Tom Salinsky

Let’s start with the end. When Eccleston quit after one year, Russell briefly wondered whether it would be possible to pull off a surprise regeneration. How amazing for a new generation of kids who had never seen the show before to see the Doctor change his face before their eyes, without knowing such a thing was even possible. Sadly, it was not to be – Eccleston’s departure and the identity of his replacement was known weeks before. But Ncuti Gatwa’s era is highly unusual, having been planned, written and produced pretty much as a single two-year story. That isn’t to say that everything for The Reality War had been shot by the time The Church on Ruby Road went out, but there was a structure and a plan in place in a way which we’ve really never seen before. Eight episode seasons are good for something it seems.

And with the Disney deal expiring following the upcoming The War Between The Land and The Sea, at present nobody knows what the future of Doctor Who looks like, but it seems the Gatwa was told that a two-year deal was in place and responded “Sure, I’ll do two years.” So this moment was always coming, even though nobody expected it, and I certainly didn’t expect Billie Fucking Piper to be staring back at me as the episode ended. As many have spotted, she is credited only as “And introducing Billie Piper” so who knows what further fuckery is afoot, but we’ll have to wait for answers.

The rest of the episode falls into two halves, very much in the way that The Giggle did, with the villains despatched somewhere around the 35 minute mark, almost exactly the midpoint of the episode. But while I criticised The Giggle for building to a climax and then hanging around for 15 or so minutes of less thrilling story admin, I didn’t have the same problem here. Firstly, those first 15 minutes are absolutely bonkers brilliance. The Time Hotel is a wonderful idea to revisit, the Doctor shedding the John Smith costume and returning to his pinstriped kilt is a real punch-the-air-moment, we get glimpses of Troughton and Pertwee and Daleks, and we get a truly horrifying CGI Omega (which alas Gatwa manages to pronounce in just about every way except the one we’re used to).

I also think the structure works better than last year’s Empire of Death. Sure, Omega doesn’t get to do much except munch on Rani and then be banished, but the problem with ending the world is that you have to un-end the world again to send us out happy. It might feel less exciting to have life as we know it merely threatened and not ended, but I prefer crisis-averted-but-at-what-cost to the-worst-has-happened-and-now-we-have-to-reverse-it. Your mileage might vary, but I feel the storytelling scales are balanced better this way.

The pals are all there of course, and most of them have something to do – Rose barely enough and the Vlinkx still absolutely nothing whatsoever. But Mel gives good value and Kate is always a welcome presence. Even the long exposition scene between the Doctor and the Rani is good fun, in no small part thanks to Archie Panjabi’s lip-curling relish at playing this fabulous part, in a costume which is part dominatrix, part John Nathan-Turner and part Martha Jones. And I absolutely hooted with laughter at Anita Dobson’s “Two Ranis” exit line.

Millie Gibson, undoubted MVP of the last series, once again shows her class here. She’s amazing, whether when fighting to overthrow the Bone Palace from below, standing alongside the Doctor in UNIT HQ, but especially when she’s desperately trying to convince him that the fight isn’t over yet. The moment of Varada and Ncuti passing baby Poppy’s orange jacket back-and-forth as it shrinks and finally vanishes is tremendously effective, setting up the final problem not with a crash and a bang but with a creeping sense of unease.

So here are the two reasons why I think the second half of this episode was just as thrilling as the first half. Reason one: we haven’t had the regeneration yet. We’re promised it 50 minutes in, but it doesn’t happen until the very end. The Giggle blew its load after Gatwa’s first appearance, and everything after that feels slightly anti-climactic as a result.

Secondly – and this may not have been entirely deliberate as rumours abound of last-minute re-shoots – but the presence of Susan last week does an awful lot to very subtly but very definitely raise the stakes on baby Poppy. When writing my book about Star Trek, one of the tropes I identified was the cover-of-a-comic-book teaser. The purpose of the cover of a comic book is to get you to buy the comic (just as the purpose of a teaser is to get you to stay on this channel and watch the rest of the episode). So it’s very tempting to start with something really eye-catching, which may or may not be paid off in the way you expect. The cover of the comic book shows Clark Kent pulling open his shirt in front of Lois Lane. When you read the story, it turns out she’s been temporarily blinded and couldn’t see the costume under his clothes. That kind of thing.

So it doesn’t matter how many times Varada and Ncuti tell us that Poppy is their child, we know that the Doctor can’t have a kid with a human woman, and we know it’s all going to be reset by the end of the episode – once again, the storytelling scales are out of balance. But half a mo. There’s Susan. And we’ve been reminded that the Doctor once travelled with a granddaughter. And you can’t have a grandchild without first having a child. So… maybe? Just maybe, Poppy is here to stay after all?

