The Returned

9pm, More4

It’s a good week for the dead who won’t stay dead. Everywhere you look there is the stirring of shades, the rising of revenants, the comeback of creatures that should have stopped bothering us long ago, yet refuse to stay buried, and I’m not just talking about the return of TFI Friday.

The cops have it bad. Both From Darkness and Unforgotten revolve around the skeletal reappearance of victims murdered decades ago. Meanwhile, in the doolally River, there’s a detective with ghosts lodged nagging in his mind.

Elsewhere come the actual living dead, as the zombie juggernaut The Walking Dead shambles back for a sixth series of brain-spattered fun, fear and loathing (Monday, 9pm, Fox).

But then, glimmering darkly in the distance, there is the most haunting of them all, with the return of The Returned: the unclassifiable French import set in a faraway town beside a dam in the mountains, where the local dead have started coming back. Not your usual zombies, these. They don’t want to eat your brains. In fact, what they want is a mystery. Unless it is just to make the living feel guilty.

It’s been two years since The Returned’s first series, and for a while it seemed like it might never come back, and simply leave us, with a disdainful Gallic shrug and a muttered “such is life,” hanging forever on the unresolved climax with which it faded away. It shares the habit of leaving years between series with the French cop saga Spiral; why it takes them so long over there, I don’t know, although I like to imagine it’s because they have contractually guaranteed Gitanes breaks every half hour. Whatever the reason, it works. Absence hasn’t simply made the heart grow fonder, it actually intensifies the woozy experience of watching the programme.

If you’ve not seen the remarkable first series, there’s a chance to catch-up online via Channel 4’s on demand service until Friday. Even if you did watch in 2013, a refresher is advised. I made the mistake of jumping into the new series without even a “story-so-far,” confident I had a firm grip on what was what. Pretty soon, I was drowning trying to remember: it gives you some idea how treacherous the terrain is that the opening title of the first episode reads “Six Months Later,” while the opening of the second is “35 Years Earlier.”

Soon after that, however, I gave up worrying, because the drowning sensation was so strangely pleasurable. It’s not simply because I’d half-forgotten stuff; opening six months on, the early episodes make a point of alluding to things that have happened in the meantime, of which we remain unaware.

Indeed, amnesia, lacunae, and the resentful kicking of buried memories are precisely what The Returned is about. In this, it fits a particular strand of French culture alongside such artefacts as Patrick Modiano’s novels and movies like Hidden; mysteries built on atmospheres of lingering, unaddressed guilt – perhaps about the Occupation, perhaps about France’s colonial past, perhaps about Zidane’s head-butt, but guilt about something.

That’s the restless sea beneath The Returned’s frozen surface. But the surface itself is beguiling: the plot; the creepiness; the enigma; the murmuring characters; the strange empty landscapes in dim autumn light; the music by Mogwai that blows in like edgy weather; the way images repeat, as in a dream from which you cannot wake. The sadness underpinning everything. Near-abstract drama, a kind of ambient TV, it leaves most shows for dead.

Homeland

9pm, Channel 4

I’m still one of those who reckon this show should have finished at the climax of Season One. Since then, subsequent series have tended to open intriguingly, then twist themselves into knots while fizzling away. But Series Five hits the reset button hard: we return to find that time has passed and things have changed. Carrie (Claire Danes), the counter-terror Frank Spencer, is no longer with the CIA and is now living far away in grey Berlin as a private citizen, taking her meds, and working as security advisor to a German businessman/ philanthropist. Back in Washington, her old mentor, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), is handed devastating news: a hack on a CIA database has opened an explosive can of worms. And where did the hack originate? You guessed it: Berlin ... It feels more 24 than ever before, but, as ever, the show builds a fizzing backdrop from current concerns: a refugee crisis, Lebanon, Syria and Isis are all in there. With the best of the old faces returning (F Murray Abraham and Rupert Friend) it begins promisingly. But I’ve been fooled this way before.

Rhymes, Rock And Revolution: The Story Of Performance Poetry 10pm, BBC Four

This summer marked the 50th anniversary of The International Poetry Incarnation, the landmark 1965 happening at the Royal Albert Hall, during which Albert Ginsberg and his poetic fellow travellers in the American Beat movement blew the minds of a generation of British longhairs by reciting their wild work on stage. This documentary takes that event as the Big Bang for a style of performance that has since rubbed at the edges between poetry and rock and roll. Celebrating some of the most significant practitioners, the film casts its net wide, including everyone from John Lennon to Gil Scott Heron. Part of the BBC’s Poetry Season, look out also for two excellent films on Sunday night: Return To Larkinland (Sunday, 9pm, BBC Four), writer AN Wilson’s portrait of the morose Bard of Hull; and Black Roses: The Killing Of Sophie Lancaster (Sunday, 10.30