Lucy Mangan

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 well worth watching this fun, stylish and confident caper, which clearly still has numerous twists up its sleeve and characters to play with.

This is a show for those mainly looking to marvel – at the effrontery, the style, the steel nerves of the twentysomething weaving webs from inside a house of cards built on thin ice. Those who are looking for an in-depth, analytical take on the Delvey phenomenon, her pathology or motivations – which the handful of previous documentaries about her have lacked – will have to wait a little longer. ... Julia Garner is mesmerising as Anna.

Amazon’s take on Reacher is as solidly made as he is and delivers the rollicking yarn as efficiently as the man himself can dispatch a Glock-wielding gangster.

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.

A warm, funny, intelligent and rather moving drama, with astonishing performances from Lily James as Anderson and Sebastian Stan as Lee.

Station Eleven is a slow burn. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded.

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

All of human life is here. Not in any credible way – just here. ... In short, it’s just what HBO ordered from the man who by now is surely actually churning this stuff out in his sleep rather than simply giving the faultless impression of it.

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 eight-episode season is full of beautifully honed jokes, absurdities, acute commentary (as well as some more similar to the decidedly unacute, defensive moments about “woke” criticism and contemporary issues the previous Fey/Carlock collaborations contained), sight gags and song and dance numbers. ... It is, as I say, a joy.

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.

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.

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.

It’s also got an ineffable charm that allows it to add up to more than the sum of its not inconsiderable parts. So take a leap – not even a big one – of faith, and just enjoy.

For all its adherence to the psychodrama/mystery genre, Close to Me is gratifyingly full of realistic grace notes.

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.

It’s a good story well told and the only bum note is Stirling, whose performance is so large it unbalances the whole thing and makes one wonder why a directorial note was not given at any stage. But overall it’s a fine addition to the suburban nightmare-trove.