

‘Ted Lasso’ (2020-)

When it debuted on August 14, 2020, the world was six months into the miserable Covid-19 pandemic, and the Apple TV+ dramedy was not only a poignant, low-stakes lifeline for millions of viewers, it also put the relatively new streamer on the map with its first big hit. Jason Sudeikis plays the title character, a U.S. college football coach who agrees to accept a bizarre job offer to manage a fictional English Premiere League soccer team, AFC Richmond.

Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) acquired the team in a divorce from her gross ex-husband and wants to run it into the ground to spite him only to find that she can’t resist Lasso’s aw-shucks charm and that his leadership sparks a renewal led by veteran star Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). Sudeikis’ Lasso is “practically impossible not to like,” said Nick Harley at Den of Geek, and the “easy charms of a well-executed, feel-good sports story make it a breezy, low-effort watch that just about anyone can enjoy.” (Apple TV+)

‘Heated Rivalry’ (2025)

This discourse-driving hit is set during the Obama years (Yes, 2017 is now the stuff of period pieces) and depicts a secret, steamy romance between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two young stars who break into fictional Major League Hockey at the same time for different clubs. Early in the series, their romance takes place mostly in hotels as the pair struggle with how they might be perceived if word gets out, especially the Russian Rozanov, whose home country is considerably more dangerous for gay men than Hollander’s.

The sex is “plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot,” said Naomi Fry at The New Yorker. But a bigger “part of the pleasure for viewers” is the “show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does.” (HBO Max)

The BBC has apologised for failing to edit out a racial slur shouted during the Bafta awards ceremony by a guest with Tourette syndrome. John Davidson, whose condition causes involuntary outbursts and whose life story inspired the movie “I Swear”, yelled out the N-word while Black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award.

‘Empty’ apologies

Shortly afterwards, ceremony host Alan Cumming apologised “if you are offended tonight”, and a BBC spokesperson later apologised for “any offence caused by the language heard” during the broadcast. “Can we stop making these kinds of apologies?” said Ava Vidal in The Independent. These vaguely worded hypotheticals “feel empty” and avoid the reality that “people were offended – Black people”. Jordan and Lindo were “violated in front of their peers” and then again “on almost-live TV”.

Grace is due to Davidson, too: “what some people have said about this disability campaigner is beyond disgusting”. Involuntary tics and outbursts don’t “indicate a person’s true feelings and are not a reflection of their character”, and he “will be absolutely mortified by his outburst”. Some Black commenters argued on social media that Davidson should have watched the ceremony from “a private, soundproofed box where he could not be heard”, but “people belonging to a community that knows about segregation should know better”.

Mind you, those who have signalled their support and sympathy for Davidson should now “extend the same courtesy” to Black people with Tourette syndrome and other similar disorders, who are often “victims of double discrimination”.

Big error

The moment was “shocking”, said Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco in The Herald, but so is the fact that “two hours later, the BBC inexplicably aired the segment on television, with Davidson’s shout audible in the background”. In the predictable subsequent “pile-on”, some people suggested Davidson should “wear a muzzle” or “tape his mouth shut”. “Rather than pick a side between racism and ableism, we should instead direct our ire towards the BBC,” which “failed” in its “duty of care to all parties involved”. This is “another indictment of a failing public institution”.

The “big” error was “in the editing, or the lack of”, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. “No one could have stopped” Davidson “yelling out the N-word” but, given that BBC editors found time to “judiciously remove Akinola Davies Jr’s shout of ‘Free Palestine’” from the broadcast, it “seems a perverse decision” not to edit out the “appalling racial insult”, too.

As a boy, James Van Der Beek was sports mad and dreamed of playing in the Superbowl, said The Times. But aged 13, he suffered a “severe concussion” during a football match, and was advised by a doctor to quit for a year.

To the surprise of the other jocks at his high school, he swapped the locker room for the glee club. He took the lead role in a school production of “Grease”, and at 16 he appeared off Broadway in a play by Edward Albee. Four years after that, Van Der Beek, who has died aged 48, won the role that made him famous, in the 1990s coming-of-age TV drama “Dawson’s Creek”.

With his background, he was perfect for the part of the show’s titular protagonist, Dawson Leery, who was tall and muscular, but also sensitive, introspective, and given to implausibly sophisticated musings. “It’s not about the kiss – it’s about the journey and creating a sustaining magic,” Dawson reflects in one episode, while watching “From Here to Eternity”.

James Van Der Beek was born in 1977 and brought up in Connecticut. His father was a telecoms executive, his mother a dancer. When he told her that he wanted to be an actor, aged 15, she drove him to New York to find an agent. Although he got good notices for his role in the Albee play, he spent much of the next few years, he said, “failing auditions for commercials”. He was 20, and at college, by the time he was cast as Dawson – a 15-year-old film buff living in a coastal town in Massachusetts, who is nursing a crush on his tomboy neighbour Joey (Katie Holmes).

“With a quartet of smart, articulate 15-year-olds completed by Michelle Williams and Joshua Jackson, the show was an instant hit,” said The Daily Telegraph. Over six seasons, broadcast in dozens of countries, it tracked its characters and their intertwined love lives as they navigated the journey towards adulthood, while exploring serious themes such as mental health, divorce, consent and addiction.

Success, Van Der Beek would reflect, had not come overnight – but his life changed overnight. In 1998, the year that the series launched, he was voted one of People Magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People; in public, he was mobbed by young fans. He said that for years, he had walked around “in fear of teenage girls”, and that people seemed no longer to regard him as a human being, so much as a “novelty item”. Still, the show’s success also opened doors. While “Dawson’s Creek” was still running, he starred in the box-office hit “Varsity Blues”; in 2002, he had a lead role in the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s “The Rules of Attraction”.

But though he continued to act in films and on TV, he found it harder to move on from “Dawson’s Creek” than its other young stars, and some of his later parts were send-ups of the show. Asked in 2023 what advice he’d give to his younger self, he said: “Don’t be surprised if six years of work gets reduced to a three-second GIF of you crying.” He was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2023. Last year, he had to auction off his TV memorabilia to pay his medical bills. Married twice, he is survived by his second wife, Kimberly, and their six children.

Many of us haven’t read William Golding’s 1954 novel “Lord of the Flies” since school, and can only remember a few details – “the conch, the war paint, Piggy’s glasses”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. This BBC One adaptation – the first made for television – “delves deeply and reverently into Golding’s text”, and the results are “stunningly good”. The tale of boys reverting to a feral state after they are stranded on a tropical island unfolds over four episodes, each of which is told from the perspective of a different boy. David McKenna, a 12-year-old from Northern Ireland making his debut here, “will steal your heart as Piggy”, and the rest of the performances from the young cast – who filmed in the Malaysian jungle for weeks – “are a marvel”. It all makes for a “first-class example of an adaptation done right, and of television breathing new life into a familiar story”.

This “excellent” adaptation was written by Jack Thorne, of “Adolescence” fame, and it returns to that drama’s “theme of developing masculinity”, only now with a “1950s spin”, said Rhik Samadder in The Guardian. Still, aside from the period language, it feels “painfully” contemporary: “think of it as ‘Adolescence: Origins’”. The series is “brilliantly executed”, agreed Deborah Ross in The Mail on Sunday: it is “lushly and vividly filmed”, and there is “brutality and viciousness”, as well as a “tenderness” that catches you out (“Oh God. Poor Piggy”). But while I was engrossed, I must say I was also “praying for it to be over”. It’s “terrific, and I will never, ever watch it again”.

“How do you follow a smash hit like ‘Derry Girls’?” said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. It certainly isn’t easy, but Lisa McGee – creator of the much-loved comedy about a group of school friends growing up during the Troubles – is back with a brand-new show.

“How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” follows “three old mates from Belfast”: Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne), Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher). Now in their 30s, the trio reunite for the funeral of another of their school friends, Greta, who died in an accident.

The four of them were “involved in something dark” two decades earlier, and haven’t seen Greta since, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Episode one ends with a “twist” that’s “so good I could not wait to dive into” the second instalment. A murder mystery with plenty of the “comedic brilliance” of McGee’s earlier work, “this is your new binge-watch”.

Fans of “Derry Girls” “won’t be disappointed”, said Laura Hackett in The Times. The “wide range of tones” the show straddles is a “little disconcerting” to begin with but persevere and your patience will be rewarded in “bucketloads”. Plot twists unfold “effortlessly” as the series builds into a “proper odyssey that spans Belfast, Donegal, Dublin, Derry and even Portugal”. And as the “high jinks get wilder”, the tale’s “emotional heart beats stronger too”. Beyond the laughter, this is a sensitive exploration of female friendship and the “devastating ripple effects of trauma”.

I found it “underwhelming and tonally disorienting”, said Ed Power in The Irish Times. The “patchy soldering together” of comedy and mystery is “neither funny enough to hold its own against ‘Derry Girls’ nor serious enough to be enjoyable as a mystery romp”.

The show does start to “run out of steam” as it reaches its conclusion, said the Financial Times. “But thanks to the charm of its leads, the wit of the script and the spirit of adventure, it is a highly entertaining ride.”

By the 1960s the television era was in full swing with the onset of full-color programming. But the medium’s prestige was still a distant second to cinema’s. That makes what these stellar series pulled off even more impressive given the budgetary and reputational constraints.

‘Bonanza’ (1959-1973)

The long-running NBC Western “Bonanza” was appointment-viewing on Sunday evenings and one of the top-rated shows of the era. It was also racially progressive for its time, with stars Dan Blocker, Michael Landon and Lorne Greene once refusing to appear in front of a segregated audience in Jackson, Mississippi, spurring the city’s mayor to lead a failed campaign to boycott the show.

Set outside of Carson City, Nevada, during the 1860s on a fictional ranch called Ponderosa, the show followed the adventures and tribulations of the Cartwright family. The show’s reputation for moving television forward on racial issues is partly credited to a season 5 episode in which Hoss helps a Black opera singer (William Marshall) who faces discrimination. A Western that “most often was about avoiding and resolving conflict,” it remains an important “part of our cultural history and our TV past,” said Henry Cabot Beck at True West. (Prime Video)

‘The Twilight Zone’ (1959-1964)

Rod Serling’s pioneering science-fiction anthology series has been oft-imitated but never really equalled. The season 1 masterpiece “Time Enough At Last,” about a bookworm named Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) who survives a nuclear holocaust and doesn’t really mind the solitude or the opportunity for limitless reading, remains well-known. But many of the other 156 episodes are similarly brilliant and largely forgotten, like season 1’s “The After Hours,” about a woman (Anne Francis) shopping in a department store who slowly realizes that she is a mannequin. It remains the “gold standard in anthology television, the show that helped popularize science fiction, fantasy and the macabre in prime time,” said Variety. (Paramount+)

‘Doctor Who’ (1963-1989)

Like “Star Trek,” the BBC’s science fiction marvel remains a massive cultural and entertainment behemoth, a testament to the staying power of the concept and the wisdom of those tasked with carrying forward the original vision. “Doctor Who” revolves around the titular character, a “time lord” who travels around time and space trying to prevent mayhem and injustice.

The first Doctor Who was played by William Hartnell, and countless actors have succeeded him, most recently Ncuti Gatwa. Produced on a shoestring budget with effects that were laughable even at the time, the original BBC series nevertheless ran for an astonishing 26 seasons before an ongoing revival began in 2005. A show that “hoovered up every idea going around at the time and repackaged it for family viewing,” it remains a “major influence on current genre fiction and the public’s perception of it,” said Brian M. Milton at the British Fantasy Society. (BritBox)

‘The Fugitive’ (1963-1967)

One of several beloved ’60s-era television shows to later become a blockbuster film, “The Fugitive” starred David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, who takes advantage of a train derailment and goes on the lam after he is wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death for his wife’s murder. As Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse) tries to capture him, Richard searches the country for the real killer, a one-armed man (Bill Raisch) he saw fleeing from his house the night of the killing.

Over the course of its run, Richard drifts from place to place, securing low-wage work as he searches for the real killer and tries to evade both the authorities and being recognized. Featuring a “great story, main cast, fun guests and interesting settings,” it “really has a life that most other TV shows at its time didn’t have,” said Samuel Williamson at Collider. (Youtube)

‘Gilligan’s Island’ (1964-1967)

“Gilligan’s Island” aired for just three seasons, perhaps due to the limitations of its structure. When the SS Minnow is shipwrecked on an uncharted Pacific island, its seven crew and passengers try to survive long enough to be rescued, only to be foiled every single time.

The characters were mostly two-dimensional archetypes, from the volatile Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) to the erudite Professor (Russell Johnson) and the glamorous actor Ginger (Tina Louise). But the heart of the series was the ship’s good-hearted but inept first mate, Gilligan (Bob Denver), who almost invariably ruined the gang’s plan to escape their island purgatory, for example when he fired a flare into a supply hut and destroyed all the remaining flares. The “goofy comedy” succeeded in large part through its escapist ability to “take people’s minds off civil rights marches and war overseas,” said Eric Deggans at NPR. (Tubi)

‘Hogan’s Heroes’ (1965-1971)

A situation comedy about a Nazi-run POW camp might have seemed like a tough sell, especially at a time when most World War II veterans were very much alive and at the apex of their cultural power. CBS’s sitcom depicted the Nazi camp administrators, including Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) and Sgt. Schultz (John Banner) as bumbling fools, constantly getting outwitted by the American prisoners led by Col. Hogan (Bob Crane).

Hogan and his men secretly functioned as an espionage and sabotage operation, successfully manipulating the inept Germans over the course of 168 episodes. While the show received criticism for eliding the Holocaust, the series “may have performed a service by conveying the inherent ridiculousness of the prototypical Nazi villain,” said Benjamin Ivry at Forward. (Prime Video)

‘Star Trek’ (1966-1969)

Creator Gene Roddenberry’s space western was set in an imagined future utopia and followed the exploits of a (very well-armed) research vessel called the USS Enterprise, helmed by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), whose character was proof that world peace did not eliminate womanizing. Captain Kirk’s right-hand man was the half-human, half-Vulcan First Officer Spock, and together they carried out the task of exploring new worlds so successfully that the franchise has spawned 14 feature films and more than a dozen television spin-offs. The original series was also quite subversive, deploying the “finest allegorical tropes of science fiction to send progressive sociopolitical messages under the radar of conservative TV networks in a time when McCarthyism was still fresh in people’s minds,” said James Hunt at Den of Geek. (Paramount+)

‘That Girl’ (1966-1971)

In the 1960s, most of the women on television were housewives or two-dimensional plot devices. ABC’s ebullient sitcom “That Girl” was truly revolutionary for its time in the way that it legitimized the career ambitions of aspiring actor Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas).