She is and she isn’t. Fifteeen pours that regeneration energy into the TARDIS and brings Poppy back. But she’s not his daughter. She’s Belinda’s. And that does make sense – more sense ultimately than her being Susan’s mum – but these two dangling threads kept me going all the way to the end of the episode. And gawd, I haven’t even mentioned Jodie Whittaker yet, here to give a barely-needed pep talk to our hero before he risks everything for the sake of one little life. Whittaker clearly relishes getting some RTD dialogue to say, but alas we slip back into Chris Chibnall just-say-exactly-what’s-on-our-mind mode right at the end when she says “I should say that to Yaz.”

But that is honestly my biggest complaint with this episode, and sure a lot of the first half is a hyperkinetic whirl, and it takes a long time after that to come into land – but all of that felt purposeful, deliberate and carefully judged. The Doctor’s victory is incomplete, hard-won, and the product of desperate last-minute improvisation and reliance on his friends, not simply waving a thing and spouting some gibberish. Conrad is undone not by violence but by kindness. And our hero gave everything he had for one single life. I don’t approve of Doctors only doing two years, but Ncuti has been magnificent, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. Bravo.

Wow, that came around fast. It seems only yesterday that I was pondering the impact of incel #1 Alan in The Robot Revolution and now already we’re gunning for the season finale, which features the return of incel #2 Conrad. As usual, it’s hard to judge the effectiveness of the story as a whole when we only have the first half to consider, and last year I was blown away by episode seven and felt episode eight didn’t quite live up to it. This time, I’m not quite so blown away by episode seven, but I feel as if the pieces are in place for what could be a terrific conclusion to what has been quite a strong season.

Rather than spend an entire episode having the Doctor desperately trying to prevent Rani #1 and Rani #2 from putting their evil plan into action, rather thrillingly we begin with the plan having almost completely succeeded. And it’s a slightly odd one, although the explanations are there if you listen carefully (or put the subtitles on). Omega can only be freed by cracking open the planet and that means constructing an obviously fake world which the inhabitants can then start doubting. This gives everybody the chance to play different versions of their familiar characters, which is always fun. So we have Ncuti and Varada as Mr and Mrs Smith, Jemma Redgrave as his clockwatching boss and even UNIT HQ is cos-playing as the Masque of Mandragora TARDIS.

Meanwhile, although Jonah Hauer-King still seems to me like a space where a person should be, and Bonnie Langford gets little to do as Mel, Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson are having the absolute time of their lives, job-sharing the role of the Rani and Jonathan Groff, Susan Twist and Carole Ann Ford are along for the ride too. The gag of identical yellow mugs that slip through tables is deliciously odd, and the parable about the disabled is nicely handled. But there are an awful lot of unanswered questions at this stage: why is Omega underneath our planet? Will his reappearance be yet more jeopardy-via-surname or will his role make sense given his history and be understandable by new viewers? What is Space Baby Poppy doing there? And – as usual – just how will the Doctor get out of that one.

This all looks amazing – director Alex Sanjiv Pillai does lovely work and the set design is gorgeous – so I was very happy while it was on. My only doubts are about next week…

Stakes are funny things. On the surface, the idea seems obvious. Two people amusing themselves predicting the outcome of a coin flip is dull. Two people betting fifty quid on the outcome of a coin flip is a bit more interesting. Two people betting their life savings on the outcome of a coin flip is fascinating. Two people flipping a coin for their actual life is horrifying and compelling. But it doesn’t always work like that. Consider how many stormtroopers get mown down or blown up over the course of any given Star Wars film. And yet when Luke Skywalker fills in a gap in his family tree, or loses a hand for all of ten minutes of screen time, it seems to matter far more. Stormtroopers are anonymous. Luke is someone we care about and that makes all the difference.

So it almost doesn’t matter whether ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand spectators get sucked out into space, just as it almost doesn’t matter when a hundred or a million or a billion or a trillion viewers stand to get whammied when Kid does the thing with the whatsit. They’re all anonymous. But – hang on! The Doctor is one of those sucked out into space too. That raises the stakes, right? Actually, it kinda lowers them. If this is happening to the Doctor, then it must be survivable – and if it’s survivable, that lowers the stakes again.

Now, this is a problem in any adventure story all of the time (you can only do the ending of No Time to Die once per hero) so the trick is to play these events with conviction and brio, and try to engage our emotions and stop us from thinking too hard. And that’s why I enjoyed this episode so much. The shot of all of those bodies being drawn up into space is an astonishing one and the solution is far from obvious. Nor does the explanation of how they survived make any kind of scientific sense, but it is properly executed in terms of structure, because we saw the Doctor fiddle with the thingamajig before the roof blew off.

