It’s funny, tense, stunningly forceful – the excellence of this franchise’s return is a bright flash of hopeful defiance

We settle down in front of a fresh Blue Planet, trying to escape a weary sadness that stalks us from several angles. It is a new natural history show narrated by the 100-year-old David Attenborough, so there cannot be many more of those to enjoy. It is a Sunday-night showcase on BBC One, which is nothing like as significant a shared cultural event as it once was. The film-making can’t possibly be as revelatory as the original Blue Planet in 2001, and even the impact Blue Planet II had on conservation in 2017 feels unrepeatable: the attention it brought to plastic pollution in the ocean turned out to be a minor blow struck in a battle against environmental catastrophe that we have, since then, continued to lose.

But if we stop requiring it to be another landmark and appreciate it as just another wildlife series, Blue Planet III is a corker. Its excellence is a bright flash of hopeful defiance, and if it often falls into familiar patterns, that familiarity is a comfort.

Adam Brody and Kristen Bell’s hit romcom is still gorgeous as Noah and Joanne move in together. But if you’re thirsty for the fizz of new romance … their siblings might set hearts aflutter

Just as you and your true love can’t have a second first date or another first kiss, romantic comedies can never go back. Nothing replaces the giddy spell of the movie’s opening act or the TV show’s debut season. Sure, there can be some joy and fulfilment in a fictional relationship settling down, but really we want the crackle of chemistry, the thrill of a connection that’s brand new.

Nobody Wants This is now in its third season, so it has had to leave behind the days when it was powered entirely by the phenomenal screen sparkle between Adam Brody as Noah, the rabbi who can balance devotion to his faith with the mischievous instincts of a regular thirtysomething guy; and Kristen Bell as Joanne, the atheist co-host of a frank sex-and-relationships podcast who is not as cynical or shallow as people think, or as she pretends to be.

This rehash of the notorious study in which volunteers role-play as prisoners and guards pretends to be science. It isn’t – it’s patronising reality television

Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said. They’re playing to the cameras.

Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the Milgram experiment, was that it made the artifice part of the process, telling the volunteers that they’d spoil the science if they didn’t keep giving strangers electric shocks: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Without that, the stooges may never act naturally; if they know the experiment is also a TV show, they definitely won’t.

Mobeen Azhar isn’t afraid to tackle hard topics in a brilliant documentary about the rise of Islamophobia – even when it involves hearing criticism about his own decisions

In 2024, the journalist Mobeen Azhar made a documentary called Small Town, Big Riot that ought to have been highly influential, but, in our atomised modern media landscape, wasn’t. He deconstructed how anti-immigrant racists, radicalised by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up on the streets perpetrating shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary foe.

Azhar’s new film tackles a wider, thornier problem and is less satisfying as a result. But in his willingness to debate hard topics – even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which are aimed at him personally – he is still provoking thoughts and airing views that better-known journalists would never go near.

This Northern Ireland-set police drama has never felt like this before … Race riots, organised crime and institutional politics bring it bang up to date

Blue Lights has always been a very modern cop drama. Its tales of everyday callouts, fractious office relationships and complex long-term efforts to smash organised crime have all played out against the backdrop of post-Troubles Belfast, where lingering sectarian resentments make enforcing the law even harder than it is in the rest of austerity-era UK. But it’s never been explicitly topical: it’s never felt as if it is reading today’s national news headlines with the same appalled gaze as the rest of us. Until now.

Our fourth visit to Blackthorn station pitches us and the police into a race riot. A centre offering support and resources to refugees is hosting a fete, which is a positive contribution to the area for those open to it: station sergeant and amateur baker Stevie (Martin McCann) marvels at the texture of Syrian pastry at an event that has been allocated minimal police presence. Minutes later, the whole squad has rushed to the scene to hold a line against an angry mob who want immigrants out of Northern Ireland. Bricks fly. Lives are in danger.

