So how did everyone do this year?
There's far too much TV around these days for any one show to be said to dominate proceedings, but there's little doubt that the second series of FLEABAG was one of the cultural events of the year. Clear away all the thinkpieces, sold-out jumpsuits and social media declarations of clerical crushes and you're left with a piece of work that was pretty much flawless. Each episode played out like a self-contained half-hour masterpiece, with its restaurant punch-up opener possibly the best. For me, the only misstep was the two-hander scene with Kristin Scott Thomas, which felt a little as if Phoebe Waller-Bridge had written it purely because she wanted to do a two-hander scene with Kristin Scott Thomas. Otherwise, this was an even bolder series than its garlanded predecessor, and it appears that Waller-Bridge is also bold enough to leave it there.
Despite sniping from some quarters about her privilege, Waller-Bridge remains such a hot property that her abdication of the showrunning seat for KILLING EVE's second series meant it was inevitable that folk would take against it. For my money, brilliantly-named replacement Emerald Fennell captured the tone brilliantly from the first episode, as demonstrated by the scenes of Villanelle in a French hospital. Perhaps that shock of the new was absent, but the show remained compelling even as its central characters were forced into new roles. Henry Lloyd-Hughes made for a brilliantly creepy adversary, while the likes of Adrian Scarborough and Julian Barratt put in memorable appearances. Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw both delivered more sterling work, while a character from the first series made an unexpected return. And Jodie Comer was, if anything, even more impressive this time out, her ability to inhabit different roles and accents a true wonder.
In terms of shows about which it is almost impossible to write without mentioning Fleabag, Roisin Conaty's GAMEFACE remained a dafter, more sitcommy delight, while THIS WAY UP found Aisling Bea playing to her strengths - naturally funny but with real emotional depth. Also dealing with mental health issues, though less successfully, was PURE, which never quite connected with its audience despite a decent turn from Charly Clive and strong support from Joe Cole and Niamh Algar.
Fleabag's strongest rival came, unexpectedly, from the world of period drama. Sally Wainwright's GENTLEMAN JACK was an absolute triumph, with Suranne Jones hitting a career peak as Anne Lister, charging about 19th Century Yorkshire (both literally and metaphorically) and occasionally pausing to break the fourth wall. Her masterful (mistressful?) command of proceedings was in danger of eclipsing all about her, but Sophie Rundle did well with what initially seemed the slightly drippy character of Anne's prospective partner, while Gemma Whelan proved an effective, eye-rolling foil as Lister sister Marian. Nothing else could compete in the world of terrestrial period drama; having ducked out of POLDARK around the second series, I caught a random episode towards the end of its final run which appeared to be a compilation of unconnected scenes packing in every conceivable genre cliche. And while a dubiously-executed adaptation/completion of Jane Austen's unfinished novel SANDITON wasn't without its charms, I'd rather view it as the story of Charlotte Spencer's snarky Esther Denham than Rose Williams' perma-squinting heroine-by-numbers Charlotte Heywood.
We'll come back to the present, but let's consider a different kind of period drama first. YEARS & YEARS fast-forwarded a family through the next decade-and-a-half in a kind of dystopian soap opera that seemed equally likely to prompt floods of tears and fatal heart attacks. Everything felt rooted in a very plausible near-future, with writer Russell T Davies recognising that most of the things which claw at society now won't be going away - or getting better - any time soon. Humanitarian crises, financial collapses, the gig economy and homophobia were all present and correct, along with frankly terrifying advances in technology and increasing tension between nation states. But the core of the show is how these things affect the life of the Lyons family. It's this that gives the show real heart, making it more than just several episodes of Black Mirror running concurrently, and there's predictably sterling work here from Russell Tovey, Anne Reid, Jessica Hynes and Rory Kinnear, along with the less well-known (to me) Ruth Madeley, T'Nia Miller, Lydia West and Maxim Baldry. Genuinely intense and with some truly moving scenes, this was the finest thing I saw all year. And I haven't even mentioned Emma Thompson's role as the leader of a populist political party with its own UKIP-on-QVC TV channel.