Ann moves from her suburban hometown of Brewster to New York City to pursue her dreams, and while she has a long-running boyfriend named Donald (Ted Bessell), her character remained unmarried throughout the show’s run. But “That Girl” was much more than just dry social commentary. The series was tremendously fun and insightful and has aged better than many of its contemporaries. Featuring a “different kind of everywoman,” the show “broke ground by depicting a single woman with bigger dreams for her career than her love life,” said Rachael Allen at Slate. (Prime Video)

Mackenzie Crook’s new comedy is “eccentric, funny, sweet, and sad – often all at once”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. If you enjoyed “Detectorists”, his “gentle” comedy series about metal-detecting enthusiasts, you will find “much to love” in his latest show.

Our “hero” is Michael (Pearce Quigley). He leads a “lonely existence” since his partner, Clea, vanished seven years ago. His days are filled working at the local DIY superstore and visiting his father Brian (Michael Palin), who is in the early stages of dementia and lives in a care home nearby. But the show takes an “unexpected swerve into magical realism” when Michael sets out, by “dabbling in alchemy”, to grow six homunculi in his garden shed. His quest to conjure these “titular ‘small prophets’” is “driven by the one question to which he desperately seeks an answer: where is Clea?”

This plot twist may “come as a surprise to those who have spent the first 25 minutes expecting a downbeat workplace comedy about drills and buckets”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But it’s “all part of the show’s charm”. Crook has once again crafted an “idiosyncratic British comedy” and it’s “undoubtedly a treasure”.

“Don’t be put off” when “Crook pulls the rug” and the show shifts from “kitchen-sink comedy into folklore and the supernatural”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. If you stay the course, you will be “rewarded with something funny, strange and surprisingly accessible”.

Crook appears in a supporting role as Michael’s “officious supervisor, Gordon, with his dreadful ponytail, clipboard and obsession with work break time”, said Ben Dowell in The Times. “But even here nothing is quite as it seems.”

The show is a “pure, pure pleasure”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. This is Crook, so of course there is “wonder below the surface”. In another’s hands, the story would “dissolve into facile whimsy”, but he makes “exactly the right decision in every moment, big and small”. Quigley, who played a supporting character in “Detectorists”, shines in the “lead role he deserves”, and Lauren Patel is “sensational” as Michael’s young colleague, Kacey. At a time when it feels like the world is “fast running out”of “wonderful things”, “Small Prophets” is a reminder “that British telly can still create impossible marvels”.

A warts-and-all documentary about “The X Factor” is to air on Sky later this year. Produced by the makers of “Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story”, it promises to tell the “definitive” story of the show, which drew audiences of close to 20 million during its late-2000s peak.

Creator and judge Simon Cowell, infamous for his brutal put-downs of hopefuls, will be among those appearing in the three-part series, alongside former producers and contestants.

It comes as a new Netflix documentary promises to tell the inside story of “America’s Next Top Model”, the 2000s reality contest whose treatment of aspiring models has come under an increasingly unflattering spotlight since the show went off the air.

“Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model”, which comes to the streaming service later this month, will “unpack how a ‘cultural juggernaut’ became synonymous with allegations of toxicity, exploitation and harm”, said Grazia.

The two new documentaries follow similar exposés on weight-loss contest “The Biggest Loser”, and “There’s Something About Miriam”, a 2004 Sky dating show revolving around the hidden identity of trans woman Miriam Rivera, who took her own life in 2019.

Humiliation and manipulation

Cowell had plentiful “power over the audience” because we “related to” the contestants but we could “simultaneously” join him as “judge, jury and executioner on the panel”, said The i Paper’s culture editor, Sarah Carson. However, now “the very idea of this kind of influence feels absurd” and Cowell comes across as a “relic”.

Talent shows as a format are outdated – “social media and streaming have given musicians platforms to make themselves famous” – but, crucially, the audience “no longer” enjoys them. “Much of their value lay in humiliation”, and viewers now are “wise to the sob stories”, the producer manipulation, and the “welfare risks to every hopeful nobody launched through the fame machine” – cast into stark relief by the “tragic death” of One Direction singer Liam Payne in 2024.

Similarly, “America’s Next Top Model”, which ran between 2003 and 2015 (followed by a short-lived reboot) “garnered a global audience of 100 million”. But when clips from the show made their way onto social media “it wasn’t quite the nostalgic escape many remembered”, said Grazia. “From assigning models different ethnicities for photoshoots to having them pose as victims of violent crimes”, the show has come in for intense criticism.

Theatre of cruelty

The mid-2000s were a “peculiar time in television”, said The Guardian. It became clear that using the “travails of so-called ordinary people as fuel for small-screen entertainment was an idea with legs”, leading to a “mini goldrush”, as programme creators realised that “conflict, extremity and dysfunction would always sell”.

“Even contemporary critics baulked” at the “ugliness” of shows like “There’s Something About Miriam”, said The Independent. And now, thanks to social media, “horrified and bemused Gen Z-ers” can recoil at “soundbites of ‘Fat Families’ host Steve Miller branding obese people disgusting losers”.

TV in the early 2000s was “ruled by cruelty”. Shows like “Wife Swap”, “Supersize vs Superskinny”, “The Jeremy Kyle Show” and “Benefits Street”, seemingly created with “the express purpose of punching down”, and it’s hard not to be appalled by the “bear-baiting that Noughties audiences were taught to expect in their prime-time offerings”.

Several of the “TV villains” who rose to prominence on the wave of 2000s reality are attempting image rehabilitation in “soft, self-produced” documentaries, said Olivia Ovenden on The Observer. Presumably, they are hoping that “footage of them with their families and talking about how much they have changed” will “erase what came before”.

Talking to The Times, Cowell admitted he had “probably gone too far” on “The X Factor”, and its predecessor, “Pop Idol”, and said “What can I say? I’m sorry.”

“We are back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). If you feel fatigue stealing over you already, banish it!” said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. This nifty and unexpectedly excellent eight-part series on Disney+ follows Simon, an actor with secret superpowers (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who has been trying to make it in Hollywood for years. Then he gets a shot at auditioning for a film about his childhood hero, Wonder Man. As a result, he meets Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), “a washed-up, drug-addled actor” – who is a character that first appeared in “Iron Man 3”. Slattery has a sinister purpose in taking Simon under his wing, and there are some superheroics to please MCU fans. But “the real meat of the thing” is the “meticulous and moving examination of the growing friendship between the men”. The series also serves as “a meditation on the film industry and a masterclass on the art of acting”.

The show “has a distinctive sense of wonder”, said Mike Hale in The New York Times. Yet the low-key buddy comedy sometimes feels at odds with the series’ Marvel wrappings. “The more realistically human you make your characters and their interactions, the more obtrusive and artificial the mandatory superhero material will seem.” I’d call it a “rare morsel of actual substance” in a cinematic universe “gone thoroughly to seed”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. But it’s unlikely that this breezy departure from the usual bilge will do much “in the long term for a franchise whose rattly breaths are numbered”.

Sex doesn’t sell like it used to. That was the major takeaway from the latest Teens & Screens survey from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), looking into the viewing habits of 10- to 24-year-olds in the US.

While it is hardly surprising that this age group rarely watch films or shows on an actual television, instead preferring to consume content in short clips on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, the “stat that made Hollywood blink” concerns sex on screen, said Audrey Weisburd in Paste Magazine.

UCLA found that 48% of its 1,500 respondents think there is too much sex in film and television, with more than 60% of 14- to 24-year-olds saying they want romances depicted as “more about friendship than sex”.

This fits the stereotype of a generation that’s having less sex than their parents, and which is often labelled as prudish and puritanical. In 2024, 24% of US 18- to 29-year-olds had not had sex in the past year, according to the General Social Survey, a figure that “had doubled” since 2010, said New Scientist. Yet the stats don’t tell the whole story.

‘Movement towards authenticity’

Take the current Gen Z obsession with shows such as “Heated Rivalry”, “Tell Me Lies” and “Bridgerton”.

These are “hot, filled with sex scenes, body parts and forbidden and fiery romantic interactions” but have still “captivated young viewers”, said USA Today.

For Gen Zs who are not engaging in sex themselves but are seeking out emotional validation and connection, these stories “might almost fill that void”, said Chicago health educator Virginia Gramarosso.

What “feels unique” about “Heated Rivalry”, a show about two male ice hockey players on opposing teams having a decade-long affair, “is that it lets its sex scenes play out, sometimes sticking with its characters nearly from the beginning of their encounter until the end in real time”, said Faith Hill in The Atlantic.

The key here is authenticity. The American actress and director Olivia Wilde touched on this recently when promoting her film “I Want Your Sex”, in which she plays an artist who turns her young male assistant into her sex slave.

“The way that sex has been portrayed in film for a long time hasn’t been particularly realistic” so “there’s been this movement now towards authenticity”.

‘A new grammar of intimacy’

Especially in an era where online porn is more accessible than ever, “gone are the days when gratuitous sex would satiate an audience”, said Olivia Petter in The Times. “People want to see themselves represented on screen and this perhaps applies to sexual content now more than ever.”

When it comes to Gen Z, perhaps “they have a point”, said Zoe Strimpel in The Telegraph. “Slick commercial sex scenes” tend to be “either too perfect, or too imperfect” and the options are “just not good enough” for this generation, which has “the most complex array of demands and expectations the world has ever seen”.

In the end, this “may be less about prudishness than dissonance and fatigue”, said Paste Magazine. Gen Z is “the most digitally sexualised generation in history, raised on algorithmic thirst, parasocial infatuation, and the casual surveillance of bodies online”.

Yet “instead of translating that saturation into appetite, it’s produced a kind of sensory burnout”. What they are seeking instead, “consciously or not, is a new grammar of intimacy”.

Most people will never be involved in a murder investigation, but nearly all of us will find ourselves under the care of doctors and nurses at some point. That might explain why hospital dramas have always been a staple of television, starting with ABC’s short-lived “City Hospital” in 1951. At their best, these shows are a mirror for what ails society, typically delivered with a heaping side of melodrama and romance.

‘M*A*S*H’ (1972-1983)

One of the best series based on a movie, the beloved “M*A*S*H” softened its source material’s grim anti-war messaging just enough for primetime viability over the course of its 11-season run. But even with a laugh track foisted on it by CBS executives, the series maintained its focus on the horrors of the Korean War, following the staff of a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, including surgeons Benjamin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda), nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit) and Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff).

“No scripted television show before, and no episode of any show in the 40 years since, has ever had more eyeballs on it at the same time” than the M*A*S*H series finale, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” said Kenneth Lowe at Paste Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘St. Elsewhere’ (1982-1988)

Along with “Hill Street Blues,” NBC’s medical procedural “St. Elsewhere” was “one of the shows that helped unlock TV’s full narrative potential and started to change the platform’s reputation as a haven only for big-tent, pre-chewed, lowest-common-denominator storytelling,” said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. The show followed a series of residents at crumbling, fictional Boston hospital St. Eligius, including future Hollywood superstars like Denzel Washington as Dr. Philip Chandler.

It also was one of the first dramatic series to tackle complex moral, social and political issues as part of its core mission. One example: The womanizing plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Caldwell (Mark Harmon) dies of AIDS in a season 4 arc. (Prime Video)

‘ER’ (1994-2009)

The closing act of NBC’s legendary 1990s Thursday night lineup, the Chicago-set “ER,” was an instant hit, with its vérité medical-acronym-per-second style of depicting the thrills of emergency medicine. Created by bestselling “Jurassic Park” novelist Michael Crichton, the show featured a stellar cast, including Anthony Edwards as Dr. Mark Greene, George Clooney as Dr. Doug Ross and Julianna Margulies as Nurse Carol Hathaway, and those characters were the enduring emotional core, even in later seasons when the writers piled one implausible trauma on top of another. In “its heyday, ER was one of the rare shows that I looked forward to each week with a mixture of eagerness and sick dread,” said Noel Murray at The AV Club. (Hulu)

‘Bodies’ (2004)

Unlike most medical procedurals, BBC Three’s little-known, two-season “Bodies” has a very tight narrative through line. Max Beesley is Dr. Rob Lake, the British equivalent of a resident training in obstetrics, who comes to believe that his boss, the renowned Dr. Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi) is dangerously and negligently incompetent.

Dr. Lake becomes romantically involved with a nurse, Donna Rix (Neve McIntosh), and tries to convince his colleagues that Dr. Hurley is a fraud. Full of “suffocating claustrophobia, grinding despair or nameless dread,” creator Jed Mercurio’s series is “totally addictive” in part because a “brilliant seam of dark humor runs through the show, lightening the load considerably,” said James Donaghy at The Guardian. (The Roku Channel)

‘House’ (2004-2012)

They don’t make them like “House” anymore. Its 176 episodes over eight seasons represent about 25 theoretical years worth of “The Last of Us” — a show that HBO Max is doling out in seven-episode, snail-paced increments every two years or so. Hugh Laurie is the titular Dr. Gregory House, a gruff and often deeply unpleasant diagnostic medicine specialist whose forte is solving medical mysteries. He’s also fighting a Vicodin addiction that makes him erratic.

The supporting cast shifted several times over the course of its run, but several characters, including his friend Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) and colleague Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), were with him for the duration. The show eventually focused on Dr. House “descending deeper and deeper into his own darkness,” a “vast undertaking for a series of its kind, which usually deals with a big group of equally billed stars,” said Caroline Preece at Den of Geek. (Hulu)

‘Nurse Jackie’ (2009-2015)

Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” stakes out its territory in the first episode, when we see nurse Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco) sneaking Percocets before treating patients and flushing a patient’s severed ear down the toilet. An emergency room nurse at a fictional Manhattan hospital, Jackie isn’t quite a classic prestige TV antihero, but neither is she the kind of protagonist viewers will trust.

