The third series of ‘Merlin’ has started with grim spectacle, aside from the odd slapstick scene that’s escaped from a different tone meeting.

One of those things that, while you’re watching it, you can’t help but be deeply suspicious of the reaction the production is trying to evoke.

I thought I’d like ‘Sherlock’, because I like both Sherlock Holmes apocrypha and Steven Moffat scripts, but I didn’t think it possible it would surprise me. Thrillingly, I was both right on the first count and very, very wrong on the second.

Now into its ninth and penultimate season, belated showing on E4 in the UK, ‘Smallville’ is definitely not fresh produce.

Ask any fan of 1960s spy show ‘The Avengers’ and they’ll all tell you the same thing – series four was the point where it started to go seriously bonkers.

Timothy Olyphant is back in his comfort zone as Manichean, hair-trigger-temper Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens in ‘Justified’ (various timeslots, Five USA).

ITV1’s new drama is one ‘Identity’ that should have remained a secret.

So, ‘The Big Bang’ went off and there’s no more ‘Doctor Who’ until Christmas. Luckily, we’re here with a recommendation list of ten old ‘Who’ stories (well, not exactly ten, but we’ll get to that later) that are worth watching to help the next six months pass a bit quicker.

BBC4’s fatherhood season includes one of the channel’s drama biopics, this time on John Lennon.

‘Doctor Who’ the series, like Doctor Who the character, has a tricky habit of regenerating, with producers and other creative types moving on. The current season, which ends this Saturday, marks the first time the show has made that transition since its 2005 relaunch – and even by the standards of such jumps this was a risky one.

We’d like you to vote for pre-2005 ‘Doctor Who’ stories worth catching up with in the long gap between the end of this season and Christmas. Details inside!

‘Sons of Anarchy’ takes a bold step in solving the perennial puzzle of how to create high stakes drama where power-plays can lead to life or death in the heavily regulated and policed, relatively safe setting of contemporary America.
The majority of shows faced with this problem take the obvious approach and choose their characters from [...]

‘Painkiller Jane’. Insert your own pain-related pun here.

Let’s face facts. There are a lot of TV shows and films where the best bit is the title sequence.

‘Pulse’ delivers high-quality genre stuff, though exactly which genre is hard to pin down. It’s a medical drama that’s also a dark conspiracy thriller that’s also a chilling supernatural horror show that also dabbles in great gouts of Grand Guignol.

Introducing John Hannah at this year’s BAFTA awards, Graham Norton described ‘Spartacus: Blood and Sand’ as being like ‘Gladiator’ without Russell Crowe: “Better.”

That was, well, surprisingly good. There’s no reason an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett novel shouldn’t be good, of course, but experience had turned me pessimistic.

It’s easy to be cynical about the finale to ‘Lost’.

‘The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’ is one of the best anime series to get an English language release, and the first series has just been re-released as a single Anime Legends box set.

I only know Martin Amis’ novel ‘Money’ by reputation, but it’s a big reputation as one of the defining novels of the 1980s, with lead character John Self hailed as a scabrous avatar for the excesses of the age.

Credit where credit’s due – if you were running a sci-fi show featuring parallel dimensions where several of the characters in one dimension were evil counterparts to those in the other – and where Spock plays a recurring character – would you have the willpower to resist dressing one of them in a sinister goatee?

‘What They Died For’ attempts to answer a question by never really doing so, or perhaps by giving the simplest explanation that we all already knew. In that sense, this episode could be viewed as the series in microcosm.

‘Heroes’ is dead. After four seasons, five ‘volumes’, and about forty seven instances of Sylar switching between good and evil for no apparent reason, US network NBC have dragged the unfortunate series, ailing from ratings deprivation, around the back of the studio lot and put seven Kryptonite bullets through its head.

A couple of years ago Philip Glenister, TV’s Gene Hunt, swore he “wouldn’t do bloody ‘Tin Machine’” so it’s best to assume that this really is the end of the ‘Life on Mars’/'Ashes to Ashes’ franchise. Huge spoilers ahead…

I’ll come out and say it: although it may have been a matter of simply having too high expectations, ‘Across the Sea’ was a disappointment for me.

Good news, bad news, bad news and good news for this episode.

I hope you like novelty episodes folks, because ‘Fringe’ has gone for it big time here.

Make no mistake: ‘The Candidate’ is a sucker punch to the gut.

Luther, the first British star vehicle for Idris Elba, is a combination of lightweight detective show cliches and preposterously grandiose villainy that isn’t so much bad as a bit baffling.

Convergence is a theme that runs through this episode. Several characters and threads, some running for a couple of years, finally come together here, as the layers for the endgame are slowly beginning to be peeled back.