Female demagogues had a bit of a moment on our screens this year, in fact, with Sarah Lancashire even more terrifying than Thompson in MOTHERFATHERSON. Where the latter embraced tackiness and vulgarity on her route to the top, Lancashire's Angela Howard delivered her brand of nationalism in statesperson-like arguments, her plausibility as a politician drowning out the dog-whistle hints. Not everything worked in this one-off; while Richard Gere's media mogul Max Finch was fittingly slick and seemingly heartless, he couldn't compete with Donald Sutherland in last year's Trust or (I imagine) Brian Cox in Succession, and the subplot involving Sinead Cusack and Paul Ready as crusading journalists didn't quite land. On the plus side, Helen McCrory was as compelling a presence as always, while Billy Howle played her and Finch's son impressively: for one episode as a cocky, coke-huffing shit, and thereafter as a man struggling to cope with a drastic change of circumstance. Pippa Bennett-Walker, the ever-excellent Joseph Mawle and, again, Niamh Algar, provided strong support, and while the idea of a Muslim PM was more far-fetched than anything in Years & Years, everything that happened to Danny Sapani's Jahan Zakari and his family rung true.
Onto crime now, and, obviously, LINE OF DUTY. With every series, it gets harder for this show to maintain its high standards, and I'd argue that this run was just a little less effective than some of its predecessors. Much of this was down to the vexing question of whether or not supposedly straight arrow Ted Hastings was criminal mastermind H, a preoccupation which proved, well, vexing, as it meant Adrian Dunbar spent a good two thirds of the series alternating between looking sad in a Travelodge and shifty in his office (before drawing the blinds). It also somewhat stole attention from a fine performance from Stephen Graham as this series' lead guest. But despite any minor misgivings, Line Of Duty remains in a league of its own, whether dealing in its established tropes (a much-loved character meeting a grisly end in the first episode) or upending them (Hastings on the receiving end of a grilling from Anna Maxwell Martin's formidable DCS Patricia Carmichael in the last two). Some nice callbacks to the very first series too; well, not sure you could call them all nice...
In terms of returning series, or at least characters, SHETLAND and BAPTISTE made welcome reappearances early in the year, both coincidentally revolving around people-smuggling storylines. The apparently final series of the former was as dependable as ever, even if regular viewers of British TV will have figured out one of the bad guys as soon as his ever-shifty face appeared (spoiler: not Mark Bonnar - this is the one where he's allowed not to be evil, and you'll be hearing from him later). Baptiste found its titular detective, previously found in The Missing, being dragged into an abduction case in Amsterdam by Tom Hollander's Edward Stratton. The latter's performance is what stood out from this twisty-turny series, playing a character about whom your opinion changes from episode to episode. Also back on UK screens this year was the superb CARDINAL, the best Scandi-Noir of the year despite coming from, well, Canada.
There was no shortage of new series, either. DUBLIN MURDERS adapted the first two books in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series (which I haven't read, although I did enjoy her unconnected The Wych Elm this year). Both plotlines, which in the adaptation run semi-concurrently, involve murders in the present (well, the present of the series, which is 2006) which seem to be connected to the past of each of the two main characters, Killian Fox's Rob Reilly and Sarah Greene's Cassie Maddox (not that Sarah Greene, obviously). This was a dark delight, with a willingness to go to dark places, excellent performances from both leads and, if you consider that there are basically four mysteries being kept spinning throughout, the fact that not all of them are effectively solved might mean a second series looks on the cards; unfortunately, each of the novels feature different central characters, so who knows whether Fox and Greene will return?
Looking more likely to come back is THE CAPTURE, which felt very much like the BBC's attempt to do another Bodyguard. Now that the Harry Potter lady's written another Strike novel, it'd be nice to think that Holliday Grainger will be back in due course for its adaptation, but in the meantime she proved she can hold her own in a lead role as DI Rachel Carey in this stylish thriller set in the world of deepfake technology and black ops. Sharing screen time was the also-impressive Callum Turner as (falsely?) accused on-the-run soldier Shaun Emery, his naturally shifty features a perfect fit for a complicated character. Menacing appearances from Ron Perlman and Lia Williams, and friendlier ones from Cavan Clerkin and Paul Ritter, gave ballast to an ambitious techno-thriller.
