Stuart Jeffries

Black Knight treats couriers as unsung heroes, with 5-8 having to drive through a desert that teems with rogues – electrocuting them with the press of a dashboard switch if they manage to climb on his delivery truck. If he gets pulled over, he has a full repertoire of firearms, baseball bats and martial arts skills to subdue them. It’s all endearingly silly.

This ninth and final series of Endeavour, prequel to the adaptation of Colin Dexter’s Morse novels, starts with an intricate and sure-footed episode directed by Shaun Evans.

The creators, Michael and Paul Clarkson, have previous with horror hokum (they produced The Haunting of Bly Manor), but here they make something more engaging.

This theme of what parenting involves here proves more engaging than all the theology and action of the first episode. Asriel is a bad dad but outdone in parenting by his ex, Ruth Wilson’s captivatingly evil Mrs Coulter.

Lang made his name on the peerless cold-case drama Unforgotten, and here his droll and disobliging reimagining of the Darwins’ survival of the dimmest ensures that the couple will remain unforgettable.

Essentially it’s an amalgam of The Deer Hunter, Band of Brothers, Phil and Grant’s sibling rivalry in EastEnders plus a sexy stay-at-home bride doomed to moon tearfully out of windows while her men straighten out Johnny Foreigner. Then something incredible happens. Amber, we abruptly learn, is not what she seems, but a protagonist in her own right.

The violence is on steroids; it’s as if the director and the writer hatched a plot after watching Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders and Ronan Bennett’s Top Boy. ... There are passages of inaction while, you’d think, minions hose down the scenery. But they all involve shifty blokes trading gangland bants so improbable that even Guy Ritchie would doubt them.

Caveats notwithstanding, Bake Off is a beautiful thing, a depiction of a diverse Britain healing itself through the medium of cake.

Despite the manifold sillinesses, the opening scene in James Kent’s directed episode of Ben Chanan’s drama is done effectively.

An extraordinary £140m has been spent over the summer on new talent, but neither they nor anyone else in an Arsenal shirt has been capable of finding the proverbial onion bag. ... Not all or nothing, but something in between.

Jack Bender, the director of the first four episodes, has fun with this well-worn trope. It is the kind of show in which Jim brakes hard and says: “What the … – ?” When there is a tree blocking the road, Tabitha says: “Why is there a tree blocking the road?” It must be the storm, says Jim. “That’s one selective storm,” she replies. Of course it is, Tabitha. It is a spooky-ass zone where the laws of nature don’t apply.

I don’t know what crimes are to be investigated next by this ludicrous drain on Caledonian public finances, but the dialogue is so droll and the performances so charming I’m in for what fisherfolk call the long haul.

The final batch of episodes kicks off with a virtuoso Vince Gilligan-directed instalment, that’s all beguilingly complicated visual techniques and gun-toting, tense plotlines.

The result is a plod – a hagiographic plod. We gather neither moss nor insight as we roll past the usual way stations in the Stones’ career.

Atkinson, by contrast, is intentionally funny in all nine episodes of this sitcom. Atkinson, with his writer Will Davies and director David Kerr, realise that comedy is not tragedy plus time, but stuff plus idiot.

If, like me, you yearn for democratic politics to be carried out with machiavellian sophistication and attention to principle and policy detail – in other words, in a manner inimical to Westminster’s practices – you will agree that it is lovely to have Borgen back. Like a 2022 version of The West Wing, it is a fictional antidote to unbearable reality.

Mood? Tense. Genre? Hokum. Script? By numbers. Likelihood of you catching whole series? I’ll get back to you.

Moon Knight is as witty and philosophically interesting as the first two [WandaVision and What If ...?].

It’s a vast, sumptuous, dynastic political TV series of the kind scarcely made any more, complete with swooning strings from Nico Muhly’s score.

The clothes horse from nowhere is back where we want him to be: in all kinds of trouble.

The chief pleasures of Cat Burglar aren’t really the interactive ones at all. Rather, the joy comes from the brilliantly observed homages to cartoons of the golden era before health and safety became a thing and cartoon violence was of exquisite imagination.

Laura Linney’s performance as Wendy is all the more chilling because her face says apple pie, but everything she does curdles into evil. Meanwhile, Jason Bateman’s Marty is a study in how far a pragmatic accountant can go into the depths of wickedness without the strain showing on his face.

Thanks to some good, understated dialogue – bucks the general mood , ie that this show was not so much written as collaged from odds and ends of other police procedurals. It’s also because Daniels and Tierney remind me so much of David Harbour and Winona Ryder in Stranger Things. Even so, it isn’t great.

Despite the use of the latest technology, including gimbals and drones, it is not clear to me what Animal adds to our understanding of the natural world, besides having celebrities do the voiceovers (a mixed blessing, as sometimes the narration is so flat that it feels as if they literally phoned it in).

Guilt is a guilty pleasure, and I won’t be missing a second of it.

All this unremittingly heteronormative fluff was less interesting than the subplot simmering on the back burner.

The charm of these six amiable half-hour rambles through the Beatle’s songbook (Disney +) arose from the lavishly bearded producer and co-founder of Def Jam Recordings looking like an indulgent patriarch listening to his prodigal son’s improbable adventures.

Perhaps it’s because Ghosts’ writers also penned and performed in Horrible Histories that this storyline felt like a primer on the Elizabethan age, as well as a revival of a regular segment on that show, namely Stupid Deaths.