These stunning, extremely relatable women, with nuanced facial expressions and sensible shoes, helped me outline success on my own terms

I love watching television – ideally in bed with a bowl of salt and vinegar potato chips and a bottle of Coke, zoning out for hours.

I’ve always been like this. In my teens and 20s I watched back-to-back-to-back Law & Order and Law & Order SVU episodes. I loved the comfort and reliability of the form: the drama of a murder, investigation, plot twist and resolution, all in under 60 minutes. But several years ago, I stopped watching Law & Order ; I grew uncomfortable with its uncritical portrayal of the police .

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The wild, format-pushing and often skin-crawling world of early 00s reality television has made for some brilliant retrospective podcast series in recent times.

There’s Something About Miriam was one of the most shocking examples, with its “six guys date the woman of their dreams and discover she is transgender” brief. Wondery’s gripping Harsh Reality revisited the murky series after its star Miriam Rivera was found dead a decade after filming.

The latest Neil Gaiman story about two ghosts on the run has spells, shenanigans and supernatural horrors galore. It’s impossible not to be entertained by such escapist adventures

Given the amount of exposition clunked out, the first episode of Dead Boy Detectives sure is confusing. But I think I have it worked out. There are two boys – best friends Charles (Jayden Revri) and Edwin (George Rexstrew). They are both dead – lippy Charles carked it in the 1980s, stiffly Edwardian Edwin in 1916. Somehow they are both still on Earth (though we learn that Edwin spent some time in hell before escaping) and are using their time to find souls trapped less happily here and release them. The first we meet is a maddened first world war soldier in a cursed gas mask they must slice off before Death (Kirby, formerly known as Kirby Howell-Baptiste). They always have to hide from Death lest she collect them too. They are actually dead boy detectives on the lam. Fortunately, they can jump into mirrors to escape and to travel. Charles also has a backpack that holds an infinite number of items, which is such a cheat by the creators that you can only applaud wildly. What else do you need to know? Oh, they can be hurt by iron. Iron’s a thing for them.

So now, on with the show! Which is aimed at a young audience, who should love it. It whips along and, after the confusing start, finds a clairvoyant and a groove that work brilliantly. The clairvoyant, Crystal Palace (Kassius Nelson, with screen presence to burn) joins the pair after they release her from a demonic possession. She can’t remember a thing about herself but has a psychic vision that tells her where a missing child is being held, surrounded by black magic and supernatural horrors.

You will laugh and may cry watching these charming youngsters prepare for their bar and batmitzvahs – but with antisemitism on the rise, this film feels bizarrely flimsy

In itself, the hour-long documentary Growing Up Jewish is … fine. Gentle and uplifting, it follows three British girls and a boy as they prepare for their bat and barmitzvahs, the Jewish rite of passage that will mark their transition at 13 into adulthood. Dylan, whose parents were raised Orthodox but attend a Reform synagogue, is thoughtful and increasingly nervous as the day approaches. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a confident person,” he says, eyes wide in his tiny, beautiful face. As with all bar and batmitzvahs, the story of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt will be central. But he worries about the deaths of the Egyptians as the sea Moses parted closes over and drowns them. He doesn’t think this should be celebrated. His rabbi, Miriam, talks him through other texts and commentaries on the story that give it depth and context, and suggest it is an illustration of God’s acknowledgment of human imperfection and the need to strive for better. He incorporates all this into his speech and if there is a dry eye in the house, I’d be surprised. There wasn’t in mine.

Talia has a more robust approach. Her batmitzvah is about becoming a woman (“Finding love! Doing things on your own!”), then having a party. A party that must go with a swing after the traditional service her Orthodox family want. She practises her entrance (to Europe’s The Final Countdown). Lovely, says the Jewish DJ, who has obviously had much experience in these matters. “But let’s remember this is about everyone who’s been part of your life for the last 13 years.” Talia takes the point without letting it lessen her ebullience one iota. It is impossible not to want more of her. “My parents think I’m funny,” she says, puzzled. “When I haven’t a clue what I’ve said.” If she doesn’t make you laugh at least three times in the hour, I would advise you to see a doctor.

Anjli Mohindra is marvellous as a cop shunted off to a remote island, only to find a strange lawless land full of pagan – possibly satanic – rituals. Then a body turns up and all bets are off

Folk-horror film touchstone The Wicker Man celebrated its 50th birthday last year, presumably by not blowing out a candle with a tiny human sacrifice trapped inside. Alibi’s wickedly playful island psychodrama The Red King feels like a belated part of the anniversary revels. It pays the ultimate Wicker Man tribute by harvesting the premise wholesale.

Again, we have an uptight copper gatecrashing a remote isle where the old ways still hold sway. There are locals parading in creepy rustic masks, a self-possessed aristocrat lording over everything and, crucially, a missing child no one seems that fussed about finding.

Mike Bubbins stars as a man who awakes in 2024, having been frozen for 50 years, and wonders why everyone is picking up dog poo in little plastic bags

Mammoth is almost a dad joke writ large. It kicks off with a flashback to a school skiing trip to France in 1979, where medallion-wearing, lady-loving PE teacher Tony Mammoth recklessly launches himself off the side of a mountain. He is soon followed by a catastrophic avalanche. Fifty years later, in a concept that seems to have been concocted just so the in-show newspaper can boast the headline Mammoth No Longer Extinct, Tony is found frozen in the snow and revived. He must now navigate the world of 2024, from the confused perspective of a late-70s unreconstructed male.

Tony walks through modern-day Cardiff noticing modern-day things, such as hoverboards, men carrying babies and people picking up dog poo with little plastic bags. For a fleeting few months, he is world-famous as “the Ice Man”, but then his moment passes and he finds himself right back where he began, teaching PE at secondary school. In a nice nod to a story that every secondary school seems to have had its own version of, the previous teacher is absent, having had a nervous breakdown.

The Oscar-winner’s powerful documentary proves how fragile the earth’s ecosystems are. From angry hippos to salmon swimming on tarmac, it is truly valuable television

Our Living World begins with a cheesy inspirational quote: “Realise that everything connects to everything else.” Leonardo da Vinci said that, possibly. Soon, this nature series has glowing blue lines running across the screen, and Cate Blanchett on the voiceover, authoritatively announcing that the planet’s species are dependent on each other in ways we cannot immediately see and might not have imagined.

It sounds as if this programme thinks it has discovered the concept of ecosystems, and across four episodes it makes repeated use of the same trick: it shows us one animal or plant, then shocks us with how that one helps another. Gradually, however, the show builds this into a powerful lecture on the climate crisis, conservation and, in particular, the importance of small gestures and how they can have larger effects down the line. In an age when we urgently need to act but the task of maintaining a survivable planet can seem too big for an individual to contemplate, let alone tackle, it’s a valuable lesson.

The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

As a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.

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