Friday

Santa Clarita Diet

Netflix

Well, you can’t win ’em all. Since it made the decision to focus resources increasingly on creating its own original content, rather than on simply paying other studios and distributors for the right to show theirs, Netflix has scored some huge hits. The best “Netflix Originals” – Stranger Things, The Crown, the ambitious Marvel Comics series – are some of the best TV being produced anywhere today, carving Netflix an identity as a poppier, pulpier rival to HBO. But of course, the more they make, the harder the quality/quantity balance is to maintain. Whether new comedy Santa Clarita Diet is the worst show to bear the Netflix badge so far is hard to say – Sense8 was really, really bad – but it’s pretty stinky.

Created by Victor Fresco, the series is an embarrassingly late arrival to the zombie party that got shuffling in the mid-2000s with 28 Days Later and Shaun Of The Dead, peaked with The Walking Dead’s TV breakout in 2010, and started smelling bad around 2013, when Brad Pitt unveiled World War Z.

Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant star as Sheila and Joel Hammond, married Californian real estate agents whose relationship hits a snag. One day, after puking up a swimming pool’s worth of beige slime, Sheila discovers she no longer has a heartbeat, her blood has turned to tar-like sludge, and she’s developed an insatiable appetite for fresh, bloody human flesh. In other words – although they prefer not to use the word itself due to its negative connotations – she seems to have become a zombie.

Determined to help her through this change of life, Joel, with the aid of their sarcastic teenage daughter and the nerd boy next door, proposes a strategy: if Sheila really has to slaughter and eat folks, they’ll limit it to killing bad people who deserve to die, like Dexter with more quirky music and kooky face pulling.

The idea looks interesting on paper. Set in a bright, sunny sitcom suburb, with acting and dialogue to match, the series infects traditional mainstream sitcom trappings with violence, gore and murder. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, Fresco is trying to use the old screwball comedy strategy: in the way that Bringing Up Baby wasn’t really about dinosaur bones and pet leopards, but about whether Cary Grant could grow up enough to win Katharine Hepburn, this isn’t really about Sheila becoming undead, it’s about Sheila and Joel reaching a certain stage and working out how to make their marriage work, or if they even want to.

If it had arrived 20 years ago, it might have become a minor cult. But Santa Clarita Diet just doesn’t work. There’s no pace, and the bad taste humour feels tired, limp and forced – people trying too hard to be something they’re not. The obvious contrast is with another recent, roaring, gore-drenched comedy horror, Ash Vs Evil Dead, the revival of the Sam Raimi films. Powered by Bruce Campbell’s effortlessly hilarious performance, it’s simply fantastic fun, a live-action cartoon, like Tex Avery in an abattoir. Santa Clarita Diet, on the other hand, is all effort.

The worst offender might be Barrymore, who manages to be simultaneously flat and flailing. Olyphant fares a little better as the hapless, mild-mannered husband, but the most interesting thing about the performance is what a change of pace it is. Best known for simmering badass cats in cowboy hats in Deadwood and Justified, watching him stumble from accident to accident here is like seeing Clint Eastwood remaking Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em. Which sounds funnier than it is.

Sunday

Apple Tree Yard

9pm, BBC One

The first part of this adaptation of Louise Doughty’s novel ended with brutal scenes. But, if anything, the opening of tonight’s episode is even more upsetting – as, picking up exactly where we left off, Yvonne (a great Emily Watson), numb and traumatised, finds herself sharing a taxi home with her attacker. Left alone, damaged and unable to tell anyone what has happened, she finally turns to the stranger with whom she commenced a wild affair (a slippery Ben Chaplin). The question of just who Chaplin’s character is, and what kind of character he has, looms ever larger. When he picked her up, there seemed something oily and slightly creepy. He grows more sympathetic tonight – all the same, there’s the sense that’s something very off here, and not just because we know it’s all going to end up in a murder trial. Yvonne still thinks he’s some kind of spook, but by the end of this tense episode you’ll be building your own theories, then taking them apart, and trying others.

Monday

Art Of France

9pm, BBC Four

It’s getting hard keeping track of how many places Andrew Graham-Dixon has covered now. If memory serves, he’s already clocked up Russia, Germany, China, Spain, The Low Countries and Scandinavia and, by this stage, you have to reckon that, like David Suchet with the Poirot books, he’s resolved to keep going until he’s done them all. That wouldn’t bad. These are fine programmes: detailed and great-looking art history travelogues, presented with insight and passion. The first surprising thing about this series is realising he hasn’t done France already, but, with the National Front rising, the moment is timely. He’ll consider the tensions of modern France later, but begins by pointing out they’ve always been there, starting in awesome style back in 1137, with the birth of gothic architecture. This episode covers the 30 Year War, Montaigne’s essays, and the palace of Louis XIV, featuring some incredible map-models the Sun King ordered. For the childish among us, who like to play Alan Partridge Watch with AGD, the “A-ha!” moment is when he suddenly shouts, “Versailles!”

Tuesday

The Modern British Slave Trade

10pm, Channel 4

“It’s going on within 10 miles of you, regardless of where you’re sat in the country.” So says one of the contributors in this depressing but eye-opening and necessary film. Government figures estimate around 13,000 people have been forced into new forms of slavery in the UK today. The documentary illustrates the statistic with some of the most glaring examples to have come to light. The first case proves the truth of that opening quote, reporting how, in 2008, police discovered a brutal little forced labour empire operating in the genteel, wealthy Costwolds town of Cheltenham. At its head was Billy Connors, who, with his family, preyed on vulnerable and homeless men, luring them with promises of paid work and accommodation, then keeping them in cruel conditions and forcing them to work through brutal violence. Featuring interviews with former “slaves” and police who investigated cases, the documentary explores how people can be held trapped in plain sight, forced to toil in jobs from agriculture to high street nail bars.

Wednesday

Storyville: The Great Literary Scandal – The JT LeRoy Story 11pm, BBC Four

Storyville brings us an edited version of Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary, Author, about how one of the great literary sensations of the early 2000s was actually one of the most fascinating literary hoaxes of recent decades. Between 1998 and 2005, readers flocked to the best-selling figure of JT LeRoy: an adolescent, gender-fluid, HIV-positive homeless hustler-turned-author, whose squalid, searching southern gothic fiction drew on his own miserable childhood as abused son of a prostitute. LeRoy’s fame was burnished by a bandwagon of celebrity fans. But, as was revealed in 2006, he never existed. The real author was Laura Albert, a writer in her late-30s, who eventually persuaded her young sister-in-law to pose as LeRoy for shy public appearances. Feuerzeig indulges in some frustrating stylistic flourishes, but scores by securing a long interview with Albert, who has had her own real troubles. The result is perhaps one-sided, and one of the most intriguing questions – whether the writing still matters without the wrapping – fades away. But it’s still a strange, absorbing story.

Thursday

The Great Pottery Throw Down

8pm, BBC Two

Now The Great British Bake Off has died and gone to hell, or Channel 4, anyway, could this be the moment for one of its most brazen clones to step up and fill the warm, fuzzy hole that’s been ripped in audiences’ hearts? Returning for a second series, TGPTD, which is made by some of the Bake Off team, is shameless in copy-catting the format: 10 amateur potters gather to throw challenges set and judged by two master practitioners, Kate Malone and Keith Brymer Jones, who has already won a cult following due to his habit of bursting into tears over well-intentioned earthenware. It doesn’t have Bake Off’s mysterious, comfy special ingredient, but it’s actually a more interesting watch. Asked to produce a 16-piece dinner set, the potters put in serious graft; the technicalities of the processes are fascinating; the artistry is surprising; and the heartbreaks are more profound when pieces crack. In addition, sometimes – like tonight, when they’re asked to make some big cones – it just looks rude.