Lucy Mangan

As rich, complex and satisfying a comedy-drama as you could hope. Enjoy another five-star stay in this luxury place.

The warp and weft of lives, of life, is as expertly woven as ever and you couldn’t wish for a better group of actors to bring it to you. Happy new year.

Vitally for a drama about fake identities and shifting truths there is not one false note in it.

It was all as gorgeous, breathtaking, moving and harrowing as we have come to expect from this world-leading branch of the BBC. There is nothing to criticise or cavil at here.

Every performer is wonderful, not least because the script is wonderful, playing the sex for laughs and the search for intimacy as something serious, good and noble. Not a single character is a cipher – even the smallest parts have a sketched backstory and some good gags.

As well as wit by the bucketload and a searching intelligence informing the whole, the series has the thrilling confidence of a collaboration between people who trust each other implicitly and, secure in that knowledge, have been able to give the best of themselves to us. It’s a wild ride that feels like an absolute gift.

A Very British Scandal, with its lean, mean script and its refusal to reinvent the duchess as an icon of the movement, is the very best and fairest tribute that could be given her.

As the twists and turns of the cases are revealed, it becomes a show greater than the sum of its already considerable parts. By the time you get to the revelation at the end of the second episode, you become less stunned by the news itself than you are by the computation of what it will mean for all involved. Everything and everyone is real and you care about every tiny part. Wonderful.

An astoundingly tough, vigorous, sinewy thing without a wasted word or moment. Freeman – who must have fallen on it like a hungry dog – does every bit of it justice. ... The Responder is as fast and riveting as a thriller and as harrowing as a documentary.

The insistent intertwining of the pain with the laughter, instead of flattening the tale into a Wodehouse-with-women yarn, makes this adaptation feel like a classic in its own right. It is a treat for all.

Severance looks beautiful and is directed with enormous sensitivity and style by Stiller. His quartet of oddball actors, Arquette (a frequent Stiller collaborator), Turturro, Walken and Tillman, elevate an already shining script and a story that is always a finely calibrated 12 to 15 degrees off kilter, while the everyman quality of Scott throws the whole into perfect relief.

It’s a bloodstained love letter to a classic, beautifully and delicately scented with just the faintest hint of ham gothic yarns need; a homage to all the great Counts who have gone before, but still entirely its own thing. And again, like the best of Gatiss and Moffat’s Sherlocks, with the searching intelligence that promises to flesh out the foundational story. Enjoy sinking your teeth into it all.

This latest offering from the crack team and Sir David accomplishes its goal as effectively as ever; it makes us, in the best way, children again. You cannot stay unengaged, you cannot remain unmoved by the sight of nature in all her glory, or unawed by the sight of creatures honed by countless years of evolution to survive the apparently unsurvivable.

It has Parks and Recreation’s sense of community, Modern Family’s precision-tooling, Ted Lasso’s charm, but it is its own, hilarious thing. Despite – or, of course, because of – the truth its underlying tale of real-life deprivation tells.

Bea and Horgan’s chemistry is as glorious as ever. They overlap and underlap perfectly, giving expansive but controlled performances that never take from each other. It is wonderful – indeed it feels almost a privilege – to watch.

It is a rich, generous, clever, multi-textured thing, immaculately played by all the main actors, but awards for Colman, Thewlis and the script must surely be given. Consider it the first of your Christmas treats.

The show has lost none of its delicacy or nuance, nor have its makers disturbed its heart and soul – in fact, they have only added to it. All this, and extra Janice too. Quality pum-pum all round.

Mbedu – already a star in her native South Africa – is extraordinary, and embedded in an extraordinary adaptation: hallucinatory, magical, allegorical and yet permanently in the pursuit of historical and eternal truths, the resurrection of lost perspectives and the uplifting of unheard voices. Watch it, but slowly, one complex, virtuosic, heartbreaking episode at a time.

[A] rich, clever, funny and courageous adaptation.

Sherwood builds slowly – layer by subtle, evocative layer – into a magisterial state-of-the-nation piece. Forty years of emotion and history have been transmuted, lovingly and painstakingly, into art. It’s the cleverest, most compelling and most moving thing I’ve seen in years. ... It is, simply put, wonderful.

There is less Willow (Renika Williams), so far, than last time, which is a great sadness. But the rest are all present, correct and adding to the general sense of a show bursting with good things: talent, energy and wit to burn.

Too Close feels like the most woman-centred, woman-driven mainstream production we’ve yet seen. That’s a bonus. Too Close is a fantastically compelling, brilliantly scripted whydunnit that is unquantifiably better than it needs to be.

The broadening and deepening must have felt like a risk to everyone involved in a show predicated on bringing light comic relief to viewers, and which then became frankly essential to their mental wellbeing. But it’s paid off. They shot and they’ve scored. God bless.

Feel Good should make you feel good. It’s not only an immaculately written and paced piece of work and a properly funny comedy, it is also has created a delicately and intricately constructed, deeply humane world where people make mistakes but are not damned, and have flaws that are not fatal, and – despite all the obstacles – connect across and despite their divides. It is good for almost everything that ails us.

It’s a dense, sharply written (by Tom Edge), absolute treat of a show about a murky, unseen world that doesn’t want to break the surface and show itself, and one that viewers will surely want to dive into.

I Love You, Now Die is a superbly perceptive study of the endless convolutions and complexities of the human mind – and the proliferation of both when two people in a desperately unhappy state meet. It succeeds in raising questions – gently, but relentlessly – about our prejudices and our readiness to judge, as individuals and through our institutions, from the media to the courts. Without losing sight of anyone’s misery or loss, it forces nuance – a characteristic increasingly absent from discourse – into the discussion.

It is, in short, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement without a false note in it, shot through with humour and with ideas, talent and character to burn at every perfectly plotted turn.

Every relationship – or lack thereof – is beautifully drawn. ... In the second episode, it truly begins to take off and by the end, it is soaring. Bea’s uncompromising character and performance become something to love as well as admire.