Jackie is “grippingly watchable but far from likable” in this “deftly touching show,” as she trades sex for opioids with her pharmacist paramour, Eddie (Paul Schulze), oversees a new trainee, Zoey (Merritt Wever), and tries to keep her marriage to Kevin (Dominic Fumusa) alive, said Tim Lusher at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘This Is Going To Hurt’ (2022)

Based on a memoir by a physician in the U.K.’s National Health Service, “This is Going to Hurt” is an unflinching look at the country’s systemic medical dysfunction, as well as a searing critique of the insane hours and nonexistent work-life balance of the average doctor. Adam (Ben Whishaw) is a junior doctor making his way through his obstetrics and gynecology rotations.

This isn’t a case-of-the-week drama but rather a difficult look at how doctors become fatigued and embittered as they navigate the constraints of an underfunded system. He’s also working with a trainee, Shruti (Ambika Mod), who begins to fear that the system might turn her into a jaded version of Adam. Adam is “not an antihero; he is simply not a hero at all,” said Linda Holmes at NPR. That’s because the focus of this limited series is on what medicine asks of doctors and how it is unsustainable, a “devastating, funny, sharp story about life and death and failure and success.” (Netflix)

The Pitt (2025-)

Coproduced by and starring “ER” veteran Noah Wyle, “The Pitt” taps into a seemingly unmet demand among streaming audiences for nostalgic, network-style drama. Each season of the series (there are two so far) unfolds over the course of a single day, which somehow doesn’t feel like a gimmick.

Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, a world-weary emergency room doctor who clashes with higher-ups over costs and spending, and is supported by a superb ensemble including Taylor Dearden as Dr. Melissa King and Shabana Azeez as Dr. Victoria Javadi. There is “simply no way to watch The Pitt and feel good about the way society is currently functioning,” as the show features an “emphatic moral clarity that feels awkward only because we haven’t seen it for so long,” said Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic. (HBO Max)

While Prime Video may lack the “cut-through” of Netflix, Amazon’s streaming service has “quietly found a groove in the past few months delivering a number of glossy, twisty-turny thrillers featuring British lead actors”, said Tim Glanfield in The Times.

“This latest effort, ‘Steal’, is a case in point.” A six-parter, it stars the “Game of Thrones” alumna Sophie Turner as Zara, “a hard-living, disillusioned twentysomething” working for a big pension fund in the City of London.

“Hangover-induced nosebleeds aside”, Zara’s life is pretty uneventful – until “an audacious group of thieves wearing unnerving prosthetics violently storm her building and force the employees to deploy $4 billion of trades to six unknown bank accounts”.

The heist is “only the beginning, in a sleek thriller that keeps changing in form”, and Turner – who is “soon to be seen as Lara Croft in a TV reboot of ‘Tomb Raider’” – demonstrates that she has the “depth and range” to carry a major series.

Sitting somewhere between “Industry” and “Die Hard”, this is a “lean, entertaining, no-fuss thriller”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. The “thumpingly ominous soundtrack” is rather overused, but in every scene, tension is ratcheted to its maximum, and Turner is perfectly cast, revealing herself to be “an unlikely new Bruce Willis”.

What is really surprising, though, is that “amid all the action”, this thriller “finds room for thought”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. While never taking its foot off the gas, it becomes “a meditation on the notion that the love of money is the root of all evil”.

When Prue Leith announced she was leaving the “Great British Bake Off” – “I’m 86 for goodness sake” – all eyes turned to the possible candidates to be Paul Hollywood’s fellow judge for the 17th season of the hit TV show.

The speculation was ended today with confirmation that Nigella Lawson is to take over from Leith. She rose to fame with her 1998 book “How to Eat” and followed that with her first TV cooking show, “Nigella Bites”, two years later. Since then Lawson has been a mainstay on British screens and could be just what “Bake Off” needs to reverse its flagging fortunes.

‘Guaranteed ratings booster’

The prospect of Lawson joining the programme was “delicious”, and perhaps even the “most fabulous thing to happen to food television like, ever?!”, said Hannah Evans in The Times.

Her energy and appeal make Lawson “any production company’s fantasy”. She is the “spoon-licking, finger-in-the-cream cook who made food sexy”, and is someone who “relishes stirring the pot”. For a show that already relies on winks and witty wordplay, Lawson will certainly bring a “whole new level of eye-twinkling double entendres and insinuations”.

Welcoming TV’s “sauciest chef” is exactly what the Channel 4 format needs, said The Telegraph. The chef turned social media personality is a “guaranteed ratings-booster” and a “wise pick”. No other TV chef has been able to “entrance the British public quite like Lawson”. Not even a cocaine scandal and tumultuous tabloid coverage of her relationship with businessman Charles Saatchi have detracted from her status as a “bona fide” national treasure.

Despite a casual, “schoolmarmish air”, her “incredible” recipes are backed up with serious pedigree both as a chef and on-screen presenter. To date, she has sold 8 million cookbooks worldwide and hosted 10 cooking programmes in the UK – not to mention recent ventures on MasterChef Australia – leaving her with an estimated net worth of £14 million. It’s hard to argue that Lawson isn’t a good addition to revamp the format: “Channel 4 might just have a ratings hit on its hands again”.

Lawson is the “only woman for the job” to turn around a show that has become “slightly long in the tooth over the last half decade or so”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. She is “spectacularly British” and exudes a “familiarity” that will “reassure existing viewers” and bring an “international first-name recognition that might even end up growing the audience”. Her appointment is “the best possible call for a series that – if we’re honest – has lost its way”.

‘Destined for the knacker’s yard’

Not everyone is pleased with Channel 4’s decision. It’s “the wrong one”, said Asyia Iftikhar in Metro. For me, she will “feel out of place in the tent”. A better choice would have been former “Bake Off” winner Nadiya Hussain. She already has experience as a guest judge on the junior version of the competition and could have tapped into a “delightful mentor-protege dynamic” with Hollywood. It would have been a “win-win” and it is “wild” that she was not considered.

Lawson has enjoyed so much success as a solo presenter with her own projects, so it will be interesting to see how she fares in this format, said Adam White in The Independent. Her “glam, worldly and cosmopolitan” poshness will surely “clash with the cosy, jolly-hockey-sticks middle-Englishness of ‘Bake Off’”. Lawson’s shows are “reliably funny and warm and dazzling”, and sharing her brand with “Bake Off” could end up being mutually detrimental.

Lawson comes with a few reservations. Though her success is undeniable, her approach to baking is “typically simple”, said The Telegraph, and she is by no means a “classically trained pastry chef” like Leith or original judge Mary Berry. There are doubts “whether she could successfully complete even half of the challenges ‘Bake Off’s competitors take on”.

Then there’s the task of hosting itself. Used to presenting solo, she has “yet to prove herself as a team player” and share the limelight with co-hosts or contestants on this scale. Finding an on-screen balance is integral to the show, and there is no knowing, at least for now, if her “star power” will “translate” to “chemistry alongside veteran judge” Hollywood.

However, despite Lawson’s appointment, the whole GBBO format might already be a lost cause, said The Guardian. The show is caught in a doomed bind, risking becoming “stale” if it continues the “safe old formula that made it popular in the first place”. But if it ramps up the difficulty, it “risks alienating the home baker with bewildering levels of conceptual avant-garde science”.

The show has already generated a litany of spin-offs, with American, celebrity and junior offshoots. Add in a revolving door of presenters – think Sandi Toksvig, Matt Lucas, Alison Hammond, Noel Fielding, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins – and it becomes clear that the series is “much closer to its end than its beginning” and “destined for the knacker’s yard. But if it’s going to go out, it deserves to go out as strongly as possible.”

Horror television has swung and missed much more often than it has connected — we’re looking at you, “Welcome to Derry.” But when a great concept meets a skilled showrunner, the results can be magnetic, as with these outstanding spooky series.

‘American Horror Story’ (2011–)

The first season of creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s FX horror anthology series was a huge hit and justifiably so. “American Horror Story: Murder House” was a kinetic and genuinely terrifying haunted house story.

Ben (Dylan McDermott) and Vivien (Connie Britton) move with their daughter, Violet (Taissa Farmiga), from Boston to a large, ominous Los Angeles house to escape recent tragedies, only to find that their new home has a troubled past and is beset by shape-shifting ghosts. “Dark, twisted and depressing,” it was a horror series “unlike anything else on TV” at the time, said Richard Chachowski at Fangoria. Subsequent seasons often recycled cast members in new roles, with each season its own mostly self-contained story. A 13th season is expected to premiere on Halloween night in 2026. (FX/Hulu)

‘Les Revenants’ (2012-2015)

In an isolated French mountain town, people suddenly begin returning from the dead, seemingly unharmed and unaware of what happened to them, including teenaged Camille (Yara Pilartz), who was killed in a horrific bus accident years earlier. Their arrival triggers a series of bizarre events, including power outages and a potentially catastrophic decrease in the local dam’s water level.

The eerie, atmospheric “Les Revenants” has been frequently imitated, including by an American remake, and raises uncomfortable questions about what we might be willing to tolerate to be reunited with lost loved ones. A show about “how death, while awful, is also a baseline fact of life,” it is also “an expertly suspenseful thriller,” said James Poniewozik at Time. (Prime)

‘The Terror’ (2018-2019)

The first, brilliant season of AMC’s short-lived horror anthology fictionalized the ill-fated 1845 Arctic voyage of two British vessels searching for the Northwest Passage that became known as “Franklin’s lost expedition.” The series stars Jared Harris as Francis Crozier, the captain of the HMS Terror, and Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus, whose crews are stalked by a spectral creature called a Tuunbaq after the ships are trapped in the ice.

The series also depicts in vivid and haunting detail the elemental plight of poorly equipped sailors trying to survive in unforgiving polar conditions. Viewers “feel the burning cold enveloping these men, and it adds considerable heft to the horror,” in an “exceptional series of surviving in the face of real yet unimaginable horrors,” said Ben Travers at IndieWire. (AMC+)

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (2018)

“The Haunting of Hill House” was one of the jewels in showrunner Mike Flanagan’s recent run of horror smashes for Netflix. An adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s pioneering 1959 gothic horror novel, the two-timeline series follows a group of siblings who return to their haunted childhood home after their sister Nell (Victoria Pedretti) dies there under mysterious circumstances.

Flanagan tends to cast the same actors in multiple projects, and a large ensemble cast featuring many members of his troupe, like Kate Siegel, play the siblings and their father, Hugh (Timothy Hutton), in the present, as their quest to understand the shared tragedy in their past endangers the whole family. The “first great horror TV show ever,” it “isn’t just scary but a seriously well-structured and well-considered story about the persistent insidiousness of trauma,” said Tom Philip at GQ. (Netflix)

‘Servant’ (2019-2023)

In showrunner M. Night Shyamalan’s “Servant,” Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) arrives to work as a nanny at the stately Philadelphia home of local TV reporter Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and test chef Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell), a couple who is grieving the tragic loss of their infant, Jericho. Dorothy carries around a doll that Leanne is meant to “care for.” But soon the real Jericho — or is it? — is back.

Both Sean and Dorothy’s constantly drugged-out brother, Julian (Rupert Grint), try to figure out whether she’s a witch or a baby thief. That premise, along with effectively delivered droll humor to break the tension (Dorothy’s local TV segments are surreal and hilarious) delivered a riveting mystery box. Featuring some of Shyamalan’s “tightest and most intriguing storytelling ever,” the show “balanced relatable human behavior with WTF plot twists around every corner,” said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (Apple TV+)

‘Evil’ (2019-2024)

The best horror series are mostly streaming-era phenomena, with long production timelines and complex layered narratives that play out across multiple seasons. That is part of what makes “Evil” so refreshing. Its network-style, case-of-the-week structure is a throwback to an earlier era of television without sacrificing modern quality or ingenuity. Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) is hired by the Catholic Church to investigate paranormal events like possessions, where she works alongside seminarian David Acosta (Mike Colter) and tech wizard Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi).

Like “The X-Files,” the series draws energy and drama out of the sexual and scientific tension between the true believer David and the skeptical Kristen, as they gradually unravel a global network of demonic evil that threatens an apocalypse. A “rare show that operates with style and intelligence on every level,” across its four seasons it achieves a “level of profundity, even genuine intellectual insight, that most shows don’t even try for,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (Paramount+)

‘The Outsider’ (2020)

From the critically panned 1994 adaptation of “The Stand” to the 2024 HBO Max series “Salem’s Lot,” creators have sometimes fallen flat in their efforts to adapt Stephen King’s source material. But showrunner Richard Price’s “The Outsider” is a rare and happy exception.

Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) is a detective charged with investigating the grisly murder of a boy named Frankie Peterson, with chief suspect Terry Maitlan (Jason Bateman), a Little League coach and father of two, seemingly captured on video in two places at once on the night of the killing. The series introduces a supernatural element, an “active, almost tangible agent of chaos and destruction, pushing hapless lives into ruin” that may represent the “perceived sickness of the world,” said Vanity Fair, producing a “deliberate, ponderous mystery that grinds and allures.” (HBO Max)

‘Midnight Mass’ (2021)

Showrunner Mike Flanagan’s limited series about a priest who isn’t who he seems to be was the ultimate vampire horror slow burn. It debuted at the end of the “Hot Vaxx Summer” in 2021, a time when everyone was desperate for sunlight.

Father Paul Hill (Hamish Linklater) is sent to lead the only parish on economically depressed, windswept Crockett Island after its elderly leader disappears on a trip to Italy. Riley (Zach Gilford) returns to the island after serving time for a drunk driving tragedy and reconnects with high school flame Erin (Kate Siegel), but a series of sinister “miracles” soon raise suspicions about exactly what Father Paul has brought to the community. The leisurely paced beginning soon “unfurls into a nightmare of apocalyptic proportions,” making this “one of the best shows of the year,” said Miles Surrey at The Ringer. (Netflix)

The “Game of Thrones” spin-off “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” will “either charm or repulse”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times.

Based on the three George R.R. Martin novellas known as “The Tales of Dunk and Egg”, the prequel takes place around 90 years before the events of “Game of Thrones”, but 72 years after “House of the Dragon”.

Some critics have already “balked” at the “phlegm, vomit and excrement” on display. “Take it in the right spirit, though, and it adds to the raucous, carnival-esque feel. It has been a long time since visiting Westeros has been so enjoyable.”

