The Americans
There’s slightly less espionage action in the fourth season of the impeccable spy drama, as KGB sleeper agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) take time off to collect themselves. Not that it stops them doing a heist to break biological weapons out of a lab.
What we said: What makes The Americans one of the standout shows in the “golden age of television” is that it isn’t about spies at all. Just as The Sopranos isn’t really about the mafia, Mad Men isn’t really about advertising, and Six Feet Under isn’t really about funerals, The Americans goes way beyond whether or not Philip and Elizabeth will continue to get away with their duplicitous life.
Better Call Saul
The Breaking Bad spin-off about Jimmy McGill slowly becoming Saul Goodman is hilarious but also touching and utterly human. It’s also less male than BB, especially in the second series when Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) comes into her own.
What we said: The longer it takes Jimmy to get to Saul and beyond, the better.
Billions
Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti go head-to-head in a disconcerting drama that manages to make hedge funds sexy (thanks in no small part to a smattering of S&M kink). Lewis plays Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, a charming, slippery billionaire trader who the endlessly het-up US attorney Chuck Rhoades (Giamatti) is convinced is doing insider trading. Compelling viewing that’ll leave you feeling icky and complicit.
What we said: Hell it’s fun, even if I feel ever so slightly naughty – guilty even – for enjoying it so much.
Camping
Julia Davis’s excruciating campsite comedy about relationships and middle age will make you laugh, squirm and shudder – perhaps because you recognise some of it from your own life.
What we said: She’s an appalling genius, that Davis. I shall need a holiday to recover. Not camping.
Deutschland 83
The 80s-set German-American spy drama that makes the cold war feel more fun than frosty.
What we said: It’s a fast-paced tale of espionage set in Germany in 1983, a time when the cold war was getting notably hotter, as the United States and the Soviet Union squared off and the threat of imminent nuclear meltdown became increasingly possible. D83 makes that terror clear from the start.
Employable Me
Poignant documentary series in the same vein as The Undateables, but with a whole lot more heart. It follows six people with neurological conditions from Tourette’s to Asperger’s as they try to get jobs as lawyers, tree surgeons, teachers and auctioneers – in many cases their first ever.
What we said: If it helps to highlight, and destigmatise, and encourage a wiser, more enlightened approach to recruitment, that’s got to be good. Plus, it’s warm, human, moving telly.
Fresh Meat
In the last outing for the daft Manchester houseshare comedy, students Vod, JP, Howard, Josie, Kingsley and Oregon are heading for their finals and learning some hideous truths about life after the salad days of uni.
What we said: It grew in confidence and stature, from a promising but shaky start, into something excellent ... but knowing when to knock something on the head, comedy especially, is important. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are doing the right thing.
Game of Thrones
It’s the first season David Benioff and DB Weiss have outpaced George RR Martin’s books and gone off-piste. We know it’s not perfect, and we know it’s not over yet – but we had to include it, if only for a certain someone’s resurrection, Hodor’s heroicism and Dany’s Dothraki revenge.
What we said: Will we get a Stark reunion between Sansa, Jon, Arya and Rickon by the end of the season? We live in hope.
The Good Wife
Alicia Florrick bows out after seven sharp, topical, superb, law-fuelled seasons. But with her husband Peter facing indictment, will she end up back where she started out – standing ill-advisedly by her man?
What we said: There is an urgency to the storytelling that is more nail-biting than any action show like The Walking Dead. Its use of cliffhangers is also unparalleled, concluding episodes in unexpected places right before viewers get all the answers they want. It would be mind-blowingly frustrating if it weren’t so brilliant.
Grayson Perry: All Man
The artist braves it with teenage gangs, cage fighters and city brokers for this insightful – and at times extremely moving – examination of the problems caused by modern masculinity. And when he’s finished, he makes pottery out of his experiences, because why not eh?
What we said: His quick mind, compassionate spirit and unending curiosity makes him the perfect interviewer in any situation. So far, every documentary he has done has been one to treasure, and All Man is no exception.
Happy Valley
Sally Wainwright’s exceptional police show set in rural West Yorkshire. The staggering Sarah Lancashire plays Sgt Catherine Cawood, north Halifax’s top cop, with James Norton as her nemesis Tommy Lee Royce, who’s in prison but still managing to perturb her. Spot on, for the second time running.
What we said: When Happy Valley is at its best, nothing can touch it.
Line of Duty
In the third series of Jed Mercurio’s compelling cop drama, supervillain The Caddy has wormed his way into anti-corruption unit AC12.
What we said: It’s extraordinary, intense, butt-clenchingly gripping television … the last time I was this involved in a case, I was doing actual jury service.
Louis Theroux: Drinking to Oblivion and A Different Brain
The ever-popular documentary-maker returns to the UK with a duo of harrowing investigations. In the first, he meets people hospitalised for alcoholism, and in the second, people who have suffered head injuries then returned home to their families as totally unrecognisable characters.