I’m a bit less interested in the viewers at home to be honest, but the plot requires that Winn and Kid (named after their fathers perhaps?) are in the process of doing an awful thing and need to be stopped, and this all went off very smoothly. The evocation of the contest is brilliantly done, on paper and on screen. The contemporary references to Rylan and Graham Norton don’t grate too badly, the songs are amazing, the aliens look fab and the backstage shenanigans with Mike and Gary and Belinda and Cora are all well-handled. Well, maybe Belinda is stuck in her own sideplot which goes nowhere, and maybe Susan steals her thunder a bit, but I admired how elegantly the political backstory was sketched in, and I loved seeing this Doctor completely lose it.

The pacing is good as well. This is a nice simple story, which starts strong and still manages to build to a climax, leaving enough time for the various bits of plot admin to be dealt with without it feeling like the episode reaches the end and keeps going. The huge number of people who need to be individually rescued is a bit of a problem, but once again this is recognised and papered over with shots of whole groups being retrieved and revived.

And Mrs Flood is the Rani. I’m not a huge fan of this reveal, to be honest. It’s a bit thrill-by-surname, like Benedict Cumberbatch revealing himself as Khan in Star Trek Into Dullness. The Rani wasn’t a brilliant character in Mark, was a frankly terrible character in Time, and although Archie Panjabi is great, it was only Kate O’Mara who made it watchable at all. Still, I’m not going to prejudge, but as a cliffhanger ending, it had nothing like the power of the return of Sutekh – a return which crucially didn’t require viewers to have seen Pyramids of Mars to understand what was going on.

This is probably worth four stars, given the solid construction, while also taking into account the slight overreaching and the sidelining of Belinda. But I had such a good time watching it, I’m going to bump it up another half. A strong year so far, making me very hopeful indeed for the season finale.

This is clearly the film of the summer which is tearing through the box office faster and more ferociously than a gang of redneck vampires through a juke joint. I saw it and loved it, but I was also careful to learn as little about it as possible in order that it could give up its secrets as it saw fit. I’ve since seen the spoilerific trailers, and I’d urge anyone reading this who hasn’t seen Sinners to avoid them too, stop reading and go and see Sinners, because it’s terrific.

This is the second of two legends-of-acting-playing-two-roles movies out this month, but here it feels like it makes rather more sense than de Niro showing he can do hat-on and hat-off acting in the same film. Smoke and Stack are two different sides of the same coin, plus – who else you gonna get to go toe-to-toe with Michael B Jordan if not Michael B Jordan? The effects work is exemplary, although I wasn’t so knocked out by the cigarette switch in the opening, but the climactic fight is absolutely flawless, and in the dialogue scenes, I simply forget they were both the same actor after a while.

The rest of the cast is top notch too, from seasoned campaigners like Delroy Lindo, to up-and-comers like Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell and Wunmi Mosaku, to complete noobs like the revelatory Miles Canton.

About the only thing which anyone seems to complain about is the pacing, but everyone has a different niggle, so this is evidently a matter of taste more than anything else. For what it’s worth, here’s my take. The opening narration is delicious, and the opening in-media-res-wait-one-day-earlier while shopworn works well to promise the scares that are coming. I adored the material surrounding the brothers putting their venue together and didn’t feel for a minute that I was being made to wait too long for the gore fest, but the intro to Jack O’Connell felt misplaced. I gather this was originally planned to open the film, but director Ryan Coogler felt the audience would be waiting for him to reappear and not be paying attention. He might be right, but the new position for this short sequence feels arbitrary and clunky. Compare that to the elegant way in which the bravura and astonishingly bold music-through-time-lifts-the-roof sequence gives way to the arrival of the bloodsucking trio. Here everything feels purposeful, carefully weighted and hugely effective.

As reality dawns on our gang and they break up the party, they’re made to confront the consequences of their choices, and this again is beautifully paced, but this movie which so luxuriated in its set-ups rushes its pay-offs ever-so-slightly with the climactic battle in the eaves of the bar feeling almost perfunctory. Do stay for the closing credits though if you want to know how the story really ends.

To be clear, these are minor quibbles, with what overall is a hugely exciting, deeply involving, transcendently musical, incredibly confident piece of filmmaking, packing luminous performances, suitably gory effects, razor sharp editing and gorgeous cinematography. What really makes it work though is how the themes of good, evil, temptation, history, hatred, trust, religion, sex, money and death are woven through the rich characters to create a deeply layered, profoundly moving and intricately constructed story. Not bad for a vampire flick by a Marvel director.

This is a tough one for me. Lots to enjoy. A fresh location, both macro (Lagos) and micro (barbershop). Some amazing guest actors. The regulars on top form. Unexpected continuity nods. And a very appealing Neil Gaiman-like fantasy atmosphere – thankfully achieved without actual Neil Gaiman. But counterbalancing this are some odd choices, a lack of coherence and the fact that there probably wasn’t quite enough plot for the running time.