This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy

‘No one knows the real Rooneys,” says Coleen Rooney at the start of her family’s new reality-TV series, The Real Rooneys. “This is a side of us we’ve never shown before.” Coleen and her husband, ex-footballer Wayne, have had their personalities dissected in the tabloids every week for the past two decades; now we’re promised the truth. But how real can The Real Rooneys be?

There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

The actors co-star in a lightly fictionalised meta-comedy about their real-life bromance – and possible sharing of parents. It’s a tasty little treat

The cheek! The indulgence! The privilege! Did anyone, anywhere in 2026, look up from news of a world in flames and say, what we really need now is a meta-comedy where two actors play gently self-satirising fictional versions of themselves?

They did not, and yet here are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. They once co-starred in the first season of True Detective, one of TV’s darkest and best crime dramas, but otherwise their personae have them as lifelong besties who are both free spirits, unencumbered by the rules of the fame game – not the sort of chaps who would stop and think about how their self-referential comedy bagatelle might be received. In Brothers, they portray themselves as blokes who don’t stop and think, full stop.

The show’s creator has gone, it’s been retooled as a conventional thriller and it feels like it’s starting to run out of ideas – even if it’s as slick and confident as ever

This is a new Slow Horses: season six is the first not to be guided by Will Smith, a writer whose previous work on The Thick of It and Veep explained why this espionage saga had an unusually sharp comic tongue. The absence of Smith’s drollery is discernible in a more straight-faced new story, but the bigger problem is one of a creative work naturally eroding over time. Slow Horses is now old.

It’s always been a difficult, delicate proposition. The staff of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5 where misfits and screw-ups are given boring work when it would make more sense to just fire them, regularly outstrip supposedly elite spies despite being shambling losers. Leading the field agents is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who has the good looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but is also a brittle, luckless and rather whiny wretch, who regularly has to be saved from ignominious death. The jokes have helped us suspend our disbelief that River and the rest haven’t yet been riddled with bullets, and the relocation of traditional spy thrills to decaying urban settings is still a tonic, but enjoying this conjuring trick gets harder every year.

From his claim of being ‘de-banked’ to a disturbing detail about a rape survivor’s story being used to fundraise, this film puts big questions to the co-founder of the English Defence League. But it is frustratingly hard to get answers

You can’t say it would be a huge surprise if a leading figure of the British far right turned out to be a fraudster: that whole strand of politics is, after all, a con job preying on angry citizens who are daft enough to believe that immigrants, and not the rapaciously greedy super-rich, are somehow the cause of the nation’s problems. If people will fall for that, fleecing them out of their money is not a big leap.

Tommy Robinson, co-founder of the English Defence League and now an influencer, independent documentary-maker and international flag-shaggers’ guru, was convicted of mortgage fraud in 2014, but what about 2026? Is he a scam artist juicing idiots for cash? Robinson, real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is undeniably a talented harvester of donations from his fans, whether it’s in person at his rallies or via the internet: in a video posted online, he admits to “continually ask[ing] you, the people, to support us”, and in another he boasts of having once convinced his admirers to hand over £350,000 in the space of two weeks. If you try to avoid seeing or hearing about Robinson, the amount of money he generates may shock you.

Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone? is on Channel 4 now.

The Hollywood hottie is back as the quarterback in disguise, in an oddball comedy that is naughty, lovable and disarmingly unique

In the first episode of season two of Chad Powers, there is but one concern: the main character’s nose has fallen off.

The TV outlet for the wacky side of movie hottie Glen Powell, Chad Powers presents itself to us having willingly taken on the burden of a ludicrous premise. Powell is Russ Holliday, a former hotshot college-football quarterback who, eight years ago, committed a career-cancelling faux pas during the televised game that was meant to make him a star. With his sporting dreams suddenly vaporised, he became an obnoxious playboy. But then, just as he felt his feet starting to scrape rock bottom, he heard that a university in Georgia was holding open tryouts for a new quarterback. Donning prosthetic whiskers, teeth, hair and an occasionally unreliable nose – a slightly more sophisticated version of a joke-shop disguise – Russ became “Chad Powers”, a southern oddball and the new star of the team, while constantly dealing with the threat of being found out and sent home.

