Lucy Mangan

The great sorrow is that Disney does not have the courage – or perhaps desire – to lean in to the potential offered by this now-prescient and fertile setup.

Transcending the directorial workmanship and production values, however, is the simple sight of unfashionable – which is to say good, ideologically informed but practically executed – work being done on behalf of the disfranchised, the powerless, the underserved. It is deeply thrilling to watch. An unfamiliar feeling stirs, and rises higher with each episode. The feeling is hope.

Everyone in the cast does good work with their thinly written characters, who have few redeeming features among them. Not least Byrne, whose commitment makes Sheila credible even in her most vicious or unlikely moments (stealing video equipment from a potential political ally foremost among them). But Physical feels like a wasted opportunity generally.

It sets the bar pleasingly high, with a stellar cast giving uniformly great performances. (Jumbo was made for grief and fury, while Howle is tremendous as a nervy bundle of torments.) It also boasts a lovely, allusive script (particularly in the scenes between Strangeways and his therapist, played by Nathaniel Parker), and a well-paced plot that only occasionally depends on slightly unconvincing breakthrough moments in Frances’s amateur investigation.

The first two episodes of Loki (which were all that was made available for review – there are six in total), however, felt flat. The opener was a lengthy, exposition-heavy setup that felt very static, and the second spent its first half going over much the same ground. ... Still, things do perk up by the very end of the second episode.

The series is overstuffed and airless.

It is either warmly eccentric or hysterically crazy, perfect entertainment or a horrifying attempt to parlay the pandemic into a commercially palatable mashup. It is undoubtedly aimed at a younger-than-full-adult audience; my 10-year-old is entranced. I am, too, although I can’t yet work out why.

Once you are over this slightly improbable premise and a slightly flat first episode while everybody finds their rhythm in this fairytale-inflected Hackney romcom, there is a lot to enjoy. There’s Matafeo’s performance for starters.

We can call it The One That Was Just Good Enough. The One That Was a Nostalgia Fest Not Revisionist History. The One That Did What It Needed to Do. The One That Was Fine.

A feast for the mind, heart and soul.

However real and affecting their experiences and difficulties are (and all those in Say It Out Loud are genuine, passionately articulated and frequently deeply moving), celebrity offerings valorise simply “telling your story”, not judging yourself and others, refusing to accept stigma and so on. Which is all well and good and necessary but does absolutely nothing to address how ordinary people are supposed to achieve this when the waiting lists for the services they need to access stretch to infinity.

The End is a meditation on what makes life worth living and how much of it is within our control. Edie is probably a natural termagant who would never have been the life and soul of the party, but her story invites us to think about how events cannot help but shape us.

Mbedu – already a star in her native South Africa – is extraordinary, and embedded in an extraordinary adaptation: hallucinatory, magical, allegorical and yet permanently in the pursuit of historical and eternal truths, the resurrection of lost perspectives and the uplifting of unheard voices. Watch it, but slowly, one complex, virtuosic, heartbreaking episode at a time.

Little Birds is a series that honours [Nin's stories] and their spirit, adding even more to them and making them resonate anew.

The insistent intertwining of the pain with the laughter, instead of flattening the tale into a Wodehouse-with-women yarn, makes this adaptation feel like a classic in its own right. It is a treat for all.

It’s all engaging enough, but a certain airlessness constrains the entertainment value. ... The problem is that it comes perilously close to taking itself too seriously. Any opportunity for fun is shut down by perpetually morose teens, action set-pieces we have seen many times before and clunky speeches about the state of the world.

Too Close feels like the most woman-centred, woman-driven mainstream production we’ve yet seen. That’s a bonus. Too Close is a fantastically compelling, brilliantly scripted whydunnit that is unquantifiably better than it needs to be.

The Drowning pays much attention to the endurance and the depths of a bereaved parent’s sorrow and how guilt manifests, while refusing to go in for big dramatic gestures at the expense of this hard-won authenticity.

The politics and sectarianism have so far only been sketched lightly – although you can sense the palette being readied for the coming episodes – but Beth’s function as Ireland’s religious conflict made flesh, and her bid to escape her stepfather’s control and increasingly malign intent as an analogy for this period of Irish history, is clear without being heavy-handed.

As the twists and turns of the cases are revealed, it becomes a show greater than the sum of its already considerable parts. By the time you get to the revelation at the end of the second episode, you become less stunned by the news itself than you are by the computation of what it will mean for all involved. Everything and everyone is real and you care about every tiny part. Wonderful.

Overall, the sense is of an opportunity wasted – especially as the series wears on and there is no sign of any change or enlightenment, apart from tiny, insubstantial flashes from poor, downtrodden Doofus. Still, it will do the Gleesons – rightly established and acknowledged talents in film and television – no harm. You just wish it could have done us some good.

What’s left is an exercise in frustration. It’s too earnest about people’s Special Days, the comedic presences jar against rather than leaven the proceedings, and, oh God, it’s so loud. Did I mention how loud it was? Exhaustingly frenetic, charmless, and pointless.

What marks out this portrayal of 50s prejudice (not unworked ground) is that, thanks to magnificent performances from Thomas and Ayorinde, you get a great sense of the cost to victims: the sheer amount of mental energy it takes to navigate a relentlessly hostile world, the consequent exhaustion, the constant abrading of the soul. If the series has a weakness as a horror story, it’s that the supernatural stuff is really a bagatelle.

Sometimes the stories are gentle to the point of soporific. ... At their best, however, the stories illuminate forgotten or unknown corners of the world and make it that much more known to us.

Line of Duty’s back and it so far seems just as good, if not better, than ever.

[Cuoco] gives charm, wit and true confidence to a character who would otherwise be a hot mess we would neither care about nor believe in. It’s joyfully astonishing to see her spread her wings – and fly.

To stand out, you need something new to say, or at the very least a new way to tread old ground. The One manages neither, unless you count the way its puts aside all that “What would the introduction via technology of perfect happiness and mind-blowing sex for all and the end of the two greatest drivers of human creativity, progress and despair, do to society?” stuff in favour of giving centre stage to a bog-standard murder mystery.

Your Honor is lifted by uniformly great performances.