Let’s start with Lagos. Despite all being summoned up in the Cardiff studios, this looked and sounded amazing and was completely convincing. And the Doctor’s explanation as to why he was drawn back to this place was very sweet and rather heartfelt – as is his surprise at hearing Belinda empathise completely with his plight. This most human and open of all Doctors needs friends and has learned that these are a little harder come by in some quarters than they were when he looked like a flamboyant cabinet minister.

Ariyon Bakare is mesmerising as the Barber and Michelle Asante is luminous as his troubled sidekick Abby/Abena. But not nearly enough was done with the other inhabitants of the barbershop to properly differentiate them. This is a common problem and the gulf between the instantly distinguishable crew of the Sanctuary Base and the impossible-to-keep-straight Flesh Gangers is a wide one – to pick two examples which stand out to me. Here, writer Inua Ellams only seems interested in the Barber and maybe old Omo, but none of the others.

Getting Belinda into the story is tough, and when she isn’t available, the Doctor has to play the role of blundering naif, yanking open the door of the shop when surely his Spidey-sense – or just his common sense – should have told him to exercise a bit of caution. There follows – if I’m honest – quite a lot of that Steven Moffat standby: people standing around urgently. This is livened up briefly by a glimpse of Jo Martin (presumably in Abby’s memory, not the Doctor’s) which is good fun, as is the equally brief appearance of Captain Poppy from Space Babies – and the requisite Angie Watts cameo.

Then after all of this narrative vamping, the resolution feels rushed, with the braided-hair-map barely being needed and set up only seconds before being paid off. And the climax didn’t really feel like it meant anything. So, none of this was bad exactly, and all of the good points still stand. And its lyrical style means it can get away with more plot holes than Lucky Day, which is fortunate. I just didn’t feel much while watching it, and I really think I was supposed to.

This seems to have gone down well with fandom at large. For once, a story with a strong message isn’t being pilloried for being “woke garbage” or tarred with similarly meaningless epithets. That’s rather heartening. And once again it’s great to see the breadth that the series is capable of, as we leap from literal animated fantasy to flesh-creeping science-fiction terror to domestic UNIT-based psycho-drama.

But to me, this all felt a bit “will this do?” And it pains me to say that because I know how much hard work goes into making any television, let alone something as ambitious as Doctor Who. The pitch isn’t bad. Catching up with an ex-companion and seeing UNIT and its fight against alien invaders through the lens of the manosphere/online trolls/misinformation warriors/conspiracy theorists/delete as applicable. Sure, I’ll watch that. However, the execution seemed to me to be consistently lacking.

Millie and Conrad’s ghastly flirting is relentlessly generic, yet the bland lines in the script might have worked if Jonah Hauer-King had found something distinctive to do with the part, but he (like everyone else) is just settling into familiar grooves. Such a disappointment after McTighe’s thrillingly original Kablam! and his amazing work on the Blu-ray range. And following an episode which did “something nasty hiding in the shadows” so brilliantly, this time the men in rubber suits look like that and only like that, whether that’s what they’re supposed to be or not. What last week’s director did seemingly effortlessly has left this week’s flailing. Do you know how rare it is for me to find myself criticising writing, directing and acting on new Who?

Of course, this is the season’s double-banked episode, with no Varada Sethu and barely featuring Ncuti Gatwa, which does make life harder. But sometimes that makes everyone else up their game, and we get classics like Blink or Midnight or Turn Left or 73 Yards. Here alas, the lack of Doctor is keenly felt. And, now I’m distracted by how familiar this feels – bits and pieces of Blink (the glimpse of the Doctor on another adventure), Love & Monsters (fan’s eye view of the Doctor), A Christmas Carol (the Doctor’s chance encounter with young Conrad), 73 Yards (Millie Gibson telling everyone in a scary pub to listen to her) and so on.

And crucially, the big switcheroo doesn’t really work at all. Either Conrad is a very well-known anti-UNIT, anti-alien podcaster with a large and loyal following and therefore everybody knows who he is and what he stands for, OR he’s the kind of podcaster which Ruby Sunday would happily go and talk to. But not, as this story needs him to be – both at once.

And just why does actually seeing real aliens and a disappearing police box make him a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic instead of, as would seem to make rather more sense, a true believer? Why does he think that making his own fake aliens will convince the world that other aliens are also fake? If I showed you fake potatoes, would you stop believing in potatoes? And why doesn’t he take the damned antidote – other than to make the plot work? Then again, he’s the kind of conspiracy theorist whose bonkers claim is that UFOs aren’t real, so maybe I shouldn’t expect logic from him. But worse, there’s no complexity to him either, no hint that he is in any way conflicted over his treatment of Ruby. We’re right back in Chibnall-land, where subtext is forbidden and everybody has a single dimension and just says what’s on their mind as directly as possible.