‘Heartwarming’ tale

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is a “drastic switch-up in scale”, said Alison Herman on Variety. While the first two Martin television adaptations so far chart the “epic struggles for the fate of Westeros”, the latest spin-off is set during “a single tournament over just a few days”. And the action takes place from a “single point-of-view character: the titular Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a young wandering warrior on a quest to prove himself”.

This “heartwarming” tale is the “‘Game of Thrones’ we all need now”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. At the start of the show “Dunk” sets off for the jousting tournament at Ashford Meadow, where he hopes to make a name for himself. During one of his early “pit stops” at a tavern he meets the “bald-headed, ethereal, rovingly intelligent child Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell)”, who offers to be his squire. Together, the “underdog and the underpuppy” embark on a journey through the “back roads of Westeros”.

I thought it was a “total delight from start to finish”, said Neil Armstrong on BBC Culture. “We haven’t had this much fun in Westeros for a long time – maybe ever.” Dunk and Egg’s “odd-couple relationship, occasionally antagonistic but mostly affectionate” is the “beating heart” of the show. “And it’s very funny.” The writers bring a “lightness of touch” to the humour, effortlessly blending droll remarks with “almost Monty Pythonesque absurdity”. It’s a “nailed-on winner”.

‘Too meagre to love’

Yes, the series reveals a more “playful” side to Westeros, said Judy Berman in Time. “But the show’s anaemic plot and spotty attempts at humour also raise questions about the health of the franchise.” Surely there was a more “compelling” story to mine from Martin’s bibliography? “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” might be “too benign to hate” but from what I’ve seen so far, “it is also too meagre to love”.

The show is a “loose, low-stakes oddity” that “feels like a footnote”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. There’s something about the series that “doesn’t quite work”. “It is a character piece without a sufficiently interesting character at its core.”

“Blood and guts” are still here, “because what’s Westeros if not a queasy swill of muck and bodily fluids?” said Lorraine Ali in the Los Angeles Times. But there’s an issue. Without an overarching story that “promises to go somewhere bigger”, sitting through the puke, poo and smashed skulls “isn’t all that tolerable”.

It’s "disappointing" that the show retains this “adolescent desire to shock”, said Ed Power in The Telegraph. Still, once it gets past these “childish instincts”, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” settles into a “sweet depiction of an unlikely friendship. A feel-good ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel? Scratch that one off your ‘didn’t see it coming’ list for 2026.”

Dawn French is back, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, in a new BBC comedy series that is the best thing she has done since “The Vicar of Dibley”.

In it, she plays a woman who tries to defraud an insurance company by pretending that her husband William (Mark Heap) is dead. This scheme arises from a “misunderstanding”: after William takes too much of his Parkinson’s medicine, at their home in the West Country, the germophobic local GP issues a death certificate without properly examining his body. When he then wakes up alive, Debbie (French) urges him to stay dead, so that they can claim a £250,000 insurance payout.

William, we learn, has always been a near-hermit, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Now his isolation is “simply enforced”. But the couple’s son Harry (Craig Roberts), who had been grieving for his father, is “traumatised by both the deception and the criminality around it” – not least because his wife (Mandip Gill) is a police officer.

None of this creates groundbreaking comedy, but “Can You Keep a Secret?” is warm and funny, with an underlying sense of melancholy that those familiar with classic British sitcoms will recognise.

Some of the gags could be “sharper”, said Ben Dowell in The Times, and a running joke about a character called Pigfish who is given to sticking petrol pumps up his bottom outstays its welcome. But the show is “beautifully performed”, and a blackmail subplot creates a real sense of jeopardy. The series takes a while to find its heart, but turns out to be “a surprising treat”.

“They grow up so fast, don’t they?” said Michael Hogan in The Telegraph. The “East-End childbirth saga” is now 15 seasons old, and has become “a TV lynchpin”.

Beneath its “cosy exterior”, “Call the Midwife” remains “one of the most radical, rousing shows” on television. Expertly blending the “personal and political” into a kind of “historical soap opera”, it’s both “hard-hitting and heartfelt in equal measure”.

We return to the Nonnatus House team in 1971, as the women’s liberation movement gathers pace in London’s Poplar. While the younger midwives are “enthusiastically” burning their bras and joining protests, the older generation “take some convincing”.

The expression on Nurse Crane’s face as she listens to her young colleagues talk of “whipping off” their “Playtex Cross Your Heart” is “a picture”, said Carol Midgley in The Times, and there’s a fascinating scene where she discusses Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” with her friend Millicent. “Ooh, in ‘Call the Midwife’! Who’d have thought it?”

What a “corker” the opening episode is. It moves “seamlessly” from “dry wit to darkest misery and back again”, reminding us how “deceptively uncosy” the show can be. It “never sugar-coats” the serious stuff. Among the “heart-rending” subplots is the story of “poverty-stricken” children facing parental abuse and neglect, and a young pregnant woman battling extreme morning sickness, who gives birth at 28 weeks.

Newly qualified midwife Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers) “struggles with the consequences” of such a devastatingly premature delivery for the mother and herself, said Fiona Mountford in The i Paper. I’m always “impressed” at how the show “swerves the saccharine in favour of the uncertainties of life as it is lived by all of us”.

By now, “Call the Midwife” should come with “some kind of emotional warning” that “side effects will include uncontrollable weeping”, said Janet A. Leigh on Digital Spy. After so many seasons, it’s a testament to the show that it still “holds the power to make us cry”.

This is definitely a “return to form” after the “middling” Christmas specials, said Hogan in The Telegraph. “Call the Midwife” is “superior comfort viewing” with an excellent female-led cast. Even in its 15th series, it can “still delight and surprise.”

For much of the northern hemisphere, January is the height of winter, a time of year when people tend to consume a lot of television. With several new and returning series headlining this month’s streaming options, there will be plenty to choose from.

‘The Pitt’

Season one of this network-style hospital drama was a discourse-driving hit. Unfolding over the course of a single (pretty terrible!) day, it included the carnage of a music festival mass shooting among many other hot-button storylines. In season two, ten months later, emergency doctor Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) heads in for his final shift at the hospital before taking off on a long, well-deserved leave, and meets his replacement, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi). This season, the series “shows little interest in the kind of hysterical stake-raising that could easily turn a hospital drama absurd,” focusing instead on the “subtler pleasures of observing how characters evolve and connect,” said Judy Berman at Time. (Jan. 8 on HBO Max)

‘Industry’

HBO Max’s critically acclaimed drama about a group of callow, London-based financial traders finally found an audience in its third season. In the season three finale, staid trading company Pierpoint went up in flames after its sale to Al-Miraj Holdings — thanks in large part to the antics of its selfish protagonists — leaving many jobless, including the magnetic Eric (Ken Leung) and Harper (Myha’la), the closest thing this series has to a traditional protagonist, who is contemplating blowing up her new venture for the allure of illegal financial maneuvers. The fourth season “proves to be as gleefully provocative and endlessly perverse as those that came before,” said Ross McIndoe at Slant Magazine. (Jan. 11 on HBO Max)

‘The Night Manager’

The streaming TV era is known for the passage of significant time between seasons, but “The Night Manager” has really outdone itself, with its second season dropping a full decade after the widely praised first. Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as Jonathan Pine, the night manager at a luxury hotel in Cairo, hired by MI6 to infiltrate and take down international arms dealer and billionaire Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). In season two, he’s still working for MI6 and gets drawn back into high-level intrigue after he’s asked by Colombian arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva). The show’s “comeback is the first must-watch show of 2026,” said Michael Hogan at The Guardian. (Jan. 11 on Prime Video)

‘Ponies’

In 1977, Bea (Emilia Clarke) and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) work as wisecracking secretaries in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow when their CIA husbands are killed. Rather than send the grieving widows back to the States, the head honchos decide to turn them into spies. It was probably only a matter of time before someone took the period aesthetic of “The Americans” and gave it a twist, and “Ponies” looks like it will situate itself in the spy saga universe somewhere between pure thriller and comedy. Peacock was “so confident in the idea for the show that a pilot” was deemed unnecessary when the series was ordered, said Yahoo Entertainment. (Jan. 15 on Peacock)

‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’

After the success of 2024’s “Dune: Prophecy” prequel, HBO Max is trying a similar maneuver with “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” a second spinoff set chronologically between fellow prequel “House of the Dragon” and “Game of Thrones” itself. Peter Claffey is Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall, accompanied by his adolescent squire, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), as they travel around Westeros in a kind of medieval road narrative.

The series is meant to be more easily digestible than its epic counterparts. The “markedly lighter tone, plus the half-hour-and-change episodes” make the series “feel like the rare spin-off that is actually doing something novel with its IP,” said Jack King at GQ. (Jan. 18 on HBO Max)

“Meddling with perfection is a risky proposition,” said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail. When “The Night Manager” first hit the small screen in 2016 the “sublime espionage thriller” was praised by many as “the best Le Carré adaptation in decades”. Another season seemed “inevitable”.

After a decade-long wait, the hotly anticipated follow-up is finally here. From the first few episodes it appears to be “another classy thriller”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, “albeit suffering from the lack of Hugh Laurie as cold-blooded arms dealer Richard Roper and Tom Hollander as his scene-stealing sidekick, Corky”.

Picking up a few years after the events of the first series, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is still haunted by his mission that brought down Roper. Now, he is trying to live a quiet life, running an unglamorous subdivision of MI6 – the Night Owls – dedicated to the nocturnal surveillance of luxury hotels.

“Hang on! Has ‘The Night Manager’ gone fully ‘Slow Horses?’” said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Only briefly: when Pine spots a “familiar face” his “complexion changes from magnolia to ivory”, and he soon turns back into a “proper spy”, this time infiltrating a Colombian drugs cartel with ties to Roper.

Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) is a “much more generic antagonist” than Roper, and the show “loses its naughty glint when Pine isn’t directly up against other members of the British upper classes”. There is also something “fundamentally gauche” about the way the second season attempts to replicate the “dynamic” of the first. Still, it “floats far above most of the competition”.

There is “much to be admired” here, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. “The pace, the intrigue, the sly sexiness; all are retained.” At the end of the first two episodes I was keen to see more. “That’s the sign of good TV.”

The show returns at a time when the tone of spy thrillers has “shifted” towards the “arch rather than the po-faced”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But “The Night Manager” is “almost defiantly strait-laced and serious”; there’s something “soothing” about its “refusal to bow to current trends”.

In all, it’s a “smart, compelling” follow-up to the first series, said Caryn James on BBC Culture. The trailer features a scene where Jonathan, Teddy Dos Santos and his girlfriend Roxana embrace in what appears to be a “steamy threesome”. Is this just another ruse? “It’s one of many questions that makes the series, with all its shadows and ambiguity, irresistible.”

The streaming era has produced its share of pathologies, including bloated running times and narratives padded with filler. The best dramas of 2025, though, are a reminder that television has become our predominant cultural medium.

‘Adolescence’

The life of the Miller family is overturned one morning when the police raid the house and arrest 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper) for the murder of his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). But this isn’t some by-the-numbers British procedural.

It doesn’t take long for footage to prove that Jamie did it, and the series instead explores the disturbing social milieu that made Jamie a murderer and the ways his sister, Lisa (Amélie Pease), and parents, Eddie (Stephen Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco), come to terms with what happened. Its four episodes are nightmare fuel for parents, each filmed in a single take, an approach that “contributes real-time immediacy to the story being told, as well as a certain astonishment at the methods, choreography and endurance of the cast,” said John Anderson at The Wall Street Journal. (Netflix)

‘The Bear’

After the long-awaited and largely negative review of the titular upscale Chicago restaurant finally comes out, co-owners Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Syd (Ayo Edebiri) are given two months to turn it around before Uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) cuts off the cash. While many see “The Bear” as an homage to the art of cooking for others, it is also a show about adrenaline junkies whose love-hate relationship with the restaurant business destroys their personal lives and ability to function.

It forces viewers to confront the wreckage that happens just offstage before they receive their amuse-bouche. In the fourth season of “The Bear,” the “chemistry and love for one another” of the ensemble explains “why we as an audience keep returning to one of the most stressful workplaces in television history,” and makes up for the inert, self-indulgent mess of season 3, said Alan Sepinwall at Rolling Stone. (Hulu)

‘The Diplomat’

If you can get past some of the silly and implausible plotting, “The Diplomat” is a marvelously acted, snappy and engrossing drama about married foreign service officers Hal (Rufus Sewell) and Kate Wyler (Keri Russell). The pair is swept up in White House intrigue, propelled by a potboiler narrative about a terrorist attack on a British aircraft carrier.

If nothing else, the show is comfort food for anyone who misses policymakers and believes there is more to American foreign policy than cruelty and blunt military force. When season 3 begins, the president has died, making Grace Penn (Allison Janney) POTUS. Penn then unexpectedly picks Hal rather than Kate to serve as her veep, sending their marriage entertainingly sideways. The series is “as ridiculous as it is compelling” and “joins a lineup of shows that make little sense but are entertaining because of it,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘Dying for Sex’

Adapted from the documentary podcast of the same name, “Dying for Sex” stars Michelle Williams as Molly, who leaves her husband and embarks on a riotous journey of erotic discovery after her cancer comes back, this time with a terminal diagnosis. Her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), is so devoted to Molly and her determination to squeeze as many encounters as possible into her final months that it eventually takes its toll on Nikki’s own life and relationships.

The series explores death in ways that are almost unique to commercial television, without losing sight of the audience’s need not to be needlessly brutalized. It is “hilariously funny, guttingly sad and somehow also tingling with joy about the preciousness of life,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (Hulu)

‘Forever’

Adapted from Judy Blume’s beloved novel, this is the rare series that can be enjoyed by both the YA demographic and adults. High school seniors Keisha (Lovie Simone) and Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) have an off-again/on-again romance complicated by their wildly different social classes.

Wealthy Justin’s overbearing mother (Karen Pittman) doesn’t want anything to get in the way of a potential elite basketball scholarship. Keisha’s mom, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), a single, overwhelmed nurse, pressures Keisha to stay with NBA-bound Christian (Xavier Mills), who unbeknownst to Shelly, ruined Keisha’s reputation by releasing a sex tape. A “charming slow burn,” it is “one of Netflix’s few shows to have a predominantly Black cast,” enabling it to be “specific in its exploration of the Black teen experience in America,” said Michel Ghanem at The Cut. (Netflix)

‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’

Most winners of the heady Man Booker Prize, like Richard Flanagan’s moving and brutal 2014 novel, aren’t easy adaptations. But Prime hired Australian auteur Justin Kurzel (“The Order”) to direct, and the result is riveting.