What we said: It’s an interesting relationship Louis Theroux has with his subjects; it goes way beyond the normal journalist/interviewee dynamic. He also acts as nurse, visitor, friend, liaison officer, Guys and Dolls singalong partner, French speaker, relationship adviser, awkward hugger/back-rubber, therapist, Therouxpist … It sure as hell works, though.
Love
Judd Apatow and Girls writer Lesley Arfin stay in the slacker vein with this spiky anti-romcom set in Los Angeles. Cynical radio producer Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) meets dweeby child-star tutor Gus (Paul Rust) at a gas station. Things go great, then things get messy and unravel until even the title becomes knowingly, ironically hipster.
What we said: It’s smart and hilarious. But God, it’s annoying, too, because of all the to-ing and fro-ing, the will-they, won’t-they (C’mon, just do it!). I’ll watch one more, though. And, go on then, one more after that. I did five in the end. And I’ll probably binge the next five, too.
The Night Manager
John Le Carré spy drama with £20m thrown at it by the BBC. Tom Hiddleston gives his best Bond audition as Jonathan Pine, the hotelier-cum-double agent trying to infiltrate and implode the operation of the smooth-talking global arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), AKA the “worst man in the world”.
What we said: The Night Manager is as sexed up as television drama comes. In Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie it has bona fide international stars; in John Le Carre’s source novel it has a pedigree of untouchable grandeur. It always seems to be spy thrillers that get the fat end of the licence fee payer’s wodge … The Night Manager channels all that money into a smoothly accomplished atmosphere of alienation and dread.
Peaky Blinders
The third series of BBC2’s garish period gangster drama served up a heady stew of Russians, robbery, religion and rampage with more swagger than really seems fair.
What we said: This is a drama at that imperious stage where it’s hard to go wrong – confident in its storytelling, secure in its character development and trusting the audience to join them on another tumultuous journey through the back streets of Small Heath, Birmingham and the equally dangerous corridors of power.
The People V OJ Simpson
It was the trial of the century, and we all knew how it ended. But somehow, Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story still managed to keep us glued to our screens the second time around.
What we said: The drama – exquisitely acted with marquee names such as John Travolta, Cuba Gooding Jr and David Schwimmer – really resides in looking down at that broken car in the ravine and imagining how the hell anybody in their right mind thinks they are going to get it back up the hill, in the full glare of the media.
Silicon Valley
Excellent and agonisingly underwatched tech satire. In the third season, Richard Hendricks and his developer gang finally get their compression platform Pied Piper off the ground. Cue photoshoots in unicorn outfits, CEO battles and a ridiculous million-dollar Hawaiian-themed party on Alcatraz.
What we said: Unsurprisingly, Silicon Valley has been embraced by those it so brilliantly skewers. Executive producer Alec Berg says: “Mark Zuckerberg apparently wears a Pied Piper shirt to work and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google guys, did their ice-bucket challenge wearing shirts from our show …”
Trapped
A headless torso gets caught in a trawler’s net in Seyðisfjörður, a tiny Icelandic port town, and the troubled and loveable local cops Andri and Henrika face their biggest investigation ever. Then a blizzard sets in and cuts off the whole town. Fantastically claustrophobic Nordic noir, the first Icelandic drama ever picked up by the BBC.
What we said: Trapped certainly shares DNA with its Scandi cousins, but this is not merely a copy. The cut-off thing adds a new intensity – it’s properly claustrophobic. And the beauty is different – it’s more about nature: grand, scooped-out glacial valleys, icy fjords, a volcanic land that is alive and dangerous. Nordic maybe but this is also most definitely, and proudly, Icelandic ... seductive, involving, gripping: I am already, thoroughly, trapped.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
In the second season of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s sitcom about an unstoppably peppy cult survivor, Kimmy is still naive, funny and Frasier-obsessed – only now she’s channelling her cheeriness into her new job as a Christmas elf.
What we said: The humour still comes fast and furious and Kimmy is as wonderfully misinformed as ever. (She thinks Milf stands for My Interesting Lady Friends.)
War and Peace
Andrew Davies took on Tolstoy’s blockbuster with a stellar cast, plenty of spectacle and a scene-stealing turn from Tom Burke as the caddish Dolokhov.
What we said: The government should give Davies a peerage like the one it awarded Julian Fellowes for his genius in keeping Britain supine during austerity years.
- In our critics’ opinions, these are the best shows of the first half of 2016. Are we right: are there inexplicable inclusions or glaring absences? Should we have included Broad City, Preacher, Girls, Mum or Cunk on Shakespeare? Bear in mind these are shows released in the UK, so if you are in the US you might want to speak up for The Girlfriend Experience, Underground or Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