Look, there’s good stuff here. Millie is great, as usual. I adored her in the pub bluntly telling the old git who dared question her authority “Go and get some fresh air, big man, see what happens.” Yes, mate. It’s always a pleasure to see Jemma Redgrave, Alexander Devrient and Ruth Madelely. And the Vlinkx, was… also there. The UNIT traitor, though, isn’t so much hiding in plain sight as sticking out like a sore thumb, forefinger and big toe. Sure, I can get behind the message. I agree: Internet trolling equals bad. But to me this all felt a bit reheated, and a bit half-hearted. And I don’t think I really like the idea that if you meet the Doctor as an impressionable child, there’s even a chance that this interaction will turn you into a cartoon villain like Conrad. The Doctor is responsible for our current toxic online culture? Really? I don’t want that even hinted at. Damn.

Ah, it was a stealth sequel. Fans being fans, that’s what seems to have exercised us the most (was Trooper Shaya really The Rani, etc) but honestly, the callback to Russell’s towering mini-epic Midnight occupies mere seconds of the running time, and is in many ways the least noteworthy feature of this incredible episode.

We begin with the slightly ludicrous cold open which sees the Doctor and Belinda plummeting out of a spaceship which can’t land on the planet below, but can follow them slowly down. Thankfully, everything’s happening too fast and too thrillingly for us to ponder this absurdity for very long, and very soon we’re in the haunted house environment which will be the main setting for the rest of the story. Star Trek has a long history of sending the crew down to a space station / colony planet / mining operation / derelict craft only to discover that it is littered with corpses. Sometimes, there’s a lone and very suspicious survivor, and so it proves to be here in the person of Rose Ayling-Ellis’s achingly vulnerable Aliss Fenly.

As he’s done previously, Russell takes the inclusion of a minority figure and stitches her disability into the fabric of the story, and yet doesn’t make it a story about deafness. This is a story about paranoia, about trust and about death. Well-worn tropes to be sure, but in the able hands of director Amanda Brotchie and co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall, this all works incredibly well, from the initial mystery of the dead bodies, to the suspense of the twelve o’clock death position, to the final break for freedom.

Varada Sethu is very strong here, combining disorientation and confusion at being on an alien planet, with a fierce desire for justice, and allowing her compassionate nursing side out long enough to care for Aliss. And Ncuti Gatwa owns the part now. From top to bottom this is outstanding stuff. More please.

Just when I thought I might – after over forty years of fairly dedicated following – be even a little bit over Doctor Who, along comes an episode which completely restores my faith in the format, cast, creative team and everything. This all just worked, despite (or maybe because of) some pretty big swings.

My heart sank just a little when i realised that after last week’s 1950s-inflected bad sci-fi robots, we were heading out into… the 1950s. And there is a teeny bit of the Russell playbook on show here. In 2005, Davies set the template of “Companion-centric story set on contemporary Earth, followed by bonkers sci-fi adventure, followed by trip to the past, followed by two-parter…” and so on, all the way to the showdown with the Big Bad in the final instalment. Even Moffat stuck to this fairly closely (for one year at least). Here, we condense the first two beats into a single story, so this week a trip to the past it is. But this isn’t another celebrity historical. This has other things on its mind.

Mr Ring-a-Ding is an extraordinary creation. Brillantly and terrifyingly voiced by a returning Alan Cumming, his beautifully animated bendy body perfectly evokes Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s (which absolutely would still be showing in 1950s cinemas) and the integration with the live action is likewise flawlessly done. Even the Doctor and Belinda’s trip to Toontown and their own renderings as cartoon characters looks fantastic, and yet feels real and high stakes.

Not satisfied with having Mrs Flood lightly tap on the fourth wall, now the show sees the Doctor and Belinda literally and metaphorically destroy it and we meet three bit-character fans – a portrait both warmly affectionate and bitingly satirical, thanks to sharp writing and three lovely performances. It’s great that they give the Doctor his way out, and even better that we (and they) have to watch film cans going up in smoke as the nitrate film (only just being replaced by more stable materials) is sacrificed by the noble projectionist, who burns up the recreation of his beloved to save the rest of the people trapped.

But the most effective scene might possibly be the one in the diner as the Doctor – and Belinda – face some of the uncomfortable realities of travelling into the past. Doing in five minutes what Rosa couldn’t manage in a whole episode, here’s a clear-eyed look at America’s racist past which needs to be acknowledged but which isn’t allowed to overwhelm the whole affair.

Add to this some decent (but not perfect) American accents, a lovely sense of time and place, a plot which kept me on my toes but never felt unfocused, and I think we have here a classic for the ages. Doctor Who is back. How could I have ever doubted it?

Eh… it was fine.