The show is set in three timelines, and follows a medical student named Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi), who marries Ella (Olivia DeJonge) but then has a destructive affair with his uncle’s wife, Amy (Odessa Young), before a harrowing stint in a Japanese POW camp in then-Indochina. Ciarán Hinds plays Evans as an older man in the late 1980s, when he is a renowned surgeon and still a womanizer. By depicting a group of people who “experience the war and come away with very little greater understanding of life,” the series is “gorgeous, ugly and stirring, with parts that seared themselves into my brain,” said Rebecca Onion at Slate. (Prime)

‘The Pitt’

After years of networks pouring resources into imitating cable and streamer prestige TV, HBO Max flipped the script with a throwback hospital procedural. “The Pitt” even borrows “ER” staple Noah Wyle as Dr. Michael Robinavitch, a grizzled emergency physician at the struggling Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center.

Buoyed by an outstanding ensemble cast, the season cleverly depicts a single 15-hour shift of hospital mayhem, and its big heart and superb performances will win you over. It strikes a nerve not just with nostalgia but by serving as a searing indictment of the inequities, waste and greed that plague America’s medical system. The show “pinpoints the widespread feeling that everything now is sick and broken, from systems to people to social compacts,” said James Poniewozik at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Pluribus’

Showrunner Vince Gilligan (“Breaking Bad”) takes a seemingly unlimited pile of Apple TV+ cash and turns it into the kind of talked-about event television that is rare in today’s fragmented streaming landscape. Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn) is a successful but jaded “romantasy” writer who returns home to Albuquerque from a miserable book-signing tour just as a virus turns all of humanity into a blankly happy hive mind.

Carol is one of just a handful of people on the planet who are immune and retain their individuality. A show that “feels not just original but wholly surprising,” Gilligan’s mysterious series “wrestles with big philosophical questions of morality, contentment, purpose and meaning,” said Lacy Baugher Milas at Paste. (Apple TV+)

In an era of limitless streamed “content”, it can be hard to settle on anything to watch. Here are nine shows worth trying.

Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes

Jeff Pope’s dramatisation of the events, in the febrile weeks after the 7/7 bombings, that led to the police shooting an innocent 27-year-old Brazilian electrician makes for gripping, harrowing viewing, said The New Statesman. It is not perfect: the depiction of Met Police commissioner Ian Blair as a “ridiculously camp” fool is misguided. But the account of how de Menezes came to be mistaken for an Ethiopian terrorist, and the lies told afterwards, is starkly told. This is a “J’accuse” that is “both subtle and grand”.
Disney +

Leonard and Hungry Paul

Rónán Hession’s debut novel, about two men still living at home in their early 30s, became a word-of-mouth hit – and was so loved by Julia Roberts that she agreed to narrate this TV adaptation. In this “droll Dublin dramedy” nothing happens, said The Irish Times, yet it is far from boring. Those totally allergic to whimsy may find it trying; for the rest, it amounts to a sweet, wry, “quietly uplifting” celebration of the “bittersweet banality” of ordinary life.
BBC iPlayer

Adolescence

A massive global hit, “Adolescence” is near-perfect TV, said The Guardian. Consisting of four episodes, each filmed in a single take, it begins with police bursting into an ordinary family home at dawn, to arrest a 13-year-old boy (Owen Cooper) on suspicion of murder, as his shell-shocked parents look on. Superbly acted and brilliantly written, this is not a police procedural, said The Telegraph. It is a devastating exploration of the pressures on boys today, including the malign influence of social media, and the nonsense peddled about what it means to be a man.
Netflix

The Great Art Fraud

In May 2022, the disgraced young art dealer Inigo Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in jail for defrauding collectors and investors out of $86 million (£63 million). This “riveting” two-part documentary looks at how he did it, with much of the story told by the former wunderkind himself, said the Financial Times. It does a great job in explaining how his fraud worked (broadly, he sold more shares than existed in the same valuable pieces), and sheds light on a little-regulated market, where relationships rely largely on trust.
BBC iPlayer

The Beast in Me

Watchable but silly thrillers come along all the time on Netflix – with “Sirens” among the better ones this year. “The Beast in Me” is also on Netflix, but this psychological thriller is a cut above, said The Guardian. Taut and convincingly scripted, it stars Claire Danes as a troubled writer, living alone in a big house in a wealthy exurb, and Matthew Rhys as the suspected wife-killer who moves in next door. They are both so good, you can hardly look away.
Netflix

Riot Women

In Sally Wainwright’s latest series, she pulls together a group of women who are feeling sidelined and invisible in middle age – and has them form a band. Set (like “Happy Valley”) in Hebden Bridge, this is an upbeat story painted in bold colours, said the FT, yet it goes into dark places. There are lots of twists, and it barrels along at a great pace. Some of the messaging about menopause is heavy-handed, said The Telegraph. Still, this is crowd-pleasing fare, and in the central role Joanna Scanlan is typically excellent.
BBC iPlayer

What It Feels Like for a Girl

An eight-part adaptation of Paris Lees’ often shattering memoir of her life as a trans teenager in Nottinghamshire, this show is not for everyone, said The Telegraph: it contains many disturbing sex scenes, and it strives a bit too hard for attention. But it brims with energy; Ellis Howard is “magnetic” in the central role; and though Lees’ story is “caked in the grime of life on the margins”, it also has “the sprinkled-in- stardust quality of a real-life fairy tale”.
BBC iPlayer

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Richard Flanagan’s novel, about an elderly Australian haunted by memories of being a Japanese POW used as forced labour on the Death Railway in Burma, is a gruelling read. And this TV adaptation, starring Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds, is no less shocking, said The Times. Many scenes in it are truly “soul sickening”. But the series is “terrific” – even “magnificent” at times.
BBC iPlayer

Amandaland

This enjoyable spinoff from the hit comedy “Motherland” is focused on snobby, glossy Amanda (Lucy Punch), the alpha female in the old gang, said The Guardian. Now a single mum, she has had to move to grotty South Harlesden (SoHar); and is trying to make it as a wellness influencer. Punch is brilliant in a show that is very funny, and also surprisingly “life affirming”, said The Times. And though we miss some of the old characters, there are welcome returns from Philippa Dunne as Anne, and Joanna Lumley as Amanda’s mother.
BBC iPlayer

“Tea with Judi Dench” is “the most touching TV you’ll watch all Christmas”, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound that exciting. This is a show where “someone comes to visit Dench for a cup of tea and that’s literally it” – which could be “dispiriting” were it not so “relentlessly charming”.

Kenneth Branagh goes to see Dench at her home in Surrey, and the pair – who have been friends for almost 40 years – have a “lovely, easy, breezy relationship”. Over the next 45 minutes, the actors “natter away pleasantly with no real direction”.

“At one point, they potter over to Dench’s parrot, Sweetheart, in the hope that it will call Branagh a ‘slag’.” But mostly they “reminisce” about their stage careers and the people they’ve lost, and “quote Shakespeare to each other, at length”.

Blending “personal anecdotes” with “rarely seen archive material”, it’s an “unflinching” documentary that opens the doors to the Oscar-winning actor’s “stunning” country home, said Emma Guinness in the Daily Mail.

Dench gets “tearful” as she reflects on the loss of her late husband Michael Williams, who died of lung cancer in 2001. Elsewhere, we’re “treated to more lively conversation, humorous insights and moments of genuine candour and emotion”.

The parts that “interested me the most are when she talks of memory”, said A.N. Wilson in The Times. Like many nonagenarians, she explains how she often can’t remember what happened the day before – but the “consoling thing” is that her head is still filled with Shakespeare.

Dench is an “extraordinarily intent listener” and a “nimble” interviewer, said Heritage in The Guardian. She manages to tease out details from Branagh that might otherwise have been left unsaid. It’s a style that risks encouraging “indulgent waffle”, but for “Tea with Judi Dench”, an edited show about two very old, close friends, it’s “perfectly pitched”.

Rowan Atkinson claims not to care what the critics say about him, said Carol Midgley in The Times. He’d be unmoved, then, to learn that I found his new Netflix series quite “charming”.

A sequel to 2022’s “Man vs Bee”, it’s a “comedic survival drama” in which Atkinson reprises his role as hapless everyman Trevor Bingley. In the run-up to Christmas, Trevor loses his job as a school caretaker in a pretty village. He’s about to close up for the last time when he finds a baby abandoned there, and feels obliged to take it home.

‘Unpleasantly stressful’

Lonely and broke, Trevor is thrown a lifeline when he’s offered a house-sitting job in a London penthouse, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. There’s just one problem: he can’t offload the baby; the police are too busy and social services think he’s delusional. So he brings the infant with him. The baby proceeds to explore the lethal potential of every item in the flat, leading Trevor in a dance to save it. The series amounts to a succession of “nightmarish” scenarios; I found it unfunny and actually “unpleasantly stressful”.

Silly and ‘trite’

When Trevor went to war with a bee, his no-holds-barred approach to eliminating this nuisance led to some enjoyably farcical scenes, said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. Here, he is not, of course, pitted against the baby, so the laughs are thinner on the ground, while sentimentality abounds – as does the product placement. It amounts to four cynical episodes that trade on “Cosy British Christmascore” in a way that is “nauseatingly schmaltzy”, silly and “trite”.

Comedy writers had their work cut out for them in 2025, with the United States in political crisis and a mass culture that increasingly revolves around short-form video and manufactured outrage. It was also the year that studios tackled some of these problems directly, resulting in a crop of astute and sometimes discomfiting comedy offerings.

‘Adults,’ season 1

Anton (Owen Thiele), Billie (Lucy Freyer) and Issa (Amita Rao) are twenty-something friends living together in the Queens-based family home of Samir (Malik Elassal), all trying and failing to launch careers, relationships and even Zoom job interviews. An episode in which the helpless quartet attempts the seemingly simple task of roasting a chicken for a dinner party deliriously walks the line between critique and mean-spirited generational warfare.

With their brains “poisoned with all the anxieties of their internet-obsessed cohort,” the characters on FX’s Gen Z hang-out comedy connect most successfully when their antics are “just straight-up zany,” said Esther Zuckerman at The New York Times. (Hulu)

‘The Chair Company,’ season 1

Tim Robinson has cemented himself as an auteur of workplace cringe humor, In “The Chair Company,” Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a middle-aged mall designer for a firm called Fisher Robay whose wife, Barb (Lake Bell), and children, Natalie (Sophia Lillis) and Seth (Will Price), treat him with a mixture of bemusement and resignation.

At a presentation to unveil the firm’s newest shopping center, a desk chair collapses under him, sending Ron down a rabbit hole trying to figure out whether its shadowy manufacturer, Tecca, is the leading edge of a global conspiracy. A comedy about “man who will invent circles upon circles of spiraling conspiratorial lore to mask his inability to deal with the way his life has turned out,” it is ultimately a commentary on a world “designed to make it easy for you to go insane,” said Phillip Maciak at The New Republic. (HBO Max)

‘Deli Boys,’ season 1

Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are brothers who inherit what they believe to be a Philadelphia-based convenience store and retail empire when their father, Baba (Iqbal Theba), is killed in a golfing mishap. But Aunt Lucky (Poorna Jagannathan) is forced to share the bad news that the whole enterprise was a drug-running operation, and if they don’t right the ship quickly they’ll all be killed.

A lot of the laughs stem from the wildly mismatched brothers: Mir is an MBA-wielding straight man, while Raj is a brain-addled failson who spends most of his time curating his own drug experiences. Highlighted by the “genuine warmth of the relationships within this murderous crime family,” the Hulu comedy “balances bloody knuckles with a tender heart,” said Judy Berman at Time. (Hulu)

‘English Teacher,’ season 2

This uproarious ensemble comedy about a group of Austin, Texas, high school teachers went out with a bang with its second and final season after sexual assault allegations against creator and star Brian Jordan Alvarez (as well as an inability to find a larger audience) led FX to pull the plug. Alvarez is Evan, a gay English teacher delicately navigating various Trump-era fixations as the school’s principal, Grant (Enrico Colantoni), tries and usually fails to keep the school on the right side of whatever culture war has erupted most recently.

It’s mostly a buddy comedy, with fellow teachers Markie (Sean Patton) and Gwen (Stephanie Koenig) participating in hijinx or joining together to battle the students as in a memorable episode where the students launch an off-books, R-rated scavenger hunt at an overnight lock-in. A show whose “characters, comedy and rhythm seemed to come into the world fully formed,” its second season “continues to thrive in a comfortable groove,” said Ross McIndoe at Slant Magazine. (Hulu)

‘I Love LA,’ season 1

Another Gen Z hangout comedy that feels like a concerted effort to lure its target demographic away from their phones, “I Love LA” stars social media sensation Rachel Sennott as Maia, an office assistant at Alyssa 180, an eponymous talent agency overseen by a self-satisfied millennial boss (Leighton Meester) who refuses to give Maia a promotion.

When Maia’s best friend, Tallulah, an influencer perpetually riding the Hot Mess Express, returns to Los Angeles, she gives Maia a new career opportunity while also upsetting the delicate friendship dynamics of her band of hapless young narcissists. A show “populated by delusional strivers running on the fumes of substance-free hype,” it succeeds best as a “piece of sociology about the influencer era,” said Alison Herman at Variety. (HBO Max)

‘Mo,’ season 2

A comedy about a Palestinian refugee seeking immigration status in the United States couldn’t possibly have turned out to be more timely when its second season was released in January 2025. Comedian Mo Amer plays Mohammed “Mo” Najjar, a somewhat aimless Palestinian who was brought to the U.S. as a child.

In the second season he is marooned in Mexico City, performing in wrestling matches to get by, while his family fights to find him a legal pathway to residency in Houston. “Mo,” which concluded with this season, “excels in humanizing people of all stripes, and in being as sidesplittingly funny as it is unapologetically dark,” said Hannah J Davies at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Platonic,’ season 2

Friendship is the essence of virtually every project that Seth Rogan has ever been involved with and so it is fitting that he tackles the subject head-on in the underrated “Platonic.” Rogan is Will, a forty-something doofus who reconnects with his college buddy Sylvia (Rose Byrne at the top of her comedy game) after he gets divorced.

