Among the many innovations that The Wire brought to TV was its much-vaunted ‘novelistic structure’. Its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns (who between them had worked as a journalist, a cop and a teacher) admitted that this was intentional, and redoubled their commitment by hiring actual novelists to sit on the production and writing staff. One of those novelists, Dennis Lehane, has since moved on to write for Boardwalk Empire, again alongside other authors....

Now we’re talking. It’s taken two episodes to bring Trust Me to a riveting place, but it’s there. The third instalment was an involving hour that not only gave us much-needed clarity into Cath’s until-now opaque motivation for lying, it also placed her in some gripping situations. Cath is clearly as bright and capable as any doctor, but her single-parent family lacked the resources and crucially, the precedent (medicine being one of those careers that, like diabetes, tends to run in families) for her to become one the usual way....

Now consider the following: Salt. Spectre. The Double. Unlocked. Don’t exactly get the pulse racing, do they? What follows is a fairly rote thriller in the mode of Jason Bourne or TV’s Spooks (which got a forgettable big-screen spin-off, The Greater Good, in 2015). The good news is that veteran director Michael Apted has form in this kind of thing, having brought us the good-but-not-great 90s Bond outing The World Is Not Enough; he brings a decent number of whizzes and bangs to most of Unlocked’s action sequences, which are far more spiky and bloody than in your average Bond or Bourne flick....

Voltron Season 7 Episode 3 There’s a lot of really great stuff in this episode. The division between Lotor’s former generals, the casual banter between the Galra crew, the space battle with the Paladins, and Lance rushing in to protect Pidge with zero regard for his own safety. I’ve regularly seen the complaint that Coran is “too goofy”. To that I say, why? What’s wrong with having a wacky character who approaches situations in a silly way?...

4.2 An Evil Within This episode is a smorgasbord of plot points and adventures, but do they come together cohesively? Short answer is yes, absolutely. And I’m loving the multiple directions things are going. But where is HG in all of this hoo-hah? I guess we’ll find out later down the line. So we’ll start with Pete and Myka, who are sent out to Philly to chase a ping in a diner....

2.3 Virtu E Fortuna Suffice it to say, Westworld isn’t the only world in Delos’s massive adult theme park. We’ve seen the size of the control facility, which looks to be something like 85 floors from available Delos-themed material online. There are six parks, only one of which we have seen a great deal of, but with the chaos in the park in the wake of the hosts gaining their freedom (if not their sentience), there’s bound to be chaos....

Wind River goes one step further: it’s a murder mystery, a thriller about male violence, a drama about the marginalisation of Native Americans and, again, a western. Jeremy Renner stars as Cory Lambert, a tracker who patrols the vast, snowy expanses of the Wind River reservation in Wyoming; a seasoned marksman with a tragic past, Lambert’s every inch the archetypal cowboy. As well as writing, Sheridan makes his debut as director here, and it’s an assured piece of filmmaking, even if it doesn’t have the stylistic verve of Sicario or Hell Or High Water....

But now the film is out and available for those UK backers to watch, and that seems a lot more important than questioning whether it should have been made in the first place. However it happened, it’s rare in its purity – this is exactly the film its director wanted to make, with no compromises and no one to please other than the loyal fans that have handed over their cash to ensure its existence....

Wynonna Earp Season 3, Episode 5 Zoie Palmer (Dark Matter, Lost Girl) makes a fun appearance on Wynonna Earp as Jolene, the demon that has dogged Waverly her whole life. Poor Waves – first Bobo, now Jolene. It turns out all of Michelle’s treachery was an attempt to take out Jolene, who keeps everyone transfixed with her baked goods. Bobo has long been obsessed with Waverly, and probably always will be....

By going right back to basics, First Class not only finds interesting things to say at the very beginnings of the X-Men story, but it might just make you believe in origin stories all over again. And while it doesn’t quite sustain itself across its entire running time in the manner that Nolan’s Batman reboot managed, director Matthew Vaughn come far closer than you might expect. Make no mistake, it’s a triumph....