Look, I’ll give some fuller thoughts in a minute, but for the first time that I can remember, I’m finding it hard to get excited about the show. The relentless negativity from some quarters of fandom is really getting me down, and it doesn’t help that the programme itself seems to have settled into a comfortable groove, parcelling out a leisurely eight episodes a year, seemingly without breaking much of a sweat. Don’t misunderstand me – everything we got since Russell returned has been better than almost anything Chris Chibnall oversaw, but all the very best stuff was in those first three specials. And although Ncuti is a magnetic presence, none of the stories has been as consistent and as surefooted as The Star Beast, or as evocative as Wild Blue Yonder (73 Yards came close) or contained anything as bravura as the Toymaker’s re-entrance in The Giggle.

So, for a season opener, this was… fine. The huge robots looked a bit like the ones in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and they plucked Belinda out of her suburban home a bit like the Wrarth did in The Star Beast, and the Doctor joined the rebellion and overthrew the evil empire like that archetypal story Andrew Cartmel used to take the piss out of. Verada Sethu works in a hospital which the Doctor causes to lose all power – ho ho ho. She’s… fine – but she seemed more engaged playing Mundy Flynn and we were just getting to know Ruby Sunday. The every-ninth-word gag is good but seems a bit arbitrary. Mrs Flood is here. Nicholas Briggs is the voice of the robots. It’s all absolutely fine.

The best bit was probably the death of Thalia. The Doctor having lived on Missbelindachandra One for six months is a little glib, but his partnership with Thalia felt real and it was genuinely shocking to see her disintegrated. But other than that, this isn’t anything like as epoch-defining as Rose, as exciting as Smith and Jones, as funny as Partners in Crime, as fresh as The Eleventh Hour, as bonkers as The Bells of St John or as engaging as The Pilot. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t do anything wrong. It was just… fine.

I stumbled across Columbo as a teenager, idly channel hopping. It was the one with Dick van Dyke as a photographer and I remember not being able to work out if it was a TV show or a movie. This is one of several odd things about this amazing series. It formed part of what was called the NBC Mystery Wheel which variously occupied either a 90 minute or a two-hour prime time slot and would cycle through various different crime shows, each presenting a movie-length edition. Columbo would be followed next week by McCloud or McMillan and Wife or Quincy. This meant each production team only had to come up with 7-8 editions each year and could take their time.

Columbo stands out for a few reasons. Creators Richard Levinson and William Link had been inspired by, among other things, Dial M for Murder, Les Diaboliques and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown. The character went from a short story to a one-off TV play, to a stage play to a one-off TV movie (all with the same basic plot) and it’s here that Peter Falk was cast – the studio wanted Bing Crosby. The novelty with the original story, and the thing which inspired the writers to keep recycling it, was that it was an “inverted mystery”. The first act showed how the murder was committed, by whom and why. The rest of the drama was about how he got caught. Not a “whodunnit” but a “howcatchem”. Could the trick be repeated?

A second one-off TV movie showed that it could, and so Columbo was commissioned, and Peter Falk became a bone fide star. It’s often said that Americans don’t have a class system, but Columbo gives the lie to that assertion. Not only is the central character mild, self-effacing and unfailingly polite in the face of a parade of arrogant, self-aggrandising, pompous killers – he’s a blue collar copper bringing down wealthy evildoers who skulk in mansions and stalk the corridors of power.

It ran for eight years and was then brought back in the late eighties, with occasional specials through the nineties – 69 episodes in all, pretty much all hewing to this formula. And Columbo’s bumbling and deferential manner was in stark contrast to the macho antics of rivals Starsky and Hutch, Miami Vice, Magnum PI – even Cagney and Lacey. It’s fondly remembered and there has been much speculation about a remake. Mark Ruffalo has been known to be interested, and there’s a tiny hint of Columbo in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out.

A bit more than a hint is to be found in Johnson’s 2023 TV series Poker Face which borrows the inverted mystery structure, unassuming lead and even the font for the titles from Columbo. Natasha Lyonne plays Charlie Cale, a drifter with a freakish ability to detect liars. In an age of prestige streaming series, this felt refreshingly case-of-the-week with just a hint of a continuing storyline, setting up a big bad in the first episode and despatching him in the last. It has been renewed for a second season.

Not to be outdone, The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King picked up their recurring character of Chicago lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and dropped her down in New York City, attached to the police department where she quickly becomes an asset to the team. Once again, most episodes open with a crime being committed, leaving us in little doubt who has done what, and why, and the fun is watching Elsbeth figure it out. This she tends to do a little too quickly and easily for my taste – the clues are subtler in Poker Face and that’s more fun. A shame as I often felt that The Good Wife was the one American lawyer show which really managed to balance the legal jargon with the needs of easily-digestible narrative. A second series is airing currently.

Meanwhile, the BBC was getting in on the act, with their own quirky-individual-works-with-the-police-to-solve-crimes show. David Mitchell is puzzle-setter John “Ludwig” Taylor whose identical twin brother James is a) a detective and b) mysteriously missing. John is persuaded by his brother’s wife to pose as his brother in order to determine his whereabouts and quickly becomes an asset to the team his brother worked with. Time and again, his puzzle-skills become relevant, but although we see portions of the crime, we don’t always know whodunnit and this doesn’t play by proper Agatha Christie rules either – we usually aren’t given enough information to work it out for ourselves. But this hardly matters when the series is so charming and Mitchell is so well cast. It has been renewed for a second season.

