This review contains spoilers. This week’s episode of Being Human, despite suffering from a lack of Nora, was a vast improvement on the last few episodes. The show is at its best when it lets its main characters interact with each other, and this episode proved why that formula works. Sally’s plot in this episode is a story that’s been told over and over again in multiple ways: a child finding out the truth about their parent’s hidden past....

This week’s Beowulf: Return To The Shieldlands introduced us to some significant new characters. The most important of these going forward with the series is surely Slean’s new bride, Kela. It will be interesting to see what effect her arrival has on Slean and his ever-revolving loyalties. Still trying to hold his uncle in his back pocket (if those rather nice tunics of theirs have pockets), Slean is nevertheless no more willing to be a pawn of his uncle than of his mother, to whom he showed rather more affection than usual this week....

1.3 YumTime The easy armchair psychoanalyst move would be to attribute these growing pains to the showrunners’ relative inexperience. Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Andrew Ross Sorkin are all tremendously capable writers but they A. are used to different media from television like movies and books and B. occupy a world in which white collar fraud is the sexiest crime in the world. For pop culture TV nerds (which is a truly enormous bloc of people that does not seems to include Koppelman, Levien and Ross Sorkin) a character monologuing about “ass to mouth” which eventually becomes a metaphor for his sadistic human resources practices is no longer shocking or interesting....

2.9 Battle Of The Century However, there is a richer seam of history for the show to mine: that of its setting. The story takes place in a very precise time in history, and is pegged to a peculiar event, America’s thirteen-year experiment at Prohibition. The show has always done well at establishing the setting, and of supplementing its fictional characters with historical figures. It is a delicate blend, but one that works, and in this episode, Battle Of The Century, the relationships of these people to the wider events of their period takes centre stage....

You know that now-classic episode of Rick and Morty where they watch interdimensional television for the entire thing and everyone lost their minds over it? Well, picture an entire series of that and you’ll maybe have a grasp on the insanity, and stream of consciousness mayhem that powers this show. Harg Nallin’ is a wrecking ball of comedy that doesn’t stop knocking down walls. Adult Swim’s underappreciated Superjail isn’t exactly the best comparison but I couldn’t help but think of the series while watching this in terms of its sprawling, unique brand of comedy....

5.15 Granite State But Breaking Bad doesn’t just feature death as some device to keep the show going– it’s all about death. Yes, it’s also about meth and morality and family and villainy, but ultimately death permeates every frame and informs almost every decision made by the characters, and penultimate episode Granite State was an episode where the stench of mortality became unavoidable. Whereas last week’s Ozymandias was a horrifying, dizzying descent into the depths of despair for Walt and his extended family, Granite State feels numb and purgatorial, as our already broken and beaten Breaking Bad gang are pummelled even further into the ground: it’s like watching someone collapse face down towards to the floor after their heart has stopped, unable to put their hands out in front of them to break the fall....

Breaking Homicide’s premiered opened with a case in Levasseur’s hometown in Rhode Island. Seven-year-old Michelle Norris was abducted from a playground in 1986, her body was later found in the nearby. The evidence indicated the murderer was someone who lived in the neighborhood. The show also tackled the case of the Honolulu Strangler, who brutally murdered five young women thirty years ago, while Monhandie was a young man on the island....

When else in the history of television have the words “Of course!” prompted a nation to throw down the sofa cushion it’d been tensely gnawing on for the past hour, look up to the sky, clench its fists, and scream a prolonged, action-movie-style “Nooooooooo”? Not often, I’d bet. Because this is the best bit, isn’t it? This is the honeymoon/halcyon/salad-y part of TV whodunits, just before the end, when all our theories and clues could still mean something, when we’re as alert as a cocker spaniel who’s heard the unmistakeable ring of his dinner bowl being placed on the kitchen floor, when we don’t yet know....

Like an orange-cagouled lamb to the slaughterhouse, Ellie Miller’s aggressive pursuit of the Sandbrook case after her heart-rending meeting with Tom led her to a grisly discovery. Was that agricultural incinerator the final resting place of Lisa Newberry’s body? Or is it simply another sleight of hand misdirection? Whether we have the arrival of The Railway Man director Jonathan Teplitzky or cinematographer John Conroy to thank for it, episode five was Broadchurch as an art-house flick....

Okay, I think it’s probably time to admit it. Caprica is starting to lose me. This latest episode was another exercise is adding backstory, from where I was sat, with precious little to really enjoy here and now. Yep, there’s an element of stuck record about this review, with the same points and themes coming through. But go back to the second episode of Caprica onwards, and how has the show really evolved?...

It is certainly an experimental commission for the BBC. Amstell – known for sad-com Grandma’s House and causing more than one celebrity walkout on Popworld and Never Mind The Buzzcocks – was asked if he had any ideas weird enough to be an iPlayer exclusive. This mockumentary is what he came up with. It is important to say at this point, before you tut and go back to eating your sausage and eggs, that the film is actually funny....

What a coincidence then, that it also stars Favreau as the lead character. Chef Carl Casper was once the next big thing in cuisine, but has since settled into a creative rut at a restaurant owned by Riva (Dustin Hoffman). He’s been serving his boss’ menu for five years, but finally loses his tether when he gets a very public critical drubbing from acerbic food writer Ramsey Michel (Oliver Platt)....

“Da Director” was truly a step down. There were a few good laughs, but the writing was not very strong. It was nice to give Tracy some time in the spotlight, but it didn’t do much for her, and while I appreciate that the Ricky/Troy/Crisco sub-plot was stronger than last week’s, it was still pretty lame. It was also pretty telling that Troy’s lame sub-plot was at least centered on his character, while Ricky’s participation in the comedy once again hinged largely on his ethnicity....

This month sees the release of ParaNorman, the latest stop-motion animated film from Laika, who brought us the captivating Coraline back in 2009. Directed by Chris Butler and Sam Fell (with a screenplay written by the former), ParaNorman’s a zombie comedy flick, school drama, and loving homage to classic horror movies of the 70s and 80s. And while the process of making it involved traditional techniques, which at one point saw around 300 people building sets and making clothes, ParaNorman also used new technology to bring its characters to life....

4.18 Chuck Versus The A-Team What’s inside Zone 6 is fully revealed, and Chuck gets to feel less special when he discovers that the CIA has two more Intersects at its disposal. This feeds the somewhat overly paranoid aspect to Chuck’s personality, where he’s continually questioning if he’s on the ‘A’ or ‘B’ team? Much of this part of the story was fun, but not as hilarious as this show can be on occasions....

5.3 Chuck Versus The Frosted Tips When I was formulating my thoughts before writing this, it struck me just how much content they’d managed to pack into the running time. Because this story not only delivered a complete mini-arc where Morgan goes to the dark side, only to be coaxed back in to the light, but it also developed the Casey/Gertrude romance, brought back Beckman and Alex, and even managed to make Jeff funny again....

5.6 Chuck Versus The Curse Similarly devoid of any idea as to who is trying to make their lives hell, Team Carmichael decides to dig out the cabin in the woods set one more time. Elle and Awesome have a romantic dinner, while everyone is pursued by CIA operative Rebecca Romijn, who sadly is neither naked nor coloured blue in this appearance. Even clothed she’s fine, given the cartoon dialogue her character is given, and even manages a trademark pout when she’s finally outmanoeuvred....

1.1 For Tonight We May Die & 1.2 The Coach With The Dragon Tattoo With one exception in this case. As a Doctor Who spin-off, a certain Gallifreyan has licence to pop in and wave his Sonic Screwdriver about from time to time, as he does in For Tonight We May Die. Peter Capaldi’s cameo is a necessary encroachment in episode one, connecting Class to its parent show and establishing the rules of the game....

Good, it was, almost like a little play-within-a-play, when Tolin and Stallwood stalked across the alarmingly silent road, with Stallwood narrating the events and Tolin coming over all Macbeth as though he was seeing ghosts of cars and lorries. Cut into this were super-short clips of each driver at the moment of the collision – distressed faces, shrieks and panics, loud engines – making sure we were thinking about the human impact as well as the crash of machinery....

1.2 Brave New World Thus begins the real plot-of-the-week for Colony this time around. It’s a fascinating one, although it frequently gets lost in a tug of war between Will and Katie’s competing storylines. The second episode of this lofty social sci-fi saga maintains the uneasy status quo established in the pilot while introducing us to another, more digestible state of affairs that will have a lasting impact on the formula of this series from here on out....