Altered Carbon
Like Black Mirror on speed and steroids – and played for thrills rather than philosophical nuance – this Netflix original mines future-shock technology for adrenalised action. It’s a detective story of sorts but with immortality and CGI humans at its heart.
Available from Friday, Netflix
Keep It!
This likably exasperated podcast is the work of US culture journalist Ira Madison III. The catchphrase of the title functions as a sort of Trump-era Room 101, an overflowing repository of contemporary American ills. In each episode, guests are invited to consign their own bugbears to the dustbin.
Requiem
An exemplary winter chiller as Lydia Wilson’s ambitious but rootless cellist Matilda is drawn to rural Wales to investigate her mother’s inexplicable suicide. In doing so, she makes the unforgivably basic mistake of wandering into rickety old houses and dark, treacherous woodlands. All manner of watch-through-your-fingers horrors ensue.
Fri, 9pm, BBC One
The Good Place
Michael Schur’s sleeper-hit afterlife comedy has established itself as a charming, hilarious and gently profound delight. The final episode of season two drops this week: can Eleanor and Chidi (superb turns from Kristen Bell and William Jackson Harper) escape fro-yo purgatory? Holy mother-forking shirtballs all round and roll on season three.
Available from Friday, Netflix
The Blue Dahlia
This hard-boiled Raymond Chandler-scripted thriller stars a laconic Alan Ladd as war vet Johnny Morrison, returning to LA and getting framed for his wife’s death. Veronica Lake as nightclub owner’s wife Joyce Harwood is pure trouble, while war buddy William Bendix gets blinding headaches and crazy eyes on account of the steel plate in his head, in a film suffused with postwar melancholy.
Mon, 1.05pm, Film4
Gomorrah
The superbly bleak and ugly Neapolitan mafia drama returns for a third season. Gomorrah remains admirable for its refusal to glamorise the lives it dramatises, and the implications of season two’s tumultuous climax are still being felt with a power vacuum across the city resulting in a battle for control. Can Gennaro reassert himself?
Wednesday 31 January, 9pm, Sky Atlantic
Kiri
Sarah Lancashire’s social worker Miriam has plenty more opportunities to look racked and tormented as her disciplinary hearing begins. Don’t expect much in the way of redemption from the finale of Jack Thorne’s troubling foster care drama, but there’s still time for a few surprises.
Wednesday 31 January, 9pm, Channel 4
Viceroy’s House
Hugh Bonneville gives it maximum Downton Abbey-style noblesse oblige in Gurinder Chadha’s shrewd drama exploring the final years of British colonial rule in India. Bonneville plays Lord Mountbatten as affable, well-intentioned and in way over his head while Gillian Anderson is typically magisterial as his wife Edwina.
Mon, 10.10am & 6pm, Sky Cinema Premiere
Unspun with Matt Forde
Given his status as a resolute Blairite, Matt Forde occupies an unpopular niche in the British political landscape. What with the current dangerous tendency of people on all sides to simply hear what they want to hear, this makes him the perfect candidate to present a topical comedy show. Expect a few mangled sacred cows as Forde cheerfully upsets Brexiters and Corbynites alike.
Sunday 27 January, 10pm, Dave
Storyville: Trophy – The Big Game Hunting Controversy
Another run of the brilliant documentary strand begins with this upsetting, provocative look at the grim world of trophy hunting. Unpalatable as it might be, do certain species actually depend on it for their long-term survival?
Monday 29 January, 9pm, BBC Four