So, in the English-speaking world, the TV landscape is and always has been awash with quirky are-they-cops-or-aren’t-they gallantly and unassumingly fighting crime, but in France it’s not such a familiar cliché – which meant there was a gap in the market. This was filled in 2021 when Stéphane Carrié, Alice Chegaray-Breugnot, and Nicolas Jean created HPI (short for Haut potentiel intellectual) in which office cleaner Morgane Alvaro gets seconded to the Lille police force and quickly becomes an asset to the team.

In short order, this was snapped up by ABC television in the states who put Drew Goddard in charge of it and cast Kaitlin Olson (who I’ve discovered is not an Olsen twin) as Morgan Gillory, a high potential individual who is talked into becoming a police consultant and who quickly becomes an asset to the team. You can watch High Potential on Disney+ in the UK and it has been renewed for a second season. This doesn’t commit to the inverted mystery structure – most episodes play out as a more typical police procedural, but it still feels to me like part of the same family.

There’s also Kathy Bates as Matlock, to add to our roster of usually-gender-flipped, easy-to-underestimate, quirky-kind-of-cop, solves-impossible crimes, case-of-the-week shows – but there are some quite serious and complicated problems with this iteration, which I might leave for a future essay. In the meantime, here’s your rundown of The Spawn of Columbo.

COLUMBO

Transmitted: 1968-1977 on NBC, 1989-2003 on ABC.

Starring: Peter Falk as Lt Columbo (no first name ever given) of the LAPD.

Quirks: Wears a shabby raincoat, drives a beaten-up car, sometimes has a dog (called “dog”), puffs on cheap cigars. Is often a huge fan of the very wealthy and famous killer and awestruck to be in their company. A working class stiff typically in a nouveau riche world.

Magic powers: His attention to detail is matched only by his faith in humanity. He tenaciously locks on to the killer early in the episode and all but annoys them into confessing.

Episode structure: All the classic episodes show the crime committed in detail before Columbo even shows up. A handful of later episodes mess with this formula and it kind of ruins the fun.

Supporting characters: Effectively none. A handful of coroners or other police workers show up in a few episodes, but Columbo is a lone wolf by design.

Star killers: An amazing roster of familiar faces including Patrick McGoohan (four times), Robert Culp, Ruth Gordon, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (in different episodes). Even Billy Connolly (although it’s not a great outing).

Ongoing narrative: None whatsoever (it was the 1970s, are you kidding).

POKER FACE

Transmitted: 2023- on Peacock (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale who drifts around various parts of the United States.

Quirks: Not nearly as deferential as Columbo, Charlie is usually cheerful and friendly, but has a wide cynical streak and plenty of street smarts. Paradoxically, her magic powers (see below) make it almost impossible for her to keep down a job, so we usually discover her making ends meet doing grunt work of some kind.

Magic powers: Charlie has a sixth sense for liars, which often manifests as an almost involuntary “bullshit” when a fib reaches her ears.

Episode structure: As with Columbo, we usually see all the details of the crime unfold before Natasha Lyonne makes her entrance. The wrinkle here is that after the first act break, rather than the main character only now arriving on the scene, we rewind and see much of the same events again, but from Charlie’s point-of-view. She had been there all along, we just didn’t see her. It’s fun. Also fun – Charlie isn’t a cop so sometimes she hands the baddies over to the forces of law and order, and sometimes she has to rely on natural justice.

Supporting characters: Charlie is fundamentally a loner, but she forges an uneasy alliance with Simon Helberg’s FBI agent who appears in a few episodes.

Star killers: This is stuffed with familiar faces including Nick Nolte, Tim Meadows, Adrien Brody, Chloë Sevigny, Stephanie Hsu, Tim Blake Nelson, Ellen Barkin and many more.

Ongoing narrative: After the events of the first episode, Charlie is pursued by Benjamin Bratt and eventually faces down Ron Perlman, but if you just watch episodes 2-9, you’ll scarcely notice this.

ELSBETH

Transmitted: 2024- on CBS (NOW TV in the UK)

Starring: Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni, Chicago lawyer appointed to provide the NYPD was some needed oversight.

Quirks: Elsbeth is a very enthusiastic and perky middle-aged woman, who dresses in garish outfits and is sometimes too quick to speak her mind. Like Columbo, she is easily impressed by rich and famous types, and very disappointed to discover that they have blood on their hands.

Magic powers: Like many of her TV peers, Elsbeth is freakishly perceptive and notices many details which others miss.