This boxing drama wants its sex, drugs, bling and violence – but isn’t willing or naughty enough to truly go for it. Instead, it ends up as just a long, bruising slog

Fightland is what you might, for a joke, have called a drama that’s like MobLand but with boxing. That they have gone with that as the title of the new show from G-Unit Film & Television, the production company founded by the rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, is an immediate warning that this is not a series that bursts with originality, passion or technical finesse. At best, Fightland asks whether what it’s got will just about do, and hopes you’ll distractedly say yes.

Howard Charles is Maduka “Duke” Kilroy, a British boxer who, when we first meet him, is in Las Vegas, winning the world heavyweight championship. Everything’s going for him: he’s the champ and Joy (Deborah Ayorinde), the woman he enjoys a post-bout warmdown with on the silk sheets of a penthouse suite, seems receptive to his plan to take their relationship further. It’s a risky goal given that Joy’s husband is Kingsley Marshall (Nicholas Pinnock), Duke’s manager, who is also London’s top drug dealer; we’ve seen him brutally break the leg of a journalist who asks him about the secret drug-based wing of his empire.

It’s painful to see Northern Irish police bang their heads against the wall as they hunt for the journalist’s killer. But there are still important moments here – including remarkable footage from an MTV show that never aired

The killing of Lyra McKee, a journalist shot while observing a riot in the Creggan area of Derry, Northern Ireland, on 18 April 2019, is a case that remains officially unsolved. Last month, three men were found not guilty of her murder after a two-year trial; so far, there has been only one conviction, for possessing the gun that killed her.

That a member of the republican paramilitary group the New IRA fired the weapon is not in question. Many of the approximately 150 people who were standing within metres of him at the time must know who he is. But this is a part of Northern Ireland where police work is still, more than 25 years since the Good Friday agreement, met with violent intimidation or resolute silence. The extinguishing of McKee’s bright, hopeful talent is a story destined not to end in relief or resolution.

They were once the hottest shows on television – gripping, sexy, hilarious, zeitgeisty. But for our writers, the likes of America’s Next Top Model, House of Cards and The Office are now part of their viewing history they feel tainted by

When I think of the summer holidays when I was a teenager, I think of watching America’s Next Top Model for hours on end, critiquing each contestant with my sister. The makeover episode was always my favourite: girls sobbing as their hair was cropped short, or even shaved off. At the time, Tyra Banks seemed like a big sister, giving the contestants the tough love they’d need to succeed in a ferociously competitive industry. Now I feel differently. I hadn’t watched America’s Next Top Model since I was young, but like many, I recently watched Netflix’s excellent series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. It was the strangest sensation, rewatching episodes I hadn’t seen in more than two decades. At times I felt almost teleported back. How could I not find these scenes of models collapsing with hunger utterly abhorrent? I wondered what influence watching a show that celebrated eating disorders had on my own brain. I think it had an impact. I think the residual taint of it is still there. I can’t watch America’s Next Top Model any more, nor do I want to. Ironically, it’s all too ugly. Sirin Kale

This documentary follows the shocking case of Neil Hopper, a top surgeon who had his own legs removed due to a fetish.

No fetish or obsession is unique, and the internet can always connect you with others whose minds work the same way. It’s one of the great blessings and curses of the digital age, and central to An Amputation Obsession: the Monster and the Surgeon, a two-part documentary on which the “contains material some viewers may find disturbing” disclaimer is no exaggeration.

We begin at the Royal Cornwall hospital, known locally as Treliske, in Truro, Cornwall. It used to have a man on its staff who was a minor medical superstar: Neil Hopper, a vascular surgeon, was well known for his clinical expertise and comforting bedside manner, particularly when advising on and performing amputations. He acquired full hero status in 2019, when he was diagnosed with sepsis and had both legs amputated below the knee but miraculously returned to work within six months, astonishing physiotherapists and other medical professionals with how well he adapted to disability.

