Lucy Mangan

It’s great fun as long as you set your preposterousness levels to “high”. Go in thinking CSI: Peckham or Line of Bomb Duty or Bomby McBombface, rather than The Wire But With Actual Wires or Breaking Explosively Badly and you’ll enjoy yourself a lot more.

It’s broad-brush stuff for the most part – especially when it comes to Gene and the co-workers, who are allocated about one and a half characteristics each and not given much to do with them. But Falcone and McCarthy are great to watch, and the central relationship between their alter egos gives the whole thing enough charm, warmth and heart to get by.

The whole thing is full of charm (love the graffiti that animates as Kamala and her ever-active imagination walk past), wit, warmth, brio and truth. It’s just – yes, I’m afraid I’m going to – it’s just Marvel-ous.

Astute, slick, satirical fun, with enough brashness and spectacle to make it a great bang for your buck.

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.

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

The spectacle is wonderful, and the information valuable. But perhaps by the end there will be an appetite for something more about how that fossil record tells experts what it does. ... The 10-year-old in me has awakened, and with it the atavistic childhood prime directive: trust, yet verify.

Night Sky, is really three shows in one. ... Spacek and Simmons remain Night Sky’s shining stars. If they could be hived off and the Yorks given their own eight-hour, sci-fi- and conspiracy-free series simply to show us how they navigate the last decade or so of life before it winks out, that would be wonderful.

[Steven Moffat] takes the melodrama down a notch and salts the schmaltz with wit where he can. ... But it has two intrinsic problems to overcome – and hurdles one more successfully than the other. The first is the ick factor occasioned by Henry’s many visits as a grown man to Clare as a child. ... The other problem is more deep-rooted. Niffenegger’s story is built around Clare’s passivity. Her life, while not static or unfulfilled professionally, is defined by waiting for Henry.

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.

This Is Going to Hurt is full of images and scenes that you’ll hope to forget, but, more unexpectedly, it also retains the two most difficult aspects of the book (and those, incidentally, that remain with the reader long after the foreign-objects-up-orifices anecdotage has faded). The first is the fatigue, and the fathomless stupidities, injustices and lack of resources that cause it.

All in all, a staircase well worth climbing.

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.

Even as the female victim count adds up, Shining Girls keeps its integrity and never backs away from this underlying truth.

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.

The nearly three-hour running time is a measured, relentless march of contemporary footage, present-day interviews with people who worked with or knew him, the investigative journalists who eventually unearthed the evidence behind the rumours – the years and years of rumours – and one of his victims – from the years and years of victims.

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 plenty of laughs along the way, but it’s the unforced emotional truths that make Hacks a right and proper vehicle for Smart.

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.

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.

It has a seemingly effortless mastery of a large cast of characters, warm intelligence pervading everything, and promotes the gorgeous general sense of being held for the duration in a very safe pair of hands indeed. Like Binchy, it is also entirely addictive.

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.

It’s a wonderful and deeply enjoyable tale of rags to riches to (relative) rags, but it panders to the viewer’s schadenfreude instead of offering anything meatier, or any wider perspective or criticism.

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.