Sylvia is a stay-at-home mother of three married to a tightly-wrapped lawyer named Charlie (Luke Macfarlane). Season 2 picks up where the first left off, with Will set to marry straight-edge girlboss Jenna (Rachel Rosenbloom) and Sylvia agreeing to serve as the wedding planner. Anchored by leads “who excel at physical-comedy hijinks, electric banter and sincere conversations,” the Apple TV+ comedy is “rooted in laughs, crafting a chill, low-stakes story along the way,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Apple TV+)

‘The Studio,’ season 1

“The Studio” is both a showcase for Seth Rogan’s nervous, socially awkward talents and a love letter to a Hollywood striver whose creative integrity is being destroyed. Rogan plays Matt Remick, thrust into the role of chief executive at fictional Continental Studios, where he is immediately faced with a demand to turn “IP” into franchises, starting with the Kool-Aid Man.

Ike Barinholtz, Chase Sui Wonders and Kathryn Hahn steal scene after scene as his hapless underlings, with each episode centered around some massive screw-up, including Remick wrecking a delicate sunset shot for Sarah Polley, one of many stars who play versions of themselves in single-episode arcs. “The Studio” succeeds not just because of its ”attention to craft and its uniformly strong ensemble cast” but also because of its “unironic love for the medium of cinema,” said Dana Stevens at Slate. (Apple TV+)

Just because it’s December doesn’t mean you are required to watch holiday-themed television. Some of this month’s new releases are distinctly non-traditional, zagging where you expect them to zig. They include the second season of a dystopian video game adaptation, a behind-the-scenes look at history’s most profitable concert tour, and a hot love story between two hockey players.

‘Heated Rivalry’

It’s officially cold season, but if you’re craving content that will steam things up in a hurry, look no further than the aptly titled “Heated Rivalry.” Created by director Jacob Tierney for the Canadian streaming service Crave (but premiering on HBO Max), the series follows two male hockey rivals who are secretly hooking up off the ice.

“The story begins in 2008, before mainstream acceptance of queer relationships, and speeds through the years,” said Cat Zhang at The Cut. “Every so often, a match brings the nemeses to the same city, where they face off in the rink then disappear to a hotel room for kinky illicit sex.” (on HBO Max now)

‘Man vs. Baby’

British comic Rowan Atkinson, the man best known for playing the illustrious Mr. Bean, stars in this festive follow-up to 2022’s “Man vs. Bee.” The four-part show again tails Trevor Bingley, a character who has “left the stressful world of housesitting for the quieter life of a school caretaker,” said a plot synopsis.

The problem: “On the last day of term, when no one comes to collect the Baby Jesus from the school nativity, Trevor finds himself with another undersized and very unexpected companion.” Tune in for cozy sweaters, London lit up at Christmastime and Atkinson’s desperate attempts to wrangle a baby. (In the trailer, he pops a wine bottle cork in the tot’s mouth in place of a pacifier.) (Dec. 11 on Netflix)

‘Taylor Swift: The End Of An Era’

Taylor Swift’s “Eras” concert tour, which ran for an exhausting one year and nine months, broke all kinds of records and earned the distinction of being the highest-grossing tour of all time. Now the pop star is rewarding her fervid fans with a peek behind the curtain of her life as a showgirl: a six-episode docuseries that delves behind the scenes, showcasing everything from tour planning to rehearsals to Swift’s budding relationship with NFL player (and now fiancé) Travis Kelce. Alongside the series, Swift is releasing a separate film of her final “Eras” tour concert in Vancouver. (Dec. 12 on Disney+)

‘Fallout’

In its witty first season, Amazon’s “Fallout” transported viewers to a nuclear wasteland where survivors lived in underground bunkers. The series, “one of the most faithful — and best — video game adaptations,” said Ash Parrish at The Verge, is “ploughing further into its postapocalyptic mythology” in the second season, said Ben Travis at Empire. The show’s three central characters — “Ella Purnell’s Vault dweller Lucy, Aaron Moten’s mech-suited Maximus and Walton Goggins’ irradiated Ghoul” — are teaming up for a trip into “Sin City 2.0,” or New Vegas as it is now known, where Lucy will search for her father, Hank. (Dec. 17 on Prime)

‘The Copenhagen Test’

This stylish but secretive sci-fi thriller created by Thomas Brandon and blockbuster horror titan James Wan (“The Conjuring,” “Insidious”) promises a “sleek collision of psychological paranoia and high-tech espionage,” said The Playlist. “The Copenhagen Test” follows Alexander Hale (Simu Liu), an intelligence operative “who discovers his brain has been hacked, giving unseen operatives access to everything he sees and hears. Trapped between the intelligence agency he serves and the digital ghosts tracking his every move, Hale must perform his loyalty to both sides until he can expose who’s pulling the strings — before his thoughts stop being his own.” (Dec. 27 on Peacock)

“We’re finally here,” said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. Nearly a decade on from the first episode of “Stranger Things”, the Duffer Brothers are “finally bringing the curtain down on their blockbuster hit show. What a ride it’s been.”

The fresh-faced kids “aren’t so little anymore”, which is “appropriate because this feels like the most adult the show has ever been”. Series five veers into “much darker territory”: the town of Hawkins is now under full military quarantine and Demogorgons are “slashing people around like pinatas”, blood and guts flying everywhere.

Robin (Maya Hawke) and Steve (Joe Keery) now work for a local radio station, while Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is on the run from the armed forces who understandably see her as a “massive threat”. Meanwhile, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and his friends are helping Hopper (David Harbour) conduct “elaborate ‘sweeps’ of the Upside Down” to find and defeat the evil Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).

From “dark humour” to “whimsy” and the “poetry of trauma and hard-earned resilience”, the show’s “trademark” ingredients remain intact, said Leila Latif in Empire. “Most reassuring of all is how quickly the show proves it has not lost its sense of fun.” The performances are “largely excellent”, and Nell Fisher as Mike’s little sister, Holly, is a “delightful” addition to the cast. “Grander and gorier” than previous series, the latest season proves that “both our heroes and their deadliest foes still have thrilling new tricks up their sleeves”.

But there are “plot snags” that “cumulatively eat away at our suspension of disbelief”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter, and the main characters “look very much like the 20-somethings they are, rather than the roughly 16-year-olds they’re meant to be playing”.

Some of the show’s elements are becoming “repetitive”, said Laura Martin on BBC Culture, and “surely even Kate Bush is exhausted by ‘Running Up That Hill’ by now”. However, this is “poking small holes in a giant televisual beast. No ‘Stranger Things’ fan is going away disappointed” from the first four episodes, which means “anticipation for the rest of the season”, when it drops over Christmas, will be “at fever pitch”.

Episode four, leading up to an “epic battle between the demons, the military and the people of Hawkins” is the show at its very best. With grenades, gunfire and “two explosive twists in the final minutes”, it’s a “thrilling” watch – and, if it’s a sign of how the Duffer Brothers plan to conclude the show, then we “are in for an all-time great TV ending”.

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Joseph Mallord William Turner remains an “enigma”, said James Jackson in The Times: “a grunting curmudgeon, an establishment outsider, a visitor of prostitutes”, and an artist whose work “touches the sublime”. This new BBC2 documentary seeks to shed light on Turner’s character through close examination of his rarely seen sketchbooks: not just landscape studies and preliminary compositions that he would later turn into paintings, but also reams of “pornographic sketches”. The result is a show that zips “rather fascinatingly ... in and out of Turner’s id, ego and superego”.

An eclectic range of contributors offer their interpretations, said Roland White in the Daily Mail. Psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, for instance, suggests that Turner’s detailed early depictions of buildings represented “a search for stability after a difficult childhood”. His background was indeed troubled: his mother suffered psychotic episodes at a time when madness was believed to run in families. Fearing it would hinder his career, he committed her to a hospital and never saw her again.

Not all the observations are worthwhile, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Ronnie Wood, for instance, says of “Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen”: “It’s very dramatic.” But Tracey Emin convincingly discusses Turner’s working-class origins, while Chris Packham is highly insightful about Turner’s view of nature, and the effect of industry on it. This programme “balances accessibility with analytical muscle”, allowing us to see the artist “afresh”.

“Prisoner 951” is a “harrowing watch”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. The four-part series dramatises the nightmarish six years Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe endured as a political prisoner in Iranian custody before eventually being reunited with her husband and young daughter in the UK.

It is “perhaps as close as we’ll get” to imagining “how much she suffered, physically and mentally” – thanks largely to a “powerhouse performance” by Narges Rashidi as Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The story begins in Tehran where Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been visiting family. When she arrives at the airport to catch her flight back to the UK, she is stopped by officials. “Wrenched from her crying baby daughter”, Gabriella, she is taken away and “shoved in a filthy, dark prison cell in solitary confinement”, accused of spying for the British state.

Meanwhile, her husband Richard Ratcliffe (Joseph Fiennes) is at home getting ready for his wife’s return and “putting her favourite ice cream in the freezer”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. As his wife despairs from her prison cell, we watch him gradually realise that “the Foreign Office is useless”, and start to mount his own passionate campaign for her release.

The first episode of the “illuminating” series is “gripping”. It’s followed by three slower instalments that provide crucial political context. Based on “A Yard of Sky” – the soon-to-be-published book by Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband – the drama makes it plain that this British-Iranian mother is a “political pawn”. Iran is putting pressure on Britain “to repay a £400m debt for military equipment, owed to Tehran since the 1970s”.

“Mercifully”, Boris Johnson is “left uncast”, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. The former prime minister’s blundering declaration that the imprisoned charity worker was “teaching journalism” – which landed Zaghari-Ratcliffe in even deeper trouble with Iranian authorities – is relayed by real-life news footage. Johnson is “buffoon enough without needing an actor to camp things up.”

The “excruciating passage of time” is vividly portrayed, and you “lose count of the number of times Nazanin is tormented by dashed hopes”. Appeals are lost, promises of imminent release are broken, husband and wife go on multiple hunger strikes “but their bond is unbreakable, and portrayed in the many flashbacks to their early romance and marriage”.

Fiennes and Rashidi have “impressive chemistry given that they hardly have any scenes together”, said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. “The ending, when it comes, is less a moment of euphoria than a slow release of breath. ‘Prisoner 951’ might not be uplifting, but it’s a testament to two extraordinary people who never gave up fighting for each other – and that’s definitely worth celebrating, too.”

A generation ago, sci-fi aficionados were lucky if there were one or two remotely watchable shows released a year. Today, the streaming economy serves up a reliable supply of lavishly produced, inventive science fiction. It includes many shows, like the tremendous new Apple TV+ release “Pluribus,” that carry on the tradition of great speculative storytelling.

‘The Twilight Zone’ (1959-1964)

Rod Serling’s sci-fi anthology series is one of the few shows from the early television era that maintains a lasting cultural footprint. Many of the best episodes are remembered for their final act twists, like a third-season classic in which two people traveling to the home world of seemingly benevolent aliens discover that their tome “To Serve Man” is actually a cookbook and that human beings are being harvested as food.

Other episodes, like “The Shelter,” tackled fears of the still-new nuclear age, with neighbors turning savagely against one another to get into a bunker only to discover that the nuclear attack warning was a false alarm. A show that “belongs in some ways to a golden age of its own,” it is “still available and watched and loved for its stories and characters and insights into human nature,” said Brian Murray at The New Atlantis. (Paramount+)

‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (1987-1994)

Few of the most ardent fans of the short-lived “Star Trek” could deny that “The Next Generation” is a vastly superior concoction. Set a century after the original, its most important decision was casting the magnificent Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as the Starship Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. With dazzling special effects and a stellar ensemble cast that included a cyborg officer named Data (Brent Spiner), the series offered commentary on everything from the waning Cold War to the nature of humanity and the trauma of war.

The crew’s encounters with a terrifying hive mind race, the Borg, were among the best. That’s why “almost anyone would appreciate the smart, original storytelling” of the show’s seven seasons, said Phelim O’Neill at The Guardian. It was a “less violent, more cerebral show, with a cast of rare chemistry and ability.” (Paramount+)

‘The X-Files’ (1993-2018)

When by-the-book FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to a secret unit investigating paranormal phenomena with the more excitable Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), the pairing kicks off eleven seasons and 217 episodes of case-of-the-week sci-fi mayhem that became one of the most beloved series of the 1990s. While the show had a somewhat inscrutable throughline about alien abductions and a government cover-up, the heart and soul was always Scully and Mulder navigating their sexual tension to battle everything from a mysterious outbreak on an Arctic research base to camouflaged forest monsters. It was a “well-made creep show” that “grew into one of television’s most tender love stories,” also offering “meta-fictional commentary on the formulas of science fiction and the conspiracy thriller,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (Disney+)

‘Battlestar Galactica’ (2004-2009)

Showrunner Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the iconic ’70s-era show channeled post-9/11 political paranoia in the story of how a single military vessel survived a nuclear holocaust inflicted by human-created robots called “Cylons.” That ship, the Battlestar Galactica, becomes the sole defender of a convoy that contains the entire remaining human population of just over 50,000 people, led by the civilian President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), and the ship’s crew including Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and fighter pilots Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), Boomer (Grace Park) and Apollo (Jamie Bamber).

The third season was a particularly incisive commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A “thrifty U.S./UK co-production peppered with mostly unfamiliar faces,” the show is a cult classic of the 21st century because “something gritty, thrilling and politically resonant became part of an irresistible underdog story,” said Graeme Virtue at The Guardian. (Prime)

‘Black Mirror’ (2011-)

Showrunner Charlie Brooker delivers, at last, a worthy successor to the “Twilight Zone” brand of anthology-based science fiction. Over the course of seven superb seasons, “Black Mirror” has shown us the dark side of many existing or speculative technologies, and can already claim to have predicted a number of disturbing social trends, including using AI to resurrect a deceased loved one, seemingly drawn directly from the season two episode “Be Right Back.”

