Ryan Murphy’s star-studded 60s extravaganza brings alive a dreamlike portrait of a legendary writer, while the world’s biggest cartoon launches its most epic episode ever

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Scottish comedian Richard Gadd’s borderline horror about a female stalker is brilliantly eerie. It’s tense, creepily filmed television that will stay with you for a long time to come

Never have the words “sent from my iPhone” been so chilling. Baby Reindeer is an adaptation of Richard Gadd’s acclaimed one-man play, which hammered out the horrifying story of his experience of being stalked by a middle-aged woman named Martha, who he meets at the pub where he works. She gets hold of his email address, and starts to message him, incessantly, sometimes coherently, sometimes not, all through the night, every night. The emails end with, “sent from my iPhone”. In the show, Gadd’s alter ego, Donny Dunn, has a realisation: Martha doesn’t have an iPhone. At first, Baby Reindeer is chilling in small instances like this. But as Martha’s behaviour becomes more obsessive, and Donny’s more self-destructive, the two become locked in a terrible downward spiral. This is a self-loathing horror that is relentlessly bleak.

It is a true story, it tells us at the outset, very Netflixishly. Gadd first took Baby Reindeer to the Edinburgh fringe in 2019 as an hour-long play, crunching the story down into its harrowing essentials. Martha existed only as an empty bar-stool, and Gadd used multimedia and recordings of messages she had left him and people close to him, in order to flesh it out. I saw it that year, and was left stunned by the palpable fear it left in its wake. The ending was devastating. You can only pity the people who might have heard of Gadd as a standup and popped in to see if he was going to make them laugh.

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This immaculately made, supremely witty post-apocalyptic drama is yet another brilliant video game adaptation. It’s funny, self-aware and tense – an astonishing balancing act

The first thing to note is that, as with The Last of Us, there is no need for any viewer to be au fait with the source material of Fallout, Amazon’s new competitor in the field of hit video game adaptations (though a fan of the game who watched it with me assures me that there is much to enjoy in addition to the basic narrative if you are).

For newcomers such as me, this intelligent, drily witty, immaculately constructed series set in the Fallout universe fully captivates and entertains on its own terms. It opens in 1950s America, at the height of the cold war and the “red scare”, with former TV star Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins) reduced to appearing at a children’s birthday party after being tarred with the pinko brush. A mushroom cloud appears on the horizon, the blast wave hits, the apocalypse arrives.

Fallout is on Prime Video

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A decade after it was first shown, an episode of cold war drama The Game, starring Brian Cox, is causing a surprising flurry of excitement …

Name: The best hour of TV.

Age: Ten years old.

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The actor puts in a huge performance as the Chancellor of a fictional European nation. The moral seems to be: ‘Kate Winslet’s being a bit weird, isn’t she?’

You know what would be genuinely good and interesting? If someone made a miniseries with a big actor or actress that really sunk its fangs into this particular fiddling-while-Rome-burns political moment. As in: we keep being fed a pablum of culture war to distract us from the cost of living crisis that is precipitating an arguably even bigger financial disaster lurking on the horizon. The fact that we’re teetering on the brink of about a dozen different crises would be slightly more bearable if it didn’t feel like the politicians in charge of it cared about nothing other than the being a politician -ness of it. They’ve got one eye on the after-dinner speaking gigs and the consultancy roles they’ve already been taken to lunch at The Berkeley about. They’re fine.

So, you know. That feels like it could be a good background setting for a TV show.

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The post-apocalyptic gaming classic becomes an intelligent, sneakily funny thriller, while Netflix offer a compelling stalker drama with a difference

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The lead’s performance nearly carries this neo-noir crime series, but it’s derivative, uninspired and features a mid-series twist so maddening it’s unforgivable

It is a truth commonly acknowledged that neo-noir has been a tricky proposition ever since LA Confidential showed us its platonic ideal back in 1997. More than a quarter of a century later, the makers of Apple TV+’s new contribution to the genre think they have found a way to mark its place in history. We’ll come back to that, because I’m yet to reconcile my furious reaction to the narrative tactics employed therein.

We begin simply enough (and, appropriately, in black and white). In Tokyo, hard-boiled private investigator John Sugar ( Colin Farrell ) is in the process of rescuing – by means of street smarts, and a reluctant but effective amount of violence, incurring minimal damage to his suit – the kidnapped offspring of a Yakuza boss. Upon receipt of the traditional brown envelope, he returns to the US and his boss, Ruby (Kirby, formerly known as Kirby Howell-Baptiste), informing her that he has illicitly picked up another job on the way. Sugar has been contacted by movie producer Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell – who, in a series that makes intertextuality an art form, was also in LA Confidential) to find his missing granddaughter, Olivia (Sydney Chandler – no relation to Raymond, but in keeping with the mood of the thing). Her father, Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris), and half-brother, David (Nathan Corddry), think she has gone on a bender after two years of sobriety. Would that things were so simple.

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This scintillating and noirish adaptation leaves Matt Damon’s 1999 version in the shade. It’s largely thanks to Scott – who is just mesmerising

Here he is, then: every ounce of his talent, ineffable charm and lightly reptilian hotness on display. Andrew Scott steps up to play Patricia Highsmith’s titular antihero in Netflix’s eight-part adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley (the first volume of a series of pulpy novels now known as the “Ripliad”).

When we first meet him, Tom Ripley is living in a borderline flophouse in New York and scratching an inelegant living as a petty, white-collar criminal; diverting people’s post and cheques, and running fake debt collection agencies. But you can’t keep a bad man – or a good fraudster – down for long. When Dickie Greenleaf’s father offers him the job (the only one of Dickie’s friends who will entertain the idea) of heading out on an all-expenses paid trip to Italy to try to persuade his son (played by Johnny Flynn ) to give up his wastrel life in Europe and come home, he grabs the opportunity. By which I mean: runs with it clutched to his chest with both hands, as far as it will take him.

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This big, bold drama about a lone wolf who hunts down missing people has been a mega-hit in the US. Thanks partly to its lead cracking unfathomable mysteries and spending a lot of time shirtless

If I were to find myself immobilised on rough, isolated terrain, leg broken, hypothermic, with my rescue solely dependent on a walking jawline called Colter, then far be it from me to tell Colter – a man for whom the word “rugged” was surely invented – how to go about his business. Get me off the mountain, get me into one of those silvery space blankets, cup of tea would be nice. But, now I think of it, if he wouldn’t mind, maybe I would offer Colter a tiny bit of advice. When it comes to soothing rescue patter, I’m not sure that the Simon Cowell approach works. “[If] we stay put, your odds of survival – leg intact? Fifteen to 20%,” Colter tells Jessie, a poor stranded hiker who, naturally, whimpers in fear. And then he stabilises her leg, carries her away, and she’s going to be just fine. Talk about distracting us from the story.

This is the world of US TV mega-hit drama Tracker, newly arrived in the UK. Colter Shaw ( This Is Us star Justin Hartley) is what some might call a mercenary. He finds missing people in order to collect the reward money, which is usually very substantial. Jessie went on a multi-day solo hike and didn’t return on schedule; her boyfriend and parents are offering $50,000 for anyone who can bring her back. Colter turns up with his photogenic Airstream caravan and does the grunt work before cashing the cheque. He prefers to call himself a “rewardist”. “I find it a steady job … Everyone’s looking for something,” he says, ruggedly.

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