The Show Must Go On: great TV to get lost in during lockdown

Philharmonia: Walter Presents strand of Channel4.com

There’s no shortage of French horn in this sudsy Gallic drama, which finds Hélène Barizet taking over as the first female conductor of an orchestra rife with misogyny, drugs and as many sexual peccadillos as musical arpeggios. It’s made a star back home of Marie-Sophie Ferdane whose character also has to contend with a cheating husband and a mother whose mental health is rapidly declining. Add in Paris as the glamorous backdrop, and this is bingeing material of the very highest order.

Brave New World: Sky One

With Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio’s attempts to bring it to the big screen coming to nowt, Aldous Huxley’s iconic 1932 novel finally makes its TV bow with David Wiener of Homecoming and The Killing renown taking care of the showrunning. Set in New London and featuring a career reviving turn from Demi Moore, the genetically engineered near future storyline will go down a storm with all those eugenics fans who’ve been hanging round Number 10 and the White House.

Perry Mason: Sky Atlantic

Fifty-four years after the TV series that first brought him to global attention ended, the titular criminal-defense lawyer is back in a gritty origins series set in 1930s Depression-era Los Angeles. Staying as true as possible to Erle Stanley Gardner’s original series of detective stories, the relentless Perry is played with aplomb by Matthew Rhys who previously impressed in The Americans.

The Plot Against America: Sky Atlantic

What and/or who could possibly have inspired Emmy Award winning-director and prominent anti-Trumpite David Simon to adapt Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America for the smallish screen? While you’re mulling that over, we should tell you that Winona Ryder is absolutely ace as a member of the Jewish New Jersey family who tell this alternate history, and Ben Cole a shoo-in as baddie of the year as the President who’s more interested in sucking up to fellow demagogues than fighting fascism.

I'll Be Gone In The Dark: Netflix

True crime author Michelle McNamara spent over a decade researching and writing I’ll Be Gone In The Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search For The Golden Gate Killer, which posthumously hit the bestsellers list in February 2018 two years after her death. It pointed a finger at Joseph James Angelo who was arrested mere weeks after the book’s publication and has just pleaded guilty to thirteen first-degree murders. Similar in tone to Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, its title references the, “You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark” line used by the Golden Gate Killer to one of his victims who survived.

We Hunt Together: Alibi

Taking its visual and plot cues from the Scandi brigade, this noir six-parter focuses on Baba, a former child soldier whose attempts to suppress his predisposition for extreme violence go out the window when he meets the beautiful but very possibly pyscopathic Freddy. The two detectives who are trying to bring their killing spree to an end have severe character flaws of their own, making for a story that’s as morally ambiguous as it is murderous.

New Nurses: Walter Presents strand of Channel4.com

Walter also comes up trumps with this post-World War II drama about a Danish teaching hospital, which controversially decides to admit its first male students. A bullying head nurse makes Erik yearn for his old life in the army, but along then comes the upper class Anna who needs no lessons in beside manner.