The show alternates trippy think-piece episodes with more traditional science fiction yarns, like the season 4 barnburner “Metalhead” about humans being hunted down by robotic dogs. Yet the series’ occasional lighter moments “suggest that there may be hope for us yet if we’re willing to learn from the mistakes we’re on the verge of making,” said Jenna Scherer at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘The Expanse’ (2015-2022)

“The Expanse” offered a novel twist on science fiction storytelling by asking “what if we reached the stars, and brought all of our problems — xenophobia, class inequities, our innate knack for self-destruction — along with us?” said Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert. In the show, humans have colonized the solar system, and the series depicts familiar rivalries between the powerful planets like the United Nations of Earth and Luna and the outer planets, whose exploited masses are called “Belters.”

Holden (Steven Strait) is the captain of a rogue ship called the Rocinante, which becomes a critical force in the battle against a mysterious pathogen called the Protomolecule that threatens to wipe out civilization. The show was cancelled by SyFy after three seasons but then picked up by Amazon for another three well-regarded seasons. (Prime)

‘Andor’ (2022-2025)

“Andor” depicts the series of events that led to the formation of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, creating a propulsive and suspenseful drama that now has especially uncanny resonance for viewers struggling to make sense of the political present. Stellan Skarsgard is Luthen Rael, a recruiter for the nascent rebel alliance who convinces Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to join the growing resistance.

It is the only entry in the franchise that convincingly depicts the material conditions of authoritarianism that instigated the insurgency at the center of the “Star Wars” universe. Debuting during a “creative low point for the anemic franchise,” showrunner Tony Gilroy creates a “fiercely intelligent spy thriller that rendered a galaxy far, far away in terms you could legibly graft onto the world right outside your door,” said Nicholas Quah at Vulture. (Disney+)

‘Severance’ (2022-)

A show that feels like an extended buildout of a “Black Mirror” episode, “Severance” follows Mark (Adam Scott), who works in “macrodata refinement” at the mysterious Lumon Industries. Like most Lumon workers, though, Mark is “severed,” meaning that a chip implanted in his brain separates his at-work consciousness, rendering his two selves mutually distinct.

Ingeniously setting this nightmarish premise in a bespoke version of the present, “Severance” is about Mark and his coworkers, Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro), unraveling the mystery of what they do all day and eventually grappling with the philosophical nuances of cleaving a person’s consciousness in half. The “television show of our time,” its “principal subject is theft: of time and memory, of identity and humanity,” said Rachel Cooke at The New Statesman, and it is “an arrow to the heart.” (Apple TV+)

Claire Danes’s “unbroken streak of playing women in emotional extremis” continues, said Mike Hale in The New York Times. In Netflix’s new eight-parter, the “Homeland” star plays Aggie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author grieving the loss of her son, who was killed in a drink-driving accident four years earlier. Consumed by guilt and estranged from her wife Shelley (Natalie Morales), she is living alone in a large house on Long Island, struggling with writer’s block, when Nile Jarvis (Matthew Rhys) – an infamous property developer suspected of killing his ex-wife – moves into the house opposite her. Aggie is initially appalled but soon senses that “a new book may have fallen into her lap”.

Jarvis is “very wealthy and very unpleasant”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Aggie is warned that he is dangerous, a psychopath. Yet the two strike up an uneasy rapport and, in a somewhat implausible development, he hires her to write his biography. The drama appears to be heading towards “the big reveal” of whether or not Jarvis murdered his wife, and if Aggie might be next on his list. But somehow the tension fails to develop fully and, ultimately, it makes for a “dour” and “unconvincing” watch.

It may be “silly”, even “ludicrous” at times, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times, but Danes and Rhys are superb, whether “hanging out and putting the world to rights” or pitted against each other in “increasingly unsettling stand-offs”. “Gripping” and often “genuinely scary”, this “gleefully horrible story” is a lot of fun.

Pitch-black comedy has been one of the defining features of 21st-century television, as the industry moved from the earnest family sitcoms of the 1970s and 1980s — think “Family Ties” — to shows that feel like those programs’ antitheses in both spirit and tone. While this can be a delicate balance to strike, TV’s best dark comedies are genuinely funny while offering sharp critiques of politics and society.

‘The Office’ (2001-2003)

The better-known American remake toned down this caustic British original, which ran for just two seasons and a two-part “Christmas special” denouement. Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, the office manager of a middling paper company in Slough whose crippling insecurity manifests as constant, cringey manipulation of his exasperated employees.

The now-cliched formula of a camera crew making a documentary about the office was fresh at the time, and the supporting characters were spot on, particularly the lovelorn Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis). The “amazingly realistic, amazingly awkward, amazingly embarrassing” show is powered by Brent’s “desperation to be cool, to be seen, to be recognized, to be famous,” which turned a “basically decent idiot into an engine of humiliation,” said Willa Paskin at Slate. (Hulu)

‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ (2005-)

“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is still airing new episodes even though its debut episode is almost old enough to drink. The formula hasn’t changed: Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Mac (Rob Mac), Dennis’ sister Dee (Kaitlin Olson) and the Reynolds patriarch, Frank (Danny DeVito), are ”the gang,” a group of shallow, self-destructive narcissists who run a Philadelphia Irish dive bar called Paddy’s.

A representative plot line from season two sees the gang trying to get someone from the Church to bless a stain in the bar that resembles the Virgin Mary. Dee seduces a priest (David Hornsby) to get the blessing and then spurns him when he leaves the priesthood for her. A show about “venal borderline alcoholics who would be actively hateful if they weren’t so hilarious,” it is consistently both “transgressive and ingenious,” said Graeme Virtue at The Guardian. (Hulu)

‘You’re the Worst’ (2014-2019)

Even for a genre whose stock-in-trade is repellent characters, FX’s “You’re the Worst” tests the audience’s tolerance with the theatrically cruel and flailing novelist Jimmy (Chris Geere) and depressed, ironically detached music publicist Gretchen (Aya Cash), whose one-night stand at a wedding eventually becomes much more than either intended. While it never softens its blunt edges, the show eventually allows itself some more earnest exploration of trauma, mental illness and emotional avoidance. Gretchen and Jimmy are “photonegatives of saccharine rom-com protagonists” in a show that deftly mixes bleak humor “with moments of surprising tenderness,” said Michael Haigis at Slant Magazine. (Hulu)

‘Search Party’ (2016-2022)

TBS’s comedy (later rehomed by HBO for its third and fourth seasons) is a unique take on the formula of a friendship group composed entirely of narcissists. Dory (Alia Shawkat) is a failing-to-launch Brooklyn Millennial who convinces her boyfriend, Drew (John Reynolds), and their friends Portia (Meredith Hagner) and Elliott (John Early) to join her strange, obsessive quest to find a college acquaintance, Chantal (Clare McNulty), who has gone missing.

But because Dory barely knew Chantal, it’s clear that the “search” is really a stand-in for the hollowness at the core of these characters. The “pitch-black” show’s ultimate target is the “tendency to confuse the ego-stroking virtual busywork of the text- and social media-driven era for actual, meaningful action,” said Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture. (Hulu)

‘Fleabag’ (2016-2019)

Despite its short, two-season run, “Fleabag’ was an enormously influential and successful series. Phoebe Waller-Bridge delivered an Emmy-winning performance as the fourth-wall-breaking title character, a thirtysomething London cafe owner nursing a bitter secret about her role in her best friend’s suicide.

The show’s frank and graphic depiction of the way that Fleabag uses sex to distract from what she calls a “screaming void inside my empty heart” was both hilarious and sad. It also turned Waller-Bridge into a bona fide star. A show with “almost feral energy,” it combines “naked confessionalism and comic artifice” to “tap veins of honest emotion,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (Prime)

‘Barry’ (2018-2013)

Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a hitman who joins an embarrassingly terrible Los Angeles acting class led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) to take out a target for Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (a scene-stealing Anthony Carrigan). But Barry soon becomes involved with aspiring starlet Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and then decides he actually wants to be an actor rather than a killer, setting off a series-long effort to extract himself from the murder business.

Simultaneously an organized crime satire and a send-up of LA’s meat-grinder performance culture, “Barry” “unfurled into something of an existential epic” by its time-jumping fourth season, with comedic elements that provided “ideal backdrops for the series’ explorations of the inconvenience of truth,” said Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker. (HBO Max)

‘The Great’ (2020-2023)

If the tone of “The Great” feels instantly recognizable, it’s because series creator Tony McNamara is the writer of both “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.” Elle Fanning plays Catherine the Great, who in season 1 schemes to depose her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult), depicted here as a shallow, stupid libertine whose tagline is “Huzzah!”

A show that is much more interested in lampooning the habits of aristocrats than in historical accuracy, “The Great” was a showcase for its leads and featured tremendous supporting performances from actors like Douglas Hodge, playing the fictional military leader Velementov. The series is best enjoyed if you allow yourself the pleasure of watching “hot people having sex, plotting against one another, having an occasional bout of feminist thought and killing people,” said Delia Harrington at Den of Geek. (Hulu)

‘Beef’ (2023)

Lee Sung Jin’s devastatingly funny black comedy follows the fallout from an escalating feud between struggling contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) and gilded girlboss Amy Lau (Ali Wong) that starts with a routine road rage incident. Before long, Danny and Amy are obsessively trying to destroy one another in a series of set-piece revenge plots that combine terrible decision-making with pinpoint comic timing.

It’s also one of the first major commercial successes in U.S. television featuring Korean-American leads. A “thought-provoking and insidious character study,” the show is propelled by a “daring script elevated by flawless performances from both actors,” said Saloni Gajjar at The AV Club. (Netflix)

‘Such Brave Girls’ (2024-)

In the third episode of Hulu’s boundary-shredding British comedy, teenage Billie (Lizzie Davidson) pauses her raunchy text-messaging only long enough to have an abortion. She lives with her aimless, deadpan, suicidal older sister, Josie (Davidson’s real-life sibling Kat Sadler), and their hapless mother, Deb (Louise Brealey), who is desperately trying to land a man to pull them out of economic precarity. “Brutally honest, narratively unhinged and utterly fearless,” the show and its “deeply unlikeable” characters skewer “everything from feminism and self-help platitudes to sisterhood and mental health services,” said Lacy Baugher Milas at Paste Magazine. (Hulu)

Over the past 18 years, the launch of the John Lewis Christmas advert has established itself as a key point in the UK’s festive calendar, said Ed Davies in the FT. The ads are, of course, designed to be miniature weepies – to create a warm fuzzy feeling towards Britain’s favourite department store; but for many fathers of teenage boys (and some mothers too), this year’s has hit especially hard.

Shameless tearjerker

Set in a middle-class home, the ad is about a man who finds under the tree a last unopened gift, from his silent, headphone-wearing son. It is a vinyl copy of Alison Limerick’s 1990 club hit “Where Love Lives”, and it transports dad back to a 1990s rave, said The Guardian; the pace then changes and dad, now alone in a dark space, sees his son as a toddler and a baby. We then return to their home for a hug – and the tagline “If you can’t find the words, find the gift”.

So yes, it’s a shameless tearjerker, but it also taps into an urgent national conversation about the crisis in boyhood, sparked in part by the TV drama “Adolescence”.

No one wants to see dad gurning

The masculinity crisis is not a very festive theme, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. And the whole ad is weirdly disturbing, said Simon Mills in The Times. When I went to acid house raves, the very last thing I’d have wanted to see, looming out of the darkness, is any kind of relation, from the present or the future.

Then there is the unspoken “recreational drugs connection”. For anyone who was part of that scene, “Where Love Lives” will bring back memories of being “absolutely wasted on E” during nights of woozy, loved-up hedonism – and of the agonising comedowns that followed them. This is not touching family fare: no one wants to see dad gurning. It’s very un-Christmassy.

I suppose the boy’s gift is a sign that he realises that his dad is a person, who has had a life of his own and has tastes equivalent to his, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian. That is “a profound moment for a child”. And there is something reassuring in the obsolescent traditions the ad celebrates: going into a bricks and mortar shop, buying an actual object. But for Gen Z, this ad must look mind-bendingly anachronistic. What will John Lewis show us next year? A “farmer trading a goat for a sack of stubble turnips”?

“Glee” co-creator Ryan Murphy is “the high priest of tacky, tasteless television”, said Ed Power in The Daily Telegraph. Yet with this latest series for Disney, he has really outdone himself, turning in “a show of mind-bending horror sure to trigger nightmares in the unsuspecting viewer”.

It stars Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts as high-flying divorce lawyers, and Niecy Nash as their investigator, who have left a smart firm to set up an all-female practice in California. And it’s an “abomination”.

‘A long-form commercial’

The series could be seen as a post-#MeToo “Sex and the City”, said Judy Berman in Time Magazine, if “the sex were all talk, the city irrelevant” and the humour unintentional. Or perhaps it’s “The First Wives Club for psychopaths”. Either way, it “functions primarily as a long-form commercial for a long list of brands”. Strangely for a legal drama, we don’t see much law being practised; instead, much time is devoted to the partners’ personal lives and vendettas.

An ‘embarrassment’ of a script

The script is an “embarrassment” and the performances are no better, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Kardashian, while predictably “expressionless”, is at least “inoffensively useless”. The Oscar-nominee Watts, by contrast, ”preens and pouts” and delivers her lines “so archly that you can almost hear her joints cracking”. And you wonder what Glenn Close, who appears in cameo, was thinking. Camp, lurid drama played with gusto can be fun, but with its dismal plots and characters, this really is not that. Truly, “I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad”.

Louise Kennedy’s “passionate love story”, set amid the “bombs, bullets” and “punishment beatings” of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, was “beautifully told”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Now her novel has been adapted for the small screen “and, happily, the TV series does not let it down”.

It’s 1975 and, in a small town outside Belfast, Catholic teacher Cushla (Lola Petticrew) is living with her alcoholic mother (Gillian Anderson) and juggling her school job with evening shifts at her brother’s pub. It’s here that she first crosses paths with Michael (Tom Cullen), an older, married Protestant barrister who is known for taking controversial cases on both sides of the sectarian divide. The pair embark on a “lusty affair” – a “Romeo and Juliet-style couple, madly in love but forced to meet in secret”.

With his “tousled hair and tight waistcoat”, Michael is a “dreamy old goat”, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. But it’s Petticrew who “steals the show”, said Michael Hogan in London’s The Standard. She gives an “impressively nuanced performance – courageous yet flawed, wise beyond her years but youthfully idealistic”. She has a “magnetic screen presence” and, when “tragedy strikes”, delivers a “viscerally raw portrait of grief and trauma”.

