Lucy Mangan

Candy is intelligently scripted and directed. It also has two phenomenal performances. ... Female rage is an under-explored topic – whether or not it culminates in murder. If Candy concentrates on that, rather than the 41 Lizzie Borden-esque blows, it could add something to the sum of human knowledge, if not exactly happiness.

Inside Man is typical Moffat fare. Rollickingly confident, meaty, funny, clever (if not quite as clever, on a line by line basis, as it appears).

Sharp writing in plentiful scenes of Mary Ann (Anna Paquin) and father Bob (Colin Hanks) being caught in the webs he has woven, paralysed by social convention and embarrassment – and left helpless by their trusting natures – does bring to life what they must have gone through in a way that the documentary could not. At the same time, it leaves space for judgments about how and when naivete shades into denial, and innocence into wilful ignorance.

The Bear is half-hour gobbets of kinetic, pressurised, propulsive brilliance with occasional moments of stillness that make you see how much has been done in order to serve up something so delicious. This is a show that has been meticulously prepped, simmered, reduced, balanced and eventually plated up to perfection by the creator Christopher Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo. Dig in.

Wedding Season is an ambitious undertaking that might fail at what it’s trying to do but remains entertaining enough. Those who like their fun fast and furious and don’t want to decree nisi Katie as soon as she appears will no doubt have a better time still.

Overall, cumulatively, the eight 40-minute episodes work. They are attentively curated and edited to bring out the best in every “ordinary” woman interviewed, showcasing their achievements with respect and without relying on the pure emotive rush many of them could provide.

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.

It is all great, well-acted fun – and shaping up very satisfactorily. It promises to be meaty enough to justify its five-part length. Turner does a particularly good job of holding the two possible sides of O’Loughlin.

After nearly six hours spent examining how we can warp and ruin lives, the final 20 or 30 minutes offer a measure of hope and a truly moving testimony to what often sounds like a dead phrase, but here is on display as a living, breathing thing: the healing power of art.

You will want to put a fist through the screen at several points on fiercely loving and frustrated Maria’s behalf. All while laughing with them. It’s a wonderful thing.

In short, all is as it was in GoT’s heyday. Fun, propulsive, looking great and sounding passable.

Bad Sisters is wonderful. It is also superbly constructed, perfectly paced and brilliantly performed, with Horgan on top form as both writer and actor, surrounded by a cast who don’t put a foot wrong.

The whole thing is enormously funny and has such confidence, style and brio that it is impossible not to love it. It is superbly paced and has a satisfying case-of-the-week story every time.

It is utterly brutal and utterly compelling. This is at a slight cost to character delineation and development. Every performance (especially Vera Farmiga as Dr Anna Pou, Julie Ann Emery as nurse Diane Robichaux and Raven Dauda as the daughter eventually forced to abandon her dying mother) is quietly brilliant, but their situations are so unrelentingly terrible that they inevitably become slightly emblematic rather than individualised figures.

[Director Skye] Borgman lays it all out before us with her customary consummate skill. She lets the participants speak their truths, while weaving in the practicalities and difficulties of the case via interviews with the lawyers. The way she frames and edits the story serves to challenge viewers’ assumptions along the way.

It’s tremendously, gloriously, educationally bad.

Overall, Uncoupled feels flat and lifeless.

It is tremendous fun. It has great Stranger Things energy (or should that be The Goonies and Stand By Me meta-energy?) but everything feels fresh.

Rather than perch on the edge of your seat, you are more likely to drift off gently to sleep, perhaps dreaming of a pleasant holiday in a log cabin, and wake up when it is all over.

On paper, this Paramount+ sitcom is a tough sell. But, overall, it works. There might not be abundant belly laughs (though there are often great throwaway lines, such as assistant Darcy begging the CEO for time off to attend Graydon Carter’s barn warming on Martha’s Vineyard), but Bayer – on whose own story Joanna’s is based – keeps our sympathy throughout.

The script is woeful. Half of the actors look absolutely stricken with horror and those who are giving it a good try – including the stalwart Turner – make you want to cry with compassion. The whole thing is paint by numbers and there are moments when all you can do is shake your head in disbelief.

A purported investigation into industry abuses needs to produce the rotting carcass by the end. In the absence of such, we are asked to make do with such insights as the damage Victoria’s Secret has (probably) done to women over the decades by promoting of tall, skinny-yet-busty white women as the only acceptable form of beauty.

Every scene is a cliffhanger. The end of every episode is a bigger cliffhanger. You will binge-watch like you have never binge-watched before. If it is your sort of thing in even the slightest way.

Everything I Know About Love has been billed as a Sex and the City for our times, but the characterisation isn’t strong enough and it doesn’t have that touchstone’s wit, subtlety or wisdom – or at least distance from the turbulent time depicted that would pass for the latter. But it’s fun to spend time with Maggie and her gang. Exhausting, but fun.

It moves at a glacial pace and the GCHQ staff have the air of reluctant office workers on data entry shifts, boredly tapping at their keyboards until it’s time for a statutory tea break – rather than people frantically trying to hold off an enemy assault that could kill thousands and hurl the nation back to the middle ages, or at least the 1990s.

Makers Phil Lott and Ari Mark are content to leave it as a tale of derring-do, a kind of Man’s Own adventure story but a thousand questions and alternative accounts are clearly begging to be heard.

The performances are great. ... A more avoidable problem is that the script – while better than that of a Lifetime movie, for sure – rarely goes below the surface.

It is when Jimmy and Larry meet up in prison that Black Bird really begins to take flight. Suspicion gives way to tolerance, becomes fragile friendship and then moves on to something much more sinuous and slippery.