Back to Scotland next, and also back to Mark Bonnar playing a bastard, in GUILT, a slightly queasy edge-of-your-seat black comedy well worth your time, as two brothers try to cover up an accidental killing and things go, as the rules say they must, spectacularly awry. Obviously, Bonnar is one of the brothers in question; the other is played by Jamie Sives, who also cropped up in THE VICTIM, a rather more sober story of a mother who believes the man who killed her son when both were children is now back living under a new identity in the same city. In the lead role here is Kelly Macdonald, who told The Guardian this year that she "give(s) good grief face." She sure does. And she also appeared in GIRI/HAJI, one of the year's most impressive dramas, criss-crossing between London and Tokyo, past and present, bloody shoot-outs and complicated feelings, even, occasionally, animated and live action. The Japanese cast, all unknown to me, were excellent, particularly Takehiro Hira and Yosuke Kubozuka as another pair of brothers, while Will Sharpe had fun in a role very different from his standard boyish naif fare. Also good to see that the cliche of the lead cop's partner being dishevelled and portly is still alive and well in Japan. While being nothing like them, Giri/Haji felt like this year's equivalent to The Shadow Line or Black Earth Rising, a genuinely outstanding bolt-from-the-blue one-off, though perhaps with more gunfire. And, in the last episode, an interpretative dance piece.
One more drama before we go back to the funnies? This one was a bit of a romp, anyway, I promise. DEUTSCHLAND 83 returned, only this time round it was DEUTSCHLAND 86, and it was also set in Angola, South Africa, Libya and France. An exiled Martin Rauch is reunited with imperious aunt Maria Schrader as, once again, real historical events are marshalled into a narrative of espionage and shifting loyalties. I don't remember the first series packing as much humour in, though there's no shortage of tension and gravity in a series which takes in arms smuggling, terrorist attacks, the AIDS crisis and attempts to flee East Germany, not to mention the year's most balletic telly gunfight.
As we cross back over into comedy, it occurs to me that we're also back in the world of period drama. Set around a decade after Deutschland 86, the second series of DERRY GIRLS also used real-life events - the end of The Troubles, Bill Clinton's visit to Ireland, er, the popularity of Take That - as a backdrop. But for all this specificity, it remains primarily a sweet portrayal of school-age friendship that crosses audience barriers rather more successfully than the first episode's Friends Across The Barricades initiative. At the opposite end of the country, and set in the present day, THE YOUNG OFFENDERS strikes a similar note with the misadventures of lovable doofuses Jock and Connor, though most deserving of plaudits in this second series was Shane Casey's recurring performance as Billy Murphy.
Subtler fare came from the third and final series of MUM. Where previous series set episodes months apart, and always in lead character Cathy's house, this one took place over a week in a lavish house rented for titular mother and widow Cathy's hapless brother Derek's birthday. As per, the cautiously blossoming romance between Lesley Manville's Cathy and her friend Michael (Peter Mullan in atypically sweet mode) is surrounded by the latter's family of dimbulbs and grotesques. The delicious snobbery of Derek's partner Pauline is tempered by envy at the house's owners, much wealthier and more successful than her. Cathy's son Jason is on spectacularly surly form, his awareness of what's going on leading to passive aggression towards Michael before resolving in a tender moment. Many of the biggest laughs come from the friendship between Derek and Jason's girlfriend Kelly, who's doing the world's worst job of concealing the fact that she's pregnant. This wonderful series deserves to win awards, and plenty of them.
More relationship-related comedy came from STATE OF THE UNION, a run of ten-minute episodes showing a couple meeting in a pub ahead of a marriage counselling session. Rosamund Pike and Chris O'Dowd have quite possibly never been better. And for a (mostly) teenage variant on matters of the heart, we could step over to Netflix and the wonderful SEX EDUCATION. Once you got past its weirdly undefined setting, which appeared to be a 90s American high school, only in Wales and filled entirely with English people, this revealed itself to be a show with real heart. A fantastic Gillian Anderson held down the show's key adult role, while as her son Otis, Asa Butterfield found himself attempting to impart sexual advice to his peers, despite being unable even to have a successful hand shandy himself. I had my doubts about some of the other key characters, but Ncuti Gatwa uncovered hidden depths beyond gay best friend tokenism as Eric, while my concerns that Emma Mackey's Maeve was just a little too perfect a teenage boy's fantasy dissolved when I realised the show had a female creator.