I didn’t feel the “supposedly electric connection” between the pair, said Keith Watson in The Telegraph. The age gap made me feel as if Michael was “grooming Cushla rather than charming her”, and the “imbalanced relationship” never quite seemed “plausible”. Despite offering much “food for thought”, the series missed the “emotional mark”.

Occasionally it “tips into cliché” said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Anderson “possibly overdoes the doom-laden drunk act”. But this is balanced by the show’s “sweet, sincere undertone”. “Trespasses” is also “unusually sexy” for a terrestrial TV drama: “this is grown-up fare, in both tone and substance”.

It’s “devastating” at times but it’s “anything but misery porn”, said Hogan in London’s The Standard. “It’s warm, made with love and ultimately uplifting, complete with a spine-tingling coda. A deeply human drama about a highly charged slice of history.”

This month’s new releases run the gamut. There’s a delving into history, with a series about the assassination of our 20th president and another about the defiant bloodshed of the American Revolution; science fiction, with the return of “Stranger Things” and a new show from TV legend Vince Gilligan; and a palate cleanser with a silly, salient look into the complicated lives of modern-day twentysomethings.

‘I Love L.A.’

Lena Dunham’s “Girls” spoofed life for privileged and rudderless twentysomething women living in New York City. Rachel Sennott’s new series provides a similar service to Gen Zers living amid the excess and squalor of Los Angeles.

Sennott, who previously starred in “Shiva Baby” and “Bottoms,” both created and stars in “I Love L.A.,” which follows a group of zillennials anchored by Maia (Sennott) navigating their careers and love lives. “The heart of a series” like ‘I Love LA’ lies in its “ability to capture what it feels like to be young — when your heart still sings with possibility and ambition, a vital defense in a world all too ready to pelt you with disappointments,” said Nicholas Quah at Vulture. (out now, HBO)

‘Pluribus’

Created by Vince Gilligan, “Pluribus” is the long-awaited and mystery-cloaked follow-up to “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul.” This series is a little different than those others: It’s a sci-fi mystery rather than a gritty crime drama.

This shift may not be entirely surprising, as Gilligan wrote for “The X-Files” before creating “Breaking Bad,” and was “responsible for some of the show’s weirdest and funniest episodes,” said Linda Holmes at NPR. Most of the plot of “Pluribus” was “kept intentionally vague in marketing,” but it is clear the series is set in Albuquerque and stars Rhea Seehorn as Carol, a “miserable woman investigating a strange contagion that has turned the population of the city (and the world) unrelentingly happy,” said Wilson Chapman at IndieWire. (out now, Apple TV)

‘Death by Lightning’

Based on Candice Millard’s 2011 book “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” this Netflix historical drama spotlights U.S. President James Garfield (Michael Shannon), who was assassinated just 199 days into his first term and thus tends to be forgotten in the grand scheme of American politics. “That tragedy set the table for one of U.S. history’s great ‘what ifs’ with Garfield’s lost potential felt most acutely in the area of civil rights, where his commitment to equality for African Americans might have altered the nation’s post-Reconstruction trajectory,” said David Smith at The Guardian. Matthew Macfadyen also stars as the assassin, Charles Guiteau, who brings about Garfield’s untimely demise. (out now, Netflix)

‘The American Revolution’

Documentarian Ken Burns, renowned for his epic explorations of American history and culture, has already covered the Civil War, World War II and Vietnam. Now he’s turned his unrelenting gaze on one of our country’s most important battles: the American Revolution. The series “uncovers brand new information, tidbits and fascinating facts about this fraught time in our history,” said Amy Amatangelo at Paste Magazine.

Although it’s “hard to watch” the show “without awareness of the anti-monarchic sentiments shared at recent rounds of “No Kings!” protests — to hear the noble egalitarian sentiments that launched the American experiment without pondering the ways the fulfillment of our freedoms has fallen short of our loftiest aspirations — the doc does not overtly acknowledge Donald Trump,” said Daniel Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter. (Nov. 16, PBS)

‘Stranger Things’

It’s hard to believe that “Stranger Things” is only returning for its fifth — and final — season. The show, about a group of friends in 1980s Indiana who become entangled in a secret government experiment and discover a supernatural dimension, has burrowed its way deep into pop culture consciousness. It launched a group of unknown kid actors to fame, gave Winona Ryder the kind of starring role she hadn’t seen since the ’90s and introduced Kate Bush’s 1985 masterpiece “Running Up That Hill” to a whole new generation. This last season is leading toward the final battle with humanoid monster Vecna, the series’ main antagonist, and the feature-length series finale will also screen in theaters on Dec. 31, a first for Netflix. (Nov. 26, Netflix)

The finale of “The Celebrity Traitors” airs tonight, closing out “what has felt like a timely national bonding experience”, said Phil Harrison in The Guardian. While Elon Musk may be “adamant that civil war in the UK is inevitable”, we know it’s not as “we’re all too busy watching Celia Imrie screech into a well”.

The hit reality game show has swerved from its “civilian iteration” to cast everyone from Stephen Fry and Clare Balding to Cat Burns and Jonathan Ross in the UK’s first star-studded version. And although the celebrity Faithfuls have struggled – taking a long time to root out even one of the Traitors – it’s been fun watching the big names take part.

The first four episodes had an average audience of 12.6 million, making it the UK’s most-watched TV show of the year even before the finale. The celebrity version has confirmed what the “civilian series” suggested: “this is one of the most immaculate small-screen entertainment formats ever devised”.

‘Staggering’ ineptitude

When rumours first started to swirl about a celebrity version, “we had some massive reservations”, said Laura Jane Turner in the Digital Spy. But “we’re prepared to admit when we are wrong”. Does the allure of the format hold when celebrities get involved? “Thank goodness, yes!”

The celebrities bring something previous contestants couldn’t: “prior knowledge about their fellow game-players”. So, familiarity from outside the show can “make or break alliances” and “pre-conceived ideas could influence the hunt” at the nightly Round Tables.

“The sheer ineptitude on display has been staggering – and oddly endearing”, said Harrison in The Guardian. From David Olusoga’s “torturous circular monologues” to Kate Garraway – “a literal news journalist, lest we forget” – blundering around “like someone trying to burst a birthday piñata during a bomb disposal operation”, the Faithfuls haven’t exactly mastered the art of Traitor-spotting.

But everything from the Banishments to the daily team challenges has improved with the addition of star power, said Emily Baker in The i Paper. “While it’s boring to watch Sally from Southampton” attempt physical challenges, “it is altogether thrilling to watch Fry and his fellow famouses get stuck in”. The idea of celebrities taking over the game “ruffled my feathers at first” but I have “never been more glad to be wrong”.

‘Manna from TV scheduling heaven’

The “cloak-swishing” game of deception quickly became “the ultimate watercooler series”, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. And the celebrity season is “the ultimate broadcasting unicorn: ‘appointment telly’”, with viewers “obediently sitting down to watch episodes on the night” each one is dropped.

Perhaps the show’s inherent “isolation and paranoia” resonates with our “post-Covid generation”? Perhaps it has a particular appeal for the “‘cosy crime’ home nation of Agatha Christie”? Or maybe it’s simply because it’s “a televisual microscope-slide of human nature at its worst, and suggestibility at its strongest”?

So many little moments have made it into “TV folklore”. From Alan Carr’s mounting glee at being a Traitor to Paloma Faith’s “fury at being killed first” and Celia Imrie’s unforgettable fart, the season has been “manna from autumn TV scheduling heaven”.

In tonight’s final episode, we should see a Round Table and then a firepit “outdoor extravaganza, as we whittle” the last five players down, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. At least, that is the “standard” format “but this is ‘The Traitors’, so we should expect the unexpected”. Host Claudia Winkleman could easily throw a spanner in the works and, if she does, “all bets are off and anything could happen”.

“As one door is pushed shut by a grimy MI5 boss, another creaks open,” said Tim Glanfield in The Times. The fifth season of “Slow Horses” may be over “but that doesn’t mean it’s time to mothball your television” while you wait for your next Mick Herron instalment. Another of Herron’s books – this time, his debut novel – has been adapted for the small screen. And, if you’re a fan of the Slough House “outsiders” and their “battles against the system”, you’ll enjoy this new show.

The action kicks off in Oxford, where “bored art restorer” Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) is hosting a dinner party with her financier husband for one of his “particularly important and irksome” clients. But the evening is “cut short” by a deadly gas explosion at a neighbouring house. When Sarah realises that an injured child has “mysteriously disappeared”, she turns “amateur sleuth” to “find the girl, and some answers”. She soon stumbles on the offices of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), and the pair discover they are “up against a lot more than they first thought”.

Thompson is “every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical“ and “unlikely” as Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. And Wilson delivers a performance that is just as “mesmeric”. Both are “unforgettable” female characters.

It’s “great stuff”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. “There is not a wasted moment, not a wasted word.” Stuffed with plot twists, it “smooths out the book’s few technical problems” while retaining all of the “dry humour and acuity” that “Slow Horses” fans “will surely have been hoping” for.

I found some of the episodes too “padded” and, in the first half, the “momentum meanders in frustrating ways”, said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. However, the flaws become “minor irritants and not deal breakers”, thanks to the “perfectly cast” Thompson and her “top-notch” supporting cast.

Yes, it is a bit “messy here and there”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. But that didn’t stop me “bingeing the whole lot, in thrall to the cast chemistry”. “Down Cemetery Road” is not “Slow Horses” but this crime thriller is “its own beast: faster, funnier and unrelenting”.

Unlike in the real world, where politics can often be dreary, on the small screen, writers can spice up political fiction and nonfiction with potboiler plots and ripped-from-the-headlines drama. Case in point, Netflix’s soapy but glorious transatlantic political thriller “The Diplomat” returned on Oct. 16 for a third season. These are some of the other stellar political series of late.

‘Borgen’ (2010-2022)

A political thriller that doubles as an extended lesson in comparative politics, “Borgen” is the rare show that takes both politics and plot seriously. In season one, Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and her moderate Danish political party unexpectedly emerge as the winners of parliamentary elections. As she ascends to the country’s top political position, she has to maintain her fragile coalition with the help of her “spin doctor” Kasper Juul (Pilou Asbaek) and keep her marriage to Philip (Mikael Birkkjaer) alive as they raise their two children. “Borgen” is “one of the greatest TV series of the past decade” in large part because “you have to navigate” the country’s fascinating multi-party political system, said Vanity Fair. (Netflix)

‘Homeland’ (2011-2020)

The first season of Showtime’s “Homeland” dropped near the tail end of America’s Global War on Terror, and the show didn’t waste time diving into the story of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a U.S. Marine captured in Afghanistan who may or may not have been turned into an al-Qaida sleeper agent. Claire Danes won two Emmy Awards playing Carrie Mathison, a CIA agent struggling with bipolar disorder who’s convinced that Brody is not on the level.

Mandy Patinkin shines as Saul Berenson, the CIA’s Middle East Division Chief. A “gripping premise that’s delicately explored with all the ambiguity viewers felt at that time about America’s legacy of still lengthening Mideast misadventure,” the show was “arguably perfect,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Hulu)

‘House of Cards’ (2013-2018)

A show that was integral to the rise of Netflix’s original programming empire, “House of Cards” is an especially cynical look at the inner workings of Washington, D.C. Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is the Democratic House Majority Whip whose promised role as Secretary of State under newly elected President Garrett Walker (Michel Gill) is rescinded. Stung by the betrayal, Underwood and his wife, Claire (Robin Wright), plot their rise to power using any means necessary, including blackmail and murder. The show “revels in the familiar but always entertaining underbelly of government” and delivers a “delicious immorality play with an excellent cast,” said Alessandra Stanley at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘Bodyguard’ (2018)

Richard Madden is David Budd, a father of two small children and an Afghanistan veteran suffering from PTSD. He’s tapped to be head of security for U.K. Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes) after stopping a suicide bombing in the show’s gripping opening. Budd, however, is nursing explosive resentment against the government, and his assignment to protect the hawkish and conspiratorial Montague sends him further down the path of doubt and possibly madness. When Budd and Montague end up more than professionally involved, it all gets even more complicated. This six-episode limited series “excels at both the daring gasp-inducing twist and the methodical construction of slower-burning thrills,” said Variety. (Netflix)

‘Say Nothing’ (2024)

A taught nine-episode limited series, FX’s historical thriller is told through the eyes of Irish Republican Army leader Dolours Price (played by Lola Petticrew and as an older woman by Maxine Peake). Structured as a series of flashbacks as she’s interviewed in 2001 for a Boston College oral history project, the show traces her radicalization after she and her sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe), are attacked by unionist police forces during peaceful protests in Northern Ireland. The sisters join the IRA, where they meet charismatic revolutionaries Gerry Adams (Josh Finan) and Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle). The show’s “longitudinal account of political disillusionment makes it one of the year’s finest shows,” said Inkoo Kang at The New Yorker. (Hulu)

TV adaptations of the American author Harlan Coben’s “extravagantly plotted” thrillers tend to attract A-list casts, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. And it is often the case that the actors are “more believable” than the plot lines. This is very much the case with “Lazarus”, a new six-parter on Amazon Prime.

Cold-case murders

Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin play father-and-son psychiatrists Jonathan and Joel Lazarus, both of whom are haunted by the unsolved murder of Joel’s sister 25 years earlier. The series begins with Jonathan’s death, an apparent suicide – but “it doesn’t take a super-sleuth to work out that Nighy was never going to join the cast for a mere two-minute cameo”.

It soon gets “a bit ‘Sixth Sense’”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Joel starts receiving spectral visits, not only from his dead father, but also from his father’s former patients. He becomes convinced that his father was murdered. The apparitions then draw him into “a series of cold-case murders” that may or may not be connected to the death of his sister, said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent. Helpfully, he has a cop friend who can give him access to old files, to make sense of all this.

Ridiculous but addictive

It’s utterly ridiculous, convoluted (flashbacks of flashbacks) and “often clichéd”, with far too many scenes “where suspects stand lurking in dark corners or stare moodily from under hoods”. There’s some dreadful dialogue, too, and Nighy is under-used. But “it’s plotted as if it has been precision-engineered to hook you in”. And as ever with Coben, it’s “embarrassingly compelling”.