Blood Drive wasn’t for everyone, only about 450,000 Bleeders came back week after week to see it. They started a petition to #RenewBloodDrive. It was largely ignored by everyone else, who saw it as a cheesy rip-off of old grindhouse gore and sleaze. Blood Drive was all of that and less. The show was not a retread of old tires. It is now forever part of the genre it set out to pay homage to....

The episode centered on Akela Amandor, a former SHIELD agent and protégé of Coulson’s who has gone rogue and is taking missions from a shadowy organization that is controlling her through an implanted cybernetic eye-ball. First off, connecting Amandor to Coulson gave the whole thing gravitas and gave a little peak into Coulson’s past, something Marvel loyalists have been clamoring for. It gives his Agents and fans the feeling that Coulson is a man that would move heaven and Earth for his team, a man who lives by the same creed as his idol, Captain America....

Warning: this review contains spoilers for anyone who hasn’t yet read about the 2008 economic crisis. His latest series, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, examines our society’s now inextricable entanglement with computers, and how they’ve grown to dominate our financial markets and the way they interact. Like his earlier films, this first instalment, Love And Power makes seemingly incongruous connections between current events and those in the past....

Catch And Release What I especially liked was the way that, early on in the story, we have Rosen and his boss, Kathy Sullivan, having a romantic take-away, making it appear that’s she an entirely different and more affable person than the one she replaced. But, as the story unfolded, Rosen is presented with the stark reality of their predicament, when he is instructed by her to hunt an Alpha he knows not to be a danger....

2.9 The Devil Will Drag You Under Coming off the back of the hand-wringing of Falling, this takes up immediately after those events where Danni cuts a deal to avoid a standing reservation in Building 7. The trouble with the whole idea of Cameron going rogue in an attempt to save Danni is that it seemed utterly false from the outset, and they provided so many clues as to what was really going on, and how it was achieved, that even the least analytical viewer would have realised the deception long before the reveal....

With Jason “Robin II” Todd back from the dead despite being initially killed off in the 80s by a phone-vote, Captain America’s sidekick Bucky alive and kicking after a good 50 years of being the sidekick cautionary tale, and now Barry “The Flash” Allen (a man who a year or two ago would’ve made it onto this list) now expected to make an unlikely-but-inevitable return to the land of the living in the pages of Final Crisis #1 this week, I wonder – who, in comics, can you bank on staying dead?...

As one of DS9’s most powerful, The Visitor stands as one of the all-time classic Trek episodes, and features some rock solid performances, including an excellent guest appearance by Tony Todd. The episode begins with an elderly man opening his door to a young woman seeking shelter from a storm. This woman, however, doesn’t stumble upon the old man’s home by accident, and is, in fact, a budding writer who wishes to speak to the old man, who we find out is an elderly Jake Sisko (Tony Todd)....

American Crime Story: Season 1 Episode 10 But the verdict itself by no means constitutes a spoiler. Whether you watched the trial live or watched the events riffed on in I Love the 90s or pulled up Wikipedia when this miniseries began, you already knew the outcome. I realized, then, that the more effective storytelling strategy, as with the rest of the series, was to tell the events linearly. And so, the closing statements were just one small part of the episode....

American Dad Season 14 Episode 18 “Foiling your plans will make for the perfect distraction for making small talk with my daughter.” Funny enough, last episode saw Stan and Hayley imprisoned together in a Tunisian labor camp. While “The Family Plan” gets by on the shared competitive nature of Stan and Hayley, “The Long Bomb” instead leans into the humor in how awkward these two can be with each other. There’s some real beauty in the idea of Hayley going to a football game with her dad, purely because she believes the rest of the family will also be joining....

This week began with a cold open that didn’t quite work for me, which is odd because usually the show starts off on a great note. We find Queenie under a bridge in a decidedly seedy part of New Orleans, not where we left her, in Marie Laveau’s hair salon. After a showdown with a nasty hobo, Zoe and Madison appear to try and persuade Queenie to rejoin the Coven....