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As for the year's most underrated sitcom, I'll go to bat for ZOMBOAT!. In the years since Shaun and friends decided to go to The Winchester, have a nice cold pint and wait for all this to blow over, there's been no shortage of zom-coms, mostly called things like Cockneys Vs Zombies or Granny Of The Dead, and they've mostly been absolute toss. Somehow, Zomboat! took a similarly comedic conceit and made it work brilliantly. Two Brummie sisters and two Londoner mates meet and try to escape from a Birmingham-birthed zombie apocalypse... on a canal boat. Both duos are opposites: Cara Theobold, who's got form in the comedy horror genre thanks to Crazyhead from a couple of years back, plays party girl Jo, while her sister Kat is the crew's MVP, thanks both to the character's in-depth knowledge of zombie fiction lore (and ability to drive a boat), and because Leah Brotherhead's performance is the best of the series. Meanwhile, Hamza Jeetooa's cynical Sunny contrasts brilliantly with gym bunny Amar, played by Ryan McKen, revealing his comedy cops after appearances in the likes of The State. Well written and perfect post-pub entertainment, Zomboat! deserves a second series, particularly as the speed of their chosen method of transport means they're only just leaving Birmingham by the end of the sixth episode...
Back to ver Flix, where THE GOOD PLACE returned for the first half of its last series. It feels like the right time for this one to be bowing out, as the in-show reboots pile up and the timeline becomes unfathomably complicated. The six leads are still fantastic though, and the mid-series cliffhanger at least suggests that they'll all be properly reunited for the final reckoning (and hopefully without some of the annoying newer characters...).
A show that probably should have ended a while back is my old favourite THE 100. Around its second and third series, it was an allegory-spraying, underrated gem, but by this year's sixth, cracks were starting to show in its vision of a dystopian future, where everyone who's survived the apocalypse has really great hair. Having finally rendered Earth entirely uninhabitable - great work, guys! - the gang find themselves on a distant moon peopled by survivors of an earlier colonisation. Everything looks pretty perfect (if you ignore the terrible CGI rendering the Disney-style castle), but obviously there are dark secrets at hand and everything goes south with unseemly haste. Last time out, they found a way to kill characters off through old age; this time, they find a way to kill characters off while the people playing them get to stay in the cast. It certainly wasn't all bad: there were still some pretty good performances, not least from longterm lynchpin Eliza Taylor, along with effective set pieces and moments of genuine tension. But the sneaky, fan-friendly reappearance of three dead characters via various hallucinations and fugue states seemed like a tacit admission that everyone was enjoying this a lot more a few years back.
Anyway, on a fantasy tip nothing could beat this year's long-awaited TV adaptation of HIS DARK MATERIALS. Its creators (Jack thorne, Tom Hooper and Bad Wolf) rose admirably to the challenge of doing justice to one of the best-loved literary series of the last few decades, and every aspect of this rendering was damn near perfect. I mean, you can split hairs over, er, hair colour, and the early introduction of characters and themes from the second novel was a risk. But Ruth Wilson and Dafne Keen were both perfect as Mrs Coulter and Lyra, while bringing our world (and with it, Will) into proceedings worked well in bringing the narrative threads together. Nothing was added or subrtacted without good reason, with expanded roles for Boreal (a menacing Ariyon Bakare), Ma Costa (Anne-Marie Duff) and Will's mum (Nina Sosayana) all paying divends. Favourite characters were portaryed winningly, from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Lee Scoresby to, er, CGI (and Joe Tandberg)'s Iorek Byrnison, while all the locations, from the spires of an alternative Oxford colege to the icy terror of Bolvangar, looked perfect. Crucially, Philip Pullman's vision of the conflict between those questing for knowledge and a fascist, disciplinarian church remained uncompromised, while the dark turn of events at the end of the first book was allowed to play out onscreen on the last Sunday before Christmas. The quality of the show was aptly demonstrated by the quality of the actors populating the cast, even in relatively minor roles, with Andrew Scott going from Hot Priest to bloke on YouTube video (OK, you probably don't have to have reasd the books to know that he's going to have a more siginificant role in the future, but still...)
That would have been the end of it, but my insistence on waiting until the end of the year to do this has paid dividends with one particular festive season treat nudging its way in here. No, not that one. I'm talking, of course, about Mackenzie Crook's ace WORZEL GUMMIDGE reboot. Non-annoying kiddiwinks, refreshingly silly gags and a wider contextualisation of the scarecrow world made this a late-year treat. On balance, I think I preferred the crop circle-creating, wyrd folk dancing scarecrows of the first episode to the cow-graffitiing wannabe biker scarecrows of the second, but I'm happy to live in a world where I'm presented with the choice.
