Benji Wilson

Abbott Elementary brims with the confidence of a show that knows it’s got the formula right. This one will run and run.

Party Down is a slow-burn piece of workplace comedy in which a bunch of losers occasionally win. There are laughs but few side-splitters. It’s endearing rather than explosive. Yet as with The Office (UK and US) and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, there is something about the ensemble here that just clicks.

[Writer Ryan J Brown's] method – throw everything at the canvas, from high comedy to bloody gore, and see what sticks – has been taken up with gusto by director Chris Baugh, who employs a hard-candy colour palette coupled with a hyperkinetic camera to make the whole thing precisely as unrelaxing as I imagine a cruise holiday to be. ... But like a punk band at their first gig, Wreck’s energy is infectious.

Extraordinary’s superpower is its freshness. It’s not always extraordinary, but it’s never dull.

Ironically, if Ted Lasso himself had sat down to write a comedy it might well have turned out like this one. It just needs a voice in the writers’ room to shout "bollocks" from time to time when the cheese overwhelms.

The editing in Break Point is so accomplished, the links between a player revealing their state of mind and then manifesting that state on court so adroit, that you’ll be rooting for people whose names you couldn’t spell within 20 minutes of having met them.

Questions such as, "Isn’t this a bit silly?" and, "What was writer David Macpherson on when he picked up his pen?" do linger in the wings, but the direction is terrific, the editing superb and the performances top notch.

Here We Go is an instant, stone-cold comedy classic. ... As so often in great comedy, the humour gets you through the door but the characters are what keep you there. Across the board, Here We Go is wonderfully cast.

We recommend you stay for the voyage, because once the easy gags about a progressive pirate captain several fathoms out of his depth have all been used up, Our Flag Means Death charts a slightly different course. ... The relationship between Stede, the gentle man who wants to be a tough guy, and Blackbeard, the tough guy who wants to be a gentler man, is developed with surprising tenderness. There’s even an element of Mad Men’s fixation on how everyone wants something in their life.

Part of what makes this series so compelling is the subtle, unspoken tug of war over who’s controlling the narrative. Watch carefully and you’ll see that director Smith never quite lets Virgin’s marketing operation have the reins.

It might also have been better if they talked less, too – writer Abe Sylvia seems to have got carried away with country lyrics to the point where lines as corny as “Fast is the only speed I know. I’ll take you any way you want to go” somehow made it into the mouths of actual people. Much better was when the camera lingered on the two leads neither singing nor spouting folk wisdom, but instead evincing a fierce chemistry.

Landscapers took a very different approach, throwing every filming technique in the book at it and creating something wonderfully trippy. But both dramas admitted that there’s always comedy in dark deeds, and both were centred on superb performances from their leads.

Season two introduces a madcap chat show hosted by a cross between Max Headroom and Janet Street-Porter (Lucy Punch having a blast). It’s very funny, very silly and a welcome addition, but it also calls attention to the fact that the best bits of Avenue 5 are all on the Avenue 5. When it’s earthbound it founders. When it looks to the stars it soars.

[The Westward Boys are] a very likeable, watchable bunch and inevitably you find yourself rooting for them. ... But Beckham doesn’t add much. He was always better known for his right foot than his charisma.

The Peripheral is indeed a bit whack. In fact it’s chock full of premium-grade whackness, from a script that clunks its way through the manual of robo-cliches to a story that just doesn’t add up.

Writers Konrad Kay and Mickey Down scrap, and, ultimately, succeed in maintaining interest in their three central characters. ... Most of all, though, Industry is a blast: highly addictive, wicked fun and, in light of renewed focus on bankers and what they’re worth, topical too.

On television, at least, few programmes offer that feeling of constancy, reassurance, kindness and good humour that the Bake Off does.

Ultimately this is a series made for the Alibi channel in conjunction with America’s Masterpiece Theatre. It is thus strait-jacketed from its inception: it must get from body found to crime solved in an hour, and it is also duty bound to wallow in tourist board aerial shots of the Scottish Highlands.

Without that creeping dread, The Legend of the Sea Devils was reliant on a potpourri plot as watertight as a colander. ... By some way the best part of The Legend of the Sea Devils, however, had nothing to do with the Sea Devils or their legend. The nascent relationship between the Doctor and Yaz (Mandip Gill, superb) has been the most memorable aspect of the last few Whos.

Thus far there are no surprises, just resplendent competence.

The pacing is exquisite, with every episode revealing just enough of Deb and Ava’s backstory to cast them repeatedly in a new light. So there it is: Hacks is every bit as great as you’ve been told.

Moon Knight is both simple, and yet complicated, entertainment. It works on many levels and it’s right up there with Wandavision as Marvel’s most Marvellous TV show to date.

It’s polished to within an inch of blandness, great for the tourist board, less so for the tourist.

Rest assured that the final series is a worthy testament to this outstanding actress [Helen McCrory, who died last spring], and the character she created.

People staring at screens the whole time (which, admittedly, is probably all that espionage is in the 21st century) is inherently undramatic. I haven’t seen a TV series based around cyber-espionage and infosec that solves this one yet, but thankfully it doesn’t sink Suspicion altogether because the characterisation is strong and the mystery holds.

It’s a layered trifle that’s funny at a buffoonery level but also repays careful attention — from the just-so chunky knits the characters wear to the ever-changing epitaph on Anna’s daughter’s gravestone. There’s something truly life-affirming in these leaden times about the show’s dedication to silliness.

The conspiracies never spiral into absurdity and the climactic court scenes and come-uppances still hit home. But it remains a strange amalgam of taut thriller and bizarre panto, addictive and believable when Yonekura is on screen, a little silly when some of the other actors are fabricating documents while saying “but this is… fabrication of documents!!!”

There is an interesting drama to be written about the future adventures of Agent Starling. Clarice (Alibi), unfortunately, isn’t it, but rather a by-numbers procedural.