Lucy Mangan

The details pile up, but intrigue fails to mount.

Messiah is potent stuff packed with fine performances.

Although it registers friendships and fallings-out, it does not make them into soapy storylines. It prefers, equally refreshingly, to dig deep into the many qualities that must combine to make a single performer, and then how they must coalesce into one team.

It’s a bloodstained love letter to a classic, beautifully and delicately scented with just the faintest hint of ham gothic yarns need; a homage to all the great Counts who have gone before, but still entirely its own thing. And again, like the best of Gatiss and Moffat’s Sherlocks, with the searching intelligence that promises to flesh out the foundational story. Enjoy sinking your teeth into it all.

[A] rich, clever, funny and courageous adaptation.

There is plenty of action, for those who want it, but this is far from the standard wartime miniseries. It is a beautifully turned ensemble piece, with everyone getting their time in the spotlight as we move between locations without anybody’s characters or storylines feeling underbaked.

It was all as gorgeous, breathtaking, moving and harrowing as we have come to expect from this world-leading branch of the BBC. There is nothing to criticise or cavil at here.

Apart from the novelty of seeing Japan’s capital unfetishised – this is a Tokyo where people live, work and manage the daily grind, not a neon-soaked fun palace or futuristic hellscape – and the odd animated interlude (created by the company behind Hey Duggee, fact fans), nothing here feels new or revelatory.

There are attempts at knowingness: at one point, our Henry tells someone a prophecy has to rhyme. This is not a good idea, as it throws into too sharp relief the limits to what Geralt and his merry band of sorceresses and proto-feminist princesses can be said to know. Play it straight, dear scriptwriters, or don’t play it at all. ... But again, if you like this sort of thing, go nuts.

By nearly halfway through the series we have had only a set of decidedly unoriginal revelations revealed in a deeply pedestrian manner. You can feel the on-screen talent longing to let rip, but the script and the structure and the sense just aren’t there.

Every relationship – or lack thereof – is beautifully drawn. ... In the second episode, it truly begins to take off and by the end, it is soaring. Bea’s uncompromising character and performance become something to love as well as admire.

Socially responsible nature programming that retains all its beauty – we have at last, and at least, come to this.

I Love You, Now Die is a superbly perceptive study of the endless convolutions and complexities of the human mind – and the proliferation of both when two people in a desperately unhappy state meet. It succeeds in raising questions – gently, but relentlessly – about our prejudices and our readiness to judge, as individuals and through our institutions, from the media to the courts. Without losing sight of anyone’s misery or loss, it forces nuance – a characteristic increasingly absent from discourse – into the discussion.

It allows the mind to roam across many questions while the story unspools efficiently before you, asking little in the way of mental or emotional investment and giving much in the way of solidly old-fashioned whodunnitry. Pairs well with apple crumble and custard or large slabs of Dairy Milk.

This sober, responsible production that has even managed to avoid the temptation of hyping it as Martin Clunes’s first foray into straight drama and aggrandising him or the production at their expense.

There are no narrative twists awaiting us here. No miscarriages of justice straining to be heard. No insights into the complexities of an unfolding case or scandal of corrupt policemen, judges, clergy or politicians. The tapes themselves are the USP here. ... The only truly chilling thing about Conversations With a Killer was how unchilling it was.

As a programme, Surviving R Kelly is deeply flawed. At best, it treads a fine line between attesting to the apparent pain of those taking part and exploiting it – and often gives in to temptation.

Remake Death Race by all means. Put a new twist on the zombipocalypse as The Walking Dead finally lapses into terminal decline, do. But bolting the two together creates distractingly bizarre results.

It is, in short, an immaculately scripted (by Waller-Bridge) and performed (by everyone) half-hour – certainly up there with the best of the first series, and probably up with the best of TV comedy-drama entire.

They [Nick Hornby, Stephen Frears, Rosamund Pike and Chris O’Dowd] have created something close to a masterpiece (or 10). It seems like a double-marriage of true minds. The quartet make it look effortless, even artless, but every aspect, every frame, every word, every beat is a perfectly considered, crafted and curated thing that creates something even greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s another dazzling Murphy triumph. It has his trademark hurricane of a narrative that sweeps you up and deposits you breathless and agape somewhere else entirely an hour later. He has garnered a set of blistering performances from his actors.

The parts are all good – the scenery, the performances, the script – but they add up to slightly less than their sum. Perhaps it is the extra exposition that makes it feel too ponderous and prevents it from taking flight.

There might not be much, narratively, that is new to adult viewers – but is there ever? Still, it is a fresh twist and the evocation of incorruptible Spielbergian innocence that is maintained by centring the show on such young protagonists is restorative to the ageing, battered soul, even if the head cries out that it could have been compressed into six episodes to no detriment and probably quite some benefit.

It is a tasty slice of cut-and-come-again cake, even if the relationship between Cassie and Rob – upon which the credibility of the story turns (or will, if faithful to the books) – is not yet sufficiently close or well-drawn.

It promises to be a fittingly thoughtful and wholly absorbing last installment.

While it is fun, and has moments of heart, it also has moments that seem to flirt with period drama parody.

[Russell T Davies] aerates the heaviest, most fraught issues (from the insidious nature of tech, to income inequality, to the rapidity with which events can become both ancient history and rapidly repeated) with wit and optimism, so that they are no longer a burden, to us or the narrative, but grist to the mental and dramatic mill.

Nobody does anything stupid, extreme, inconsistent or out of character. The beauty of the script and the performances – which build relationships so delicately and naturally, which modulate so deftly in and out of grief and laughter, and which turn ordinary moments into hilarity and heartbreak without you noticing how they got you there – will take your breath away.