The week in TV: Save Me Too, Ozark, Money Heist, Pen15 and more

Save Me Too (Sky Atlantic)
Ozark (Netflix)
Money Heist (Netflix)
Feel Good (Channel 4) | All 4
Pen15 (Sky Comedy)
Miss Scarlet and the Duke (Alibi)

Hats off to the BBC for giving us such sterling, if po-faced, global news coverage. I’ve said it before: in an aeroplane, you’d want your pilot to be the dullest man you would flee at any party, utterly without “edge” or wacko sense of humour, and so it is with Auntie: stoic, thoroughbred, pewter, a little Pooter. But reliable, and justifiably popular: days like these, you really don’t want to be getting your news over the fence from some wheedling Twitter anarchist with self-esteem issues.

Yet – oh, the dramatic output! Was Belgravia and Our Girl really the best you could do this week? It’ll get better, it always does. But for now I’m giving great, gulping thanks for the sprawling panoply of 21st-century channels. And for the return of Save Me, Lennie James’s tour de force of a couple of years back.

Those still reluctant to give Sky their shilling – I know, I know, but – should hold their nose while biting the bullet. A Now TV stick is eminently affordable (all the cash you’ll be saving not buying that nonexistent fruit and veg) – £8.99 a month to get Sky Atlantic, on which James’s searing ensemble drama is worth the outlay alone.

We’re back at the Palm Tree, an east London pub so grotty, so loving, so flawed, so human that it must (in fact, does) exist. Nelly Rowe (James), the irrepressible, irresponsible charmer of a keen amateur drunk, is 17 months on from having had his daughter abducted by a grooming gang: he failed to rescue Jody, but has rescued against most odds a vulnerable substitute in the shape of young Grace. Nelly has grown, if not sobered, up: Jody’s absence haunts him, to the point of vengeful obsession, and there’s just the target, right there in court, in the shape of smug grooming businessman Gideon Charles (Ade Edmondson, and a remarkably subtle, intense performance; finally, I believe the gentleman can act). It says a lot about this show that so many quality actors from series one – Stephen Graham, Suranne Jones, Jason Flemyng, Kerry Godliman – put other projects on hold to join the sequel, which also features Lesley Manville as Gideon’s understandably mortified wife.

All six episodes are now available, but I’d urge you to be parsimonious, seek delayed gratification. It is, if anything, better than the original, charting the toxins spread throughout an entire community via just one tiny group’s sociopathic sense of sexual entitlement, and thus the disjointed distrusts that must fester and breed: a Hazchem barrel left leaking lazily in the Mile End rain.

I’m back in love with Ozark, after an iffy second series in which the producers didn’t seem to know quite what to do with Jason Bateman and Laura Linney. Once they’d got them established in Osage Beach, Missouri, trying to make amends for their Chicago white-collar dodgy deals by getting into bed with, um, a Mexican drug cartel, it doldrummed a little, hence some snitty reviews, one making reference to a Poundland Breaking Bad. But the 10-part third season is gloriously back on track, with Linney truly coming into her own as the boiler-room fire in the hole. Hubby Marty (Bateman), despite his squirrely financial alchemy, is left looking in comparison less Ozarks and more Walton’s Mountain.

Crucially, series three introduces Tom Pelphrey as Wendy’s (Linney) bipolar brother Ben, whose charming role encapsulates a version of a Greek chorus, as in when he asks Marty: “Do you realise what you’re doing here? Do you know how far from normal every single thing you’re doing actually is?”

Until Ben stops asking. There are shocks aplenty. If this is Poundland, I can’t wait for the shops to reopen.

Similarly, Money Heist is the Spanish gift that keeps on giving, like flamenco – yearningly romantic with a broiling undercurrent of mayhem. This is the best foreign-language series in this or arguably any other year.

The Professor, as our criminal mastermind is known, lost at the end of the last series not only his brother but his One True Love. Now, he suddenly finds OTL is still alive, the victim of a dastardly stratagem by authorities. Tables are turned, mental cliff edges stepped back from. Unfortunately, the prof is trying to coordinate his seven alternative plans (in one entire episode!) from underneath an iron trough. What’s more, he is threatened by a ground-pawing bull – only the Spanish! – while, inside the bank, his colleagues, comrades, conquistadores, bicker bloodily. There will be ichor. There will be sangre. Splendid.

I rather wanted to enjoy Feel Good, because of great reviews, and did so by and large. Comedian Mae Martin’s semi-autobiographical, six-part account of an expat Canadian bisexual has warmth, it has depth, it has all-round top-notch performances.

Yet, and I accept I’m probably against the tide, I just couldn’t warm to Martin’s character. She is (and penned her character as such) the sort to worry inordinately, over at least an episode-and-a-half, about her new girlfriend, English rose Georgie (Charlotte Ritchie), going to a wedding alone, and the worrying takes a specific and repeated form: “What if you cry? What if there’s no one there to hug you?”

This, to me, is the equivalent of being asked: “What if you meep? What if there’s dortoo wheeb T46 fradje?” And yet, that quibble apart, this is a loving, embracing show for our times, and explores with resonance and wit many chasms few of us ever explore, such as addiction, and the need for love versus neediness.

More fun, seldom less resonant, and with frankly more laughs, is Pen15, a kooky rites-of-passage triumph in which Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle, both about 33, play versions of themselves in the year 2000, negotiating the first year of middle school somewhere in butt-middle America.

It’s astonishing how swiftly credible they become as 13-year-olds. Also, how universal that age-experience must be: despite the unobtrusive attention to period detail – tramrail teeth, dialup AOL – the bit where Maya is labelled UGIS (ugliest girl in school; her mum’s just cut her hair) will plunge all into reminiscences of savagery thought unbearable, until you bear it. Just as, in Feel Good, Georgie’s accidentally morphined coming out will have you punching the air in delight.

Miss Scarlet and the Duke looked as if it might almost be OK to spend a little lazy, brain-off, lockdown time with. It featured a sparky, feisty etc young lady in bonnets, who inherits her late father’s detective business in Victorian London and has to prove herself, with steely quips and sleuthing skills and a coy smile, against Big Bearded Men. As it turns out, it’s woeful dreck.