Lucy Mangan

We get lots of meaningful looks, covert glances or charged/pained/strained silences, and very little in between to guide us. When everything is evoked, nothing is. Such great gaps make a nonsense of the script, even when the lines themselves are good.

The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) will do you no harm, as certainly as it will do you no good. People say things like, “You know Michael – the only thing he likes more than a fight is a fight with one hand tied behind his back,” and they manage exchanges such as “Can you work with that?” “I can win with that,” with straight faces.

Danes grounds and gives a remarkable truth to the whole. But even allowing for the fact that screen adaptations rarely capture the full filigree of a literary novelist’s work (one reason why uncomplicated genre fiction generally fares better – there is more to add, less to lose), it feels like slightly too much has been lost in translation here.

It is a sweet, silly, charmingly harmless thing – and funny, if you like that sort of thing, or if you are scrabbling around for any succour you can find. You could do better; you could do worse.

Though the main thrust of the story is the amateur espionage and the increasing involvement of Epstein in Jordan’s world, it is in the quieter, more domestic moments that the drama is most convincing. ... The London parts, however, have a much broader-brush feel to them.

It’s absolutely terrible. Morally, obviously, there is literally no justification for deliberately putting temptation in people’s way (I believe it is one of the tenets in fact of quite a few world religions). Creatively, it’s bankrupt. Educationally, intellectually it’s … not. ... But, oh, the entertainment. Oh, the escapism.

There are one-on-one rounds, teamwork rounds, choreography-learning rounds and occasional, fascinating fleeting mentions of the actual knowledge and insight into the very specific skills needed, and glimpses of Lizzo the working professional and businesswoman.

Despite all the brilliant work we have all seen Sharp, Regan and Ward do over the years, and perhaps because of the script, the acting is poor from the protagonists. It is also downright woeful from peripheral characters.

This is very much Melngailis’s show and she is allowed to skate too easily away from whether, when and how she could have – should have – realised what he was doing, and escaped his clutches.

It’s a lot – although the magical pill aspect is at least not dwelt on too heavily and allowed to add a full sci-fi vibe to the brew as well – and not all of it is worth it. ... But it is in many ways a career-best performance from Jackson (and from Fishback, though we must hope that hers is merely the first of many to come).

It’s slick, the plot runs like clockwork and – just as with the book – you can walk away at the end feeling thoroughly entertained without being able to remember a solitary thing about it.

Tucci is an utterly inoffensive guide throughout this sweet, light delizia of a documentary, but there is one moment with Coccia that nicely illustrates his one weakness – which is that he is slightly too muted, too self-effacing.

It’s fun, no more, no less. Bit of history, bit of gore, bit of sex, bit of plot, lots of hair. As mindless distraction at a gruelling time, it will be hard to beat.

Suspicion (Apple+ TV), is a loose, baggy thing that only begins to approach the necessary slickness a good quarter of the way through its eight-episode run.

It is Froggatt’s performance that stops the story drifting into absurdity or becoming a trivialising, exploitative endeavour. This, I suppose, is good enough.

It’s the red flags that make it fun.

As with most series of this nature, it’s better watched over time rather than binged all at once, when the leaps of faith required to get past various illogicalities and inconsistencies can become too exhausting. It’s one of those programmes where you are best advised to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.

This final third is a very, very slight affair. If the content of the stories had matched the painstaking form, the anthology could have been rather a groundbreaking success. As it is, the architects need to go back to the drawing board.

It is a slick and calculated production, designed to give Potterheads exactly what they want, how they want it. But it contains enough untold stories and honesty from the participants and unfakeable camaraderie to give it more genuine heart than probably anyone expected.

Stay Close promises more of almost exactly the same – including Richard Armitage, who is now seedy photographer Ray and, by the end of the opening episode, about to become firmly tied into the main plot.

The onslaught of “woke” teachings lends the show a smugly self-congratulatory rather than ironically self-aware air. This does nothing to make it sing like the original. ... All that said – there are reasons to hope that these are teething troubles only. There is a handful of good lines, there are flashes of the old spirit and there is one sex scene – centred round Big (“I’m getting some lube. I’m not 30”) – that recalls the genuinely pioneering original, and what fun it used to be.

After a perilously laugh-free opening episode (Kayo aside, who has funny in his bones) things begin to improve. This is thanks to some beautifully pitched secondary characters.

Look, it’s not Wolf Hall. Nothing will ever be Wolf Hall again and although its shadow looms large, it looms unfairly and should be banished. On its own terms, Anne Boleyn works well enough.

Hart is a presence you want to stay with, while Snipes is so compelling you don’t really have a choice but to follow him. It just feels – a little, but inescapably – unnecessary. The points of connection between Hart and the Kid, which might have led to an examination of the power of fame and money to corrupt, are too minor to add any tension or wonderment (did he really …? Could he have possibly …?) amid such a baroquely exaggerated plot.

It’s absolutely fine. It’s got brio, it’s got style and it’s got enough portentous voiceover book-ending events to make everything feel high stakes.

The result is a series that is far more chaotic than it needs to be; the more familiar you already are with the Sackler story and the opioid crisis, the more you will get out of it, which is not the dramatic ideal. But the main points and the outrage are clear.

Ferrell is too plodding a dramatic actor to bring much nuance to Marty’s vulnerability. Still, the sheer size and nerve of the three-decade scam will keep you going to the end.

As a primer for newcomers, or a recap for those who want one, Catch and Kill: The TV Series of the Podcast of the Book of the Article works fine. But there is a sense of missed opportunity – whether to show what has changed since, or how far we still have to go – that makes it slightly less than the sum of its reused parts.