Episode structure: Frequently makes use of the inverted mystery structure, but isn’t wedded to it – and as noted, the plotting isn’t quite as A1 as on Poker Face.

Supporting characters: A much more traditional roster of supporting characters, which gives a general throughline of: how much faith will these beat cops and career detectives learn to place in this kooky lawyer from out-of-town? Adding much class is The Wire’s Wendell Pierce as Captain Wagner. Cara Patterson as Kaya Blanke serves as an effective 2IC. Various other detectives float in and out, but none makes a huge impression, and you could say the same for Elsbeth’s son, Kaya’s dishy roommate and so on.

Star killers: Once again this is stuffed to the gills. Say hello to Jane Krakowski, Blair Underwood, Laurie Metcalf, Vanessa Bayer, Eric McCormack, Alan Ruck, Keegan-Michael Key, Matthew Broderick and countless others.

Ongoing narrative: A thin slip of a continuing storyline surrounds Elsbeth’s true reason for being in New York, and she gradually becomes closer and closer to Maya over the course of Season 1. Having exonerated Captain Wagner, in Season 2 she comes under suspicion herself, and there’s a further ongoing storyline which surrounds Lost’s Michael Emerson, whose entrance in the cold open of the episode One Angry Woman is nothing short of genius. Despite having (a bit) more screentime devoted to the season arc than Poker Face, this generally does a good job of balancing both aspects.

LUDWIG

Transmitted: 2024- on BBC One

Starring: David Mitchell as John “Ludwig” Taylor, a reclusive puzzle-setter.

Quirks: Cripplingly shy and introverted, with a strong sense of self-preservation, John cares deeply for his brother and his brother’s family, and he loves a good puzzle. He sometimes fails to take into account other people’s feelings, and is a shockingly poor improviser, which makes it all the more remarkable that his fairly inept deception isn’t tumbled immediately.

Magic powers: He da puzzle king.

Episode structure: Rather than seeing all the details of the crime, we get a few hints about what really happened before the police show up.

Supporting characters: Nice turns from Dipo Ola as James’s partner DI Carter and Sophie Willan as the station’s IT expert. Anna Maxwell-Martin is luminous as always. The unchanging team of younger coppers is a bit more anonymous. Ralph Ineson makes a strong impression.

Star killers: Not bad for a home-grown show. The first batch of episodes includes appearances from Felicity Kendall and Derek Jacobi, but this isn’t the usual case of “arrest the most famous person in the cast, they probably did it.” Many of the guest actors are familiar from other UK TV shows, but very few are really huge names.

Ongoing narrative: John’s deception is a foregrounded feature of many instalments, and the reasons for it take up half of episode one and most of episode six, but it is very engaging if slightly ludicrous. Season 2 has been set up without this element and it remains to be seen whether the show will be stronger or weaker without it – especially given how exciting it is when the whole house of cards collapses in episode six.

HIGH POTENTIAL

Transmitted: 2024- on ABC (now showing on Disney+ in the UK)

Starring: Kaitlin Olson as cleaner turned police consultant Morgan Gillory.

Quirks: Morgan hates unsolved puzzles, and is brash and overconfident, despite clearly having no shortage of empathy. Whereas Columbo was often star-struck, Morgan is impossible to impress and treats everyone the same.

Magic powers: Morgan sees everything, notices everything, and has a photographic memory as well as the kind of wide-ranging general knowledge which would put the average quizzer to shame. Here’s another contrast with Columbo. Peter Falk’s character was fascinated by new technology and always found something new to learn. Morgan Gillory already knows arcane details about which way churches face or the life cycles of exotic animals just by watching cable TV or listening to podcasts.

Episode structure: As with Ludwig, we tend to get an incomplete version of the murder which keeps us guessing as to who really did what to whom.

Supporting characters: Like Elsbeth, this is as much about the slowly deepening relationships and bond of trust between Morgan and her co-workers, and Morgan learning the rules of cop-land. She’s partnered with Daniel Sunjata as Detective Karadec, who manages not to turn his part into too broad a piece of comic relief, and it’s always nice to see Judy Reyes from Scrubs now as the head of the LAPD Major Crimes Division. A couple of other less charismatic cops are also hanging around (same team every time), plus Morgan has kids and an ex-husband played by Taran Killam from SNL (and Scrubs).

Star killers: The Amazing Spider Man’s Marc Webb directed an episode – does that count?

Ongoing narrative: Morgan’s deal for working with the police includes resources to investigate the disappearance of her first husband, but this comes up far less often than you’d think.

All of which brings us to Kathy Bates as Matlock, who once again is an unassuming quirky character who has talked her way into joining a team in order to investigate wrong-doings, but who is also pursuing her own agenda. And yet, for all its superficial similarities, this is a very different show – and I think a worse one. All of the foregoing are well-made, highly entertaining procedurals of the kind we weren’t getting any more. Maybe we’ll talk about Matlock in a few days…