An Amputation Obsession: the Monster and the Surgeon is on Prime Video

The star voices a maverick cop in new cartoon Grimsburg. Plus: the finale of Scottish crime drama Granite Harbour. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.15pm, Sky One
A triple bill of this adult cartoon starring Jon Hamm, which quietly debuted in the UK last week. Hamm plays police detective Marvin Flute, who has moved back to his home town to reconnect with his family and continue solving bizarre crimes. This time, there are easy laughs to be had as he finds himself accused of murdering a judge and tries to clear his own name. Hollie Richardson

This lively look at the 2018 novichok attack is full of strange and intriguing detail – even if May and Amber Rudd’s contributions don’t get the scrutiny they deserve

“It doesn’t sound like something that happens in your town.” The 2018 poisoning of former Russian military officer turned British double agent Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter Yulia, was extraordinary because of where it took place. Not that there are many locations where Russian agents using a chemical weapon against a former asset would be normal – but it would be relatively easy to comprehend in Paris, London or Berlin. In the quiet Wiltshire cathedral city of Salisbury, the contrast between everyday life and lethal international espionage was acute.

That’s the most prominent of many angles taken by The Salisbury Poisonings: A Spy Next Door, a not quite comprehensive but still nicely busy feature length documentary that offers a compendium of ways in which the Salisbury attack was fascinating and deeply strange.

The Salisbury Poisonings: A Spy Next Door aired on Sky Documentaries and is available on Now

There’s a cheekiness, freshness and tenderness to this show that sets it apart from standard crime dramas. It’s so wonderfully rich that the Godfather cast wouldn’t be out of place

It’s worth it just for the leather. The prequel to formidable Neapolitan mobster saga Gomorrah hurls us into the filthy bustle of Secondigliano, a broken quarter of northern Naples which, in 1977, has been abandoned by God and government, leaving organised crime as the only alternative to destitution. But even in this purgatory, the style of the city and the late 70s abides: the young men of Secondigliano might not be able to escape their fate, but they’ll look fantastic trying.

Sashaying forcefully through the throng is Angelo (Francesco Pellegrino), with his messianic collar-length curls, eyes that seem to mascara themselves and an array of spectacular leather jackets. Kids gather to gawp when his car skids to a dusty halt and Angelo, chest hair and medallion nestling in the open collar of a patterned silk shirt in two exquisite shades of brown, emerges and strides to his next appointment. Angelo is in his early 20s and is the hippest gangster in his neighbourhood, but he bears the pained intensity of the thwarted: on a citywide level he has no sway, and he’s worked out that the cut of the action the big bosses give him is a paltry percentage of the overall pie. His crew, sporting their own leather outerwear in boxy mustard or calf-length burgundy, are happy enough, but Angelo wants more.

Gold dances, the Good Friday agreement and standup superstardom … get ready to blub because here are the most heartwarming denouements in TV history

Warning: this article contains spoilers

The rebooted GCHQ digital warfare series has more zip than its predecessor – but people bashing away on computers in a bunker near Cheltenham is inherently unsexy

If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.

In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.

This documentary about the billionaires who want to rip up society’s rules in favour of CEOs somehow manages to be more entertaining than terrifying. Although at times it’s a close call …

Matt Shea’s documentary is bookended by two stark facts. One is that the wealth of the world’s 12 richest people is equal to that of the poorest 50% of humanity (you can argue about whether 12 is exactly right, but it’s certainly a horrifyingly small number). The other is that in recent US election cycles, the fossil fuel industry has been replaced as the biggest political donor by a new force: cryptocurrency.

In an hour that manages to be more entertaining than terrifying despite sailing into very murky waters, Shea explores how a fresh breed of tech billionaires are looking to make a bold new move. He shows that in a traditional western democracy, the principle that citizens all have an equal vote and are all equally beholden to the law is heavily compromised by a tiny minority of rich citizens. These people influence what the electorate votes for, by bankrolling politicians and owning media companies, as well as using their wealth to ensure rules do not properly apply to them. But plutocrats still find this system frustrating, thanks to those pesky elections and that annoying rule of law. What’s next?

Tech Billionaire Takeover aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer