Monday

Big Little Lies

9pm, Sky Atlantic

Monday night is the night for beautiful-looking towns by the sea, and all the secrets festering there. Screw up your eyes, and Big Little Lies resembles a distant Hollywood cousin to Broadchurch, which continues steadily on ITV at exactly the same time this American series arrives on Sky Atlantic with a big, beautiful splash. Both feature close-knit communities in idyllic beachfront places. Both pick away the sunny, sandy veneer to reveal ugly things: unhappy lives, lies, jealously, frustration, violence, murder. Both, to varying degrees, focus on varyingly strong female characters. And both lash together the sturdy frameworks of soap opera and crime mystery, then try to do something less predictable with them.

Yet the shows are very different – the difference between Dorset and California. Set amid an ultra-rich enclave in Monterey, a place where even sunset looks more expensive, Big Little Lies is infinitely sleeker, stranger and slyer. At first glance, in fact, it seems like a full-on satire, skewering the dream-home-and-yoga lives of the rich wives at the centre of the story.

Our way into their exclusive community is a new arrival, Jane (Shailene Woodley), a wary single mother dressed in black, just moved to town with her little son, Ziggy. Taking him to his first day at primary school, she encounters Madeline (Reese Witherspoon), whose daughter is in the same class. A slick and buzzy queen bee, Madeline decides to take Jane – by local standards, an impoverished ugly duckling – under her wing, partly as a genuine show of friendship, partly to have something to show off, introducing her to her friend, Celeste (Nicole Kidman), an ex-lawyer who now spends her time taking carefully-composed photographs of her sons and husband, to share how perfect their life is on social media.

Things, however, are not perfect. The series opens on a flash-forward: someone has been brutally killed. The victim’s identity is kept from us. Instead, we get comments from various witnesses, and as the story unfolds, it is spiked by this gossiping Greek chorus, whose catty chatter offers clues to how the trouble started. It all stemmed from that first day of school, when Jane’s son was accused of bullying the daughter of another of the town’s most visible personalities, Renata (the peerless Laura Dern). Madeline sided with Jane. Thus, battle lines were drawn.

Much of the pleasure lies in this gleaming war-of-bitches aspect. In some respects, Big Little Lies offers a grown-up version of the poison clique comedy found in highschool movies like Heathers and Election. The latter’s star, Witherspoon remains fantastic at this stuff, great at being awful. But the series, adapted from Liane Moriarty’s novel by David E Kelley, begins to wrongfoot you, probing beneath the Monterey set’s cartoonish public face. In Madeleine’s case, we discover a more likeably messed-up woman – peppy and pensive, Witherspoon is quite magnificent.

Also on compellingly good, unreadable form is Kidman. Celeste’s relationship with her husband is revealed as one of constant abuse, made all the more troubling because it’s not clear how she feels about it, or if she even wants to know how she really feels. But the held look she shares with Jane when they meet suggests theirs is the relationship to watch.

There’s another comparison with Broadchurch. Both series use a topline mystery as Trojan horse, a way of exploring character and community. But without its whodunit hook, Broadchurch would founder. Here, though, the crime barely matters, at least to begin. It’s the simmering underbelly that hooks you – although the glossy, guilty pleasure surface is a delicious icing on top.

Sunday

SS-GB

9pm, BBC One

It’s losing viewers by the minute, and everyone’s either claiming they can’t understand anything anybody’s saying, or whining that Sam Riley is too young for the role of detective Douglas Archer (for the record, Len Deighton wrote the character as 30; Riley is 37). But, hell with them, I’m still giving the secret handshake as a member of the dwindling underground resistance who are, on balance, quite enjoying SS-GB. People might complain it’s slow, but there’s twenty times as much mad stuff going on in here as there ever was in the (decent, but overrated) adaptation of Le Carré’s The Night Manager. Following the bombing at the Karl Marx Exhumation Ceremony (come on!), the Nazi crackdown has begun, and, as people are executed in the streets and old Harry (James Cosmo) gets rounded up, Archer is in a hurry to get his son out of London and ferried safely north into “the unoccupied zone.” Meanwhile, the time has come to decide whether or not to join the crazy plan to free the king.

Tuesday

The Replacement

9pm, BBC One

In years gone by, Joe Ahearne, creator of this drama, was responsible for some of the most entertaining hours I ever spent with a TV, although perhaps not for the reasons he intended: he was, after all, the writer behind BBC One’s legendary basket case Apparitions, the show in which sexy priest Martin Shaw battled hell’s demons every week. The Replacement isn’t in the same league of nuclear-strength barking madness as that, but, as we reach the final episode tonight, it has got very, very, very stupid indeed. In some respects, this is a shame, because the first episode was so promisingly tense. On the other hand, it doesn’t really matter, because, even though it’s just totally daft now, it’s so daft it’s still quite good fun. As things come to a head between Ellen and Paula, logic, motivation, plot and character dissolve, but Morven Christie and Vicky McClure enjoy themselves by going at it like Ripley V The Alien Queen, displaying some unexpected hot-wiring skills along the way.

Wednesday

Midnight Sun

10pm, Sky Atlantic

Somewhere remote in northern Sweden, a Frenchman wakes to find himself strapped helplessly to a helicopter’s propeller blade. Then the engines start…and things get very grisly. So begins this eight-part mystery from the team Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, who previously worked as lead writers on The Bridge. The crime scene is the isolated town of Kiruna, a strange landscape dominated by an enormous mine, surrounded by endless beautiful but deadly wilderness. Leading the investigation into the killing are local prosecutor Rutger Burlin (Fargo’s Peter Stormare) and his assistant Anders (Gustaf Hammarsten), whose odd couple routine becomes a trio when they’re joined by Kahina Zadi (Leïla Bekhti), a homicide detective flown in from France, happy to escape some personal issues in Paris. Whether it will be as good as The Bridge’s first series remains to be seen, but this opener is instantly intriguing, mixing its baroquely gruesome murders and conspiracy with shaggy, human humour and offbeat characterisation. The endless daylight of the region’s summer months and hints of local mysticism only add to the brew.

Thursday

The Last Kingdom

9pm, BBC Two

The characters still wander around talking about “humping,” the wailing theme tune is still godawful, and the opening “Previously on The Last Kingdom…” narration is hilarious as it tries to recap everything that’s happened already (“…and then he got killed as well, right, and then I fell in love a psychic queen, but her head got chopped off, and then…”). And yet, as it returns for a second series, the BBC’s hairy big adaptation of Bernard Cornwell’s thumping tales of Saxon V Viking adventure in 9th century Britain is still good, bloody fun. As we begin, our Saxon-born/ Viking-raised hero, Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of Timotei (Alexander Dreymon), is riding on a mission of revenge to avenge the death of his Viking stepfather, and reclaim his family’s land from his traitorous uncle. Meanwhile, at his court in Wessex, King Alfred (David Dawson), dreams of uniting the separate kingdoms of England into one, and turns his thoughts toward Northumbria, suffering under the dark, wild rule of godless Dane brothers Sigfried and Erik.

Friday

Marvel’s Iron Fist

Netflix

Following the success of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, knives have been out in advance for this fourth and final entry in Netflix’s raft of Marvel adaptations, but, to judge by the opening episodes, it’s another strong addition to an excellent franchise. Where the original Luke Cage comics were designed to cash in on the arrival of Blaxploitation movies, fellow second-string superhero Iron Fist was Marvel’s answer to the 1970s Kung Fu craze. Adding a spiritual-mystic spice to the Batman-style origin story, our hero Danny Rand (Finn Jones) lost his billionaire parents as a child when their plane crashed in the snowy Himalayas, where he was taken in and trained in arcane martial arts. As the series begins, Rand, long presumed dead, has returned to New York City as a humble barefoot Buddhist vagrant, and tries to convince people he is who he says, while kicking the tar out of many of them. Later this year, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and Daredevil will all hook up for a joint series as The Defenders.

Saturday

Happy 100th Birthday Dame Vera Lynn

9pm, BBC Two

To mark her centenary, Dame Vera and her daughter Virginia look back over her life and the songs with which she is most associated, with the aid of their family archives, old footage, and contributions from fans for whom her voice holds a special place, including Paul McCartney, Barry Humphries, Miriam Margolyes and several veterans of the Second World War. Astonishingly, it has almost been 100 years since Vera Lynn started performing: her first public appearance on stage came at the age of seven. Along the way, she’s notched up her place in the record books several times – she was the first British artist ever to have a number one in America, and in 2009 became the oldest living artist to reach the top of the UK Album Charts. To get in the mood, tune in early for tonight’s Dad’s Army repeat (8.30pm), entirely excellent as ever, with the platoon out on guerrilla training exercises...and also filming the famous end credits sequence while they’re at it.

LAST WEEK'S HIGHLIGHTS

IT’S just a fact of the times we’re living through that, on a daily basis, our TV screens flood us with fresh horror: wave upon wave of statements and images that leave you bent double, head in hands, wondering how this has been allowed to happen, when did the world become a sick, surreal sci-fi movie – why did everybody just go mad? The more it piles up, though, the more inured we become, until it now takes something fully shocking to puncture through to the core, and shake us out from the usual cocoon of numb, helpless despair and into the sense that action can and must be taken.

Such an incident came last week, on Monday March 6, a date which will live in infamy, when, suddenly and deliberately, Mary Berry added double cream to an already contentious Bolognese sauce.

The provocations had been coming thick and fast in Mary Berry Everyday (BBC Two). There was the flagrant flaunting of what she euphemistically described as her “different-shaped croutons.” There was the astonishing moment when, with a straight face, she advocated using “Japanese Dried Breadcrumbs” to coat a fish. There was this unvarnished piece of Brexit propaganda: “We Brits are lucky that we can produce so many things that we love to use every day…” – which, when spoken to introduce a segment about honey, ranks alongside Marie Antoinette’s dietary tip on cake.

But it was the double cream splashing into the Bolognese hot on the heels of the white wine Mary weirdly insisted she preferred using in there that broke the camel’s back. Sure, this wasn’t as appalling as the night in 2008 when Delia Smith launched a new series with a recipe that consisted of a tray of oven chips with boiled eggs chopped over them. But we always knew Delia was a loose cannon.

Mary, though, we come to for reassurance. Following the bloody death of proper Bake Off, her new show, with its soft sunlight and near-as-dammit music, seemed a last bastion of cosy – a place of comfort with an air of nostalgia only doubled by the way that watching her move around kindles memories of happy times watching Gerry Anderson shows as a kid. Now, though, with two thick white spoonfuls of pure wrong, all is curdled. Nothing is certain any more.

Mind reeling, grip on reality sliding away along with my grated faith in human nature, I staggered to the kitchen groping for something solid to cling to, something that has been a rock in hard times before this – my passata-spattered 1995 edition of Mary Berry Complete. Had I been wrong about her all these years? Had she always been a secret creamer? But no, there it was, page 313: her old recipe for Bolognese sauce, specifying red wine, as God intended, and no mention of cream anywhere. Here, as if more were needed, is the proof that something has gone very wrong over these past two decades. Well: this far and no more. This carnage stops, right here, right now.