Bill Nighy and Sam Claflin star in a thin, thin Amazon thriller. It’s horrifically badly paced, deeply repetitive and tension free – not to mention its deeply unlikely plot

Dame Edna Everage (and if you are too young to know of the housewife superstar that was Barry Humphries’ greatest creation, get yourselves to YouTube and gaze upon her glory, possums) once begged South Bank Show presenter and prolific novelist Melvyn Bragg to stop writing: “Give us all a chance to catch up.”

I feel the same way about Harlan Coben’s TV career. With the possible revision that once we have caught up, if he doesn’t feel refreshed enough to give us something better than Lazarus, he could extend his hiatus until full reinvigoration has been achieved.

To celebrate the return of charming hit Nobody Wants This, romcom superfans like Russell T Davies and Jack Rooke pick their favourite shows. Prepare to be swept off your feet!

It’s perfect, that’s all. It’s got the perfect meet-cute (boob, crashed car, injured dog); the perfect combination of realism and romance (especially for non-romantics like me); the perfect heroine (neither the hot mess nor the manic pixie dream girl we are so often forced to accept); the perfect hero (laid-back but not lazy, older but not creepy, patient, not a pillock) and perfect writing.

Tom Hollander and Niamh Algar star in this fun, propulsive tale of a genius code-cracker, an oddball entrepreneur … and an evil supercomputer known as Charlie Big Potatoes trapped in a secret lair. Brace yourself for a wild ride

There’s in media res and then there’s the opening of The Iris Affair. The new caper-drama opens with a man being beaten half to death while a woman (Niamh Algar) looks on unmoved and refusing to hand over a MacGuffin to the man ordering the beating (Tom Hollander, channelling Michael Caine). They are watched by a rather more concerned teenager, Joy (Meréana Tomlinson), who becomes infinitely more concerned when Hollander-Caine’s character realises that jamming a gun into her neck might be a better way to elicit a response from MacGuffin lady. Then he realises he can’t quite bring himself to shoot the child. But he can order his heavy to do so. The hired gun swings around and we cut to Sardinia, Italy, the day before. And that, my friends, is how a prologue should be done. Properly tense, properly disorientating and long enough that you become properly engaged and almost forget that you know nothing about these people. Just don’t kill the kid!

The next few episodes of this eight-part series keep the pedal to the metal but steers with perfect control around timelines (another begins in Florence two years before Sardinia), locations, revelations, multiple twists, double crosses, wigs, costume changes, false identities and set pieces, as a tale as entertaining as it is absurd takes thrillingly preposterous shape.

This six-part adaption of Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s novel is an odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of an isolated 19th-century village … but the murder investigation at its heart is risible

A debate recently went viral on social media, after someone posed the question to women: would you rather be lost in the woods with a man or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it exposed wildly different worldviews and experiences, illuminated chasms between the sexes, and was likely to induce an existential crisis if you thought about it for too long. There was also the almost inevitable coda in which men of a certain stripe came online to tell women how stupid they were for choosing the bear and proceeded to limn the punishments they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with a new confidence.

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this nifty little setup. The six-part drama is adapted from Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel of the same name (translated in 2020 for English readers by Deborah Bragan-Turner). It follows the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his family when they arrive to start a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in northern Sweden, in 1852. In a place with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants particularly warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and dancing, but it is his protection of the poor – especially the indigenous Sami, from which population comes the preacher’s adopted son Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equality that sets him on a collision course with the Kengis powers that be.

To Cook a Bear is on Disney+ now.