Lucy Mangan

So far it’s all a little paint-by-numbers.

It can only add valuably to our knowledge, and increase our capacity for nuance when seeking to understand the myriad ways our minds can malfunction and trap us in a hell of our misfiring neurons’ own making. That it can do this while making us laugh with Marnie, and never at her, is barely short of a miracle, but that is what it is. Pure brilliant.

There is a cherishable sense of deftness and overarching control about the whole endeavour that leaves you longing to find out what will happen rather than anxious amid proliferating possibilities. If there is nothing groundbreaking or fabulously innovative here (you can see shades of many previous dramas – most recently perhaps Gold Digger and Deadwater Fell), it is no problem at all. If there is nothing groundbreaking or fabulously innovative here (you can see shades of many previous dramas – most recently perhaps Gold Digger and Deadwater Fell), it is no problem at all. It is a good story well told and those two things, done well, are quite rare enough.

The mystery element and its resolution for Sukey and Elizabeth are not too complicated, psychologically or practically, and nor do they need to be. The real drama exists elsewhere, in bravely impressionistic form held together by superb writing, a complex but immaculate structure and Jackson’s mesmerising, heartbreaking (and funny – as when she cannot remember who the prime minister is but “I know I don’t like him”) performance at its heart.

If the finale loses the absolute delicacy of touch that has marked the rest of the series, as the large emotions surface at last, that is a vanishingly small criticism of an offbeat, charming and moving creation from Minchin and everyone else. It was beaut.

It’s a show with a loving heart that nevertheless manages to remain witty and fleet, doing a lot with every scene and never wasting a minute.

It’s got wit, warmth and charm in abundance, and although it includes adults in its fun it doesn’t cater to them.

What a richly bonkers soup it is.

This is the expensively made, atrociously written, chaotic, borderline-barmy tale.

Take what you have learned from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, through the aforementioned Gone Girl, put more recent memories of The Victim (that one with Kelly Macdonald), The Replacement (that one with Morven Christie and Vicky McClure) in order, stir in scraps from any story you have seen or read with a lost baby at its heart and you are away. Half your work is done and you are free to kick back and enjoy the non-plot elements.

Over The Plot Against America’s six-hour course, Simon and Burns do their usual exceptional work in delicately fitting pieces of a larger and larger puzzle together to reveal a bigger and more complicated picture at every step. If the beginning seems a bit stagey [...] it finds its feet quickly thereafter.

Hitmen may be just a bit too woolly and broadbrush to make a hit in the grander scheme of things. But it finds its target often enough to be more than worth your while.

Little Voice is little short of a horror show.

It is a hilarious, warm, brutal melange that works because it has heart without sentimentality and authenticity without strain.

A funny, fresh reimagining. Building on Martin’s solid, good-hearted tales, it maintains a contemporary feel without losing the old-fashioned charm at its heart.

Overall, Gangs of London promises to be a wild and wildly polished ride, even before the twist at the end of the 90-minute opener.

The slight disbelief and disorientation among the authorities suddenly confronted by the need to turn theory rapidly into practice resonates as the makers must never have envisaged.

It’s not exactly a hagiography, but there is no grit in the oyster.

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.

It is slow without being frustrating or dull, thoughtful without being ponderous or pretentious. It has a further advantage of basically adhering to a known formula while sitting slightly at odds with it.

Despite occasional laughs to be gleaned from the twist that Malkovich can give the most unpromising of lines, Space Force is not funny, which makes it hard to class as a comedy.

It is the characters who carry the series, which is remarkably unstylish in execution and rushes through parts of the investigation where you might have preferred it to linger, and lingers where you might have preferred it to pick up the pace a little.

Snowpiercer the series manages, gloriously, to bypass all that is great and almost all that is good about both of its sources of material, and turn it instead into a police procedural that just happens to be set on the aforementioned giant armoured train.

As the suspenseful psychological thriller it purports to be, Penance is a bit slack. ... But, despite all this, it is basically fit for purpose. Which is mainly, at this point in the subgenre’s development, still to work out how a mass audience feels about sex-swapped, intergenerational banging (I mean, romance … I mean banging) and how long writers and makers have before they need to start adding real meat, real characters and real plots, because the frisson of novelty has worn off.

Bake Off and its ilk transmute basic ingredients and materials into something better. The travel of Flower Fight is in the opposite direction. Watching the innumerable contestants (the producers can’t even be bothered to show us all of them in the opening episode) descend like a plague of locusts on the nursery provided for the show and denude it of its naturally beautiful stock, then force the plants and flowers into unnatural forms to far less beautiful effect is more depressing than uplifting. It’s sometimes actively painful. The presenters don’t seem convinced by the endeavour, either.

Its subtle layering so far puts The Nest a cut above the usual run of such dramas, though I hope the closing shots and the emerging facts about Kaya (via the investigator Dan has put on Kaya’s trail and a reveal by James) don’t signal a slide into a more by-numbers approach in the coming weeks.

Hightown works off a solid, formulaic base. It also relies on coincidences. ... The sense of place that is conjured is remarkable, and how Provincetown’s industries (fishing, drug-trafficking, tourism) and surface attractions work on and power each other is attentively and cleverly done.

White Lines has been hyped as the hit of the summer, and even though it will not be the summer any of us were expecting I’d be surprised if this lurid, swirling, fantastically confident creation didn’t hit the spot. Its energetic brio and the escapism-cum-nostalgia-trip (via a soundtrack stuffed with the Happy Mondays, the Farm, Radiohead and all points in between), may be even more rapturously received under current conditions than it would otherwise have been.