For a fast-paced 21st century update of ‘X-Files’ ‘Fringe’ doesn’t half crawl at a snail’s pace at times.

The remake of The Prisoner hadn’t even transmitted on British television before fans were leaping online to express their opinions on this apparent travesty.

Thanks to the magic of iPlayer, the rest of the UK can catch up on BBC Scotland’s latest sketch show, ‘Burnistoun’. I’ve now seen the first two episodes.
The sketches are mostly surreal takes on mundane, everyday experiences. Setting the show apart from most sketch shows is its amiable tone, as well as the length of [...]

A rollercoaster this week, but in the worst possible sense of the word as a dull start gives way to a brilliantly promising central act before stuttering to a sedate and underwhelming halt.

The latest animated incarnation of Batman has been running in the States for a while and is, I believe, shown in the UK at an hour in the morning that I refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Thankfully, it’s being very slowly released on DVD, four episodes at a time.
With ‘The Dark Knight’ providing a [...]

With ‘Everybody Loves Hugo’, ‘Lost’ finally crosses the roller coaster apex and is in free-fall, with more twists and turns in a single episode than I can recall in a long time.

Brilliant title, but all but irrelevant to the story of this week’s episode (bar a brief appearance of the game ‘Cluedo’), a fairly vanilla piece of plot development in spite of the gruesome monster-of-the-week: James Heath, a Cortexiphan test-case with the ability to give people fast-acting cancer through [...]

‘Ashes to Ashes’ is not a great TV drama. It’s enjoyable, and a pleasant lightweight watch for the weekend. But it’s not a great police procedural series, and it’s not an overly complex mystery series.

Do you remember when British television used to be good? I mean consistently good?

Good stuff like ‘The Avengers’, not Z-list celeb-reality tat or auditions for Lloyd-Webber’s latest West End ‘hit’. I’m talking G.O.O.D.

It’s impossible to approach ‘V’ without a knowing look in the direction of ‘Battlestar Galactica’. However, it is not just a shared Frankenstein-like interest in reviving long dead sci-fi franchises of the early-to-mid 80s that unite these shows: both also have a heavy reliance on crisp visuals and slick special effects and an ambition to exist as genuine social commentary.

I think Betty Draper may be one of the most interesting characters in ‘Mad Men’, which wasn’t something I ever expected to write. As the third series comes to a close on BBC4, I’d like to shine a little more attention on Betty.

All you need to know about this episode is that it is a Desmond episode.
That very knowledge, as a fan of ‘Lost’ (and let’s be honest, if you’re still watching the series – and I certainly think it has maintained a high enough quality that you should be – you’re dedicated to the mythology and [...]

Rather than shatter the ‘X-Files’ mould, ‘Fringe’ has shown every sign of making itself snug and comfortable within it, and this trend has not changed with season two.
As previously discussed, the show skips between monster-of-the-week specials, chin-stroking social commentary and a broader plot arc.
The first two of these have been well-represented; we have had 100-year-old [...]

Bryan Fuller does love his disconnected main characters. Like his other 2003-04 show ‘Dead Like Me‘, ‘Wonderfalls’ has a Gen Y heroine who refuses to engage with the real world around her.
In place of George Lass, who is killed on the way to her first dead-end job and winds up ushering dead souls into the [...]

The final season of ‘Lost’ has been impressive thus far, but ‘The Package’ is a disappointment.

Shiny Shelf newcomer Sarah Jane Vespertine previews ‘Castle’, which starts its first UK run on Alibi from Wednesday 7 April 2010.

‘Ab Aeterno’ isn’t just one of the most pivotal episodes of ‘Lost’, providing some long-awaited answers, it’s also one of the best episodes of the entire series, with a great central performance from Nestor Carbonell.

‘Eddie Izzard, Marathon Man’ follows the comedian as he attempts to run 43 marathons in 51 days. The Olympic sports doctors and trainers are aghast when he arrives at their centre for training. He’s never run a marathon before: “I’ve run for the bus.”

Am I the only one who thought, once the Sawyer/Miles buddy cop relationship was revealed early on in ‘Recon’, that there would be slash fiction popping up all over the Internet?
And no, I didn’t look.
‘Recon’ is all classic Sawyer.  He is every bit the suave con man in both realities, when on a blind date [...]

‘Dr. Linus’, like the previous episode ‘Sundown’, is an example of how an actor can take good material and elevate it to something superb.  Michael Emerson has been of the best actors we’ve seen in ‘Lost’; his interpretation of Ben Linus is one of the most complex and nuanced in the series.
With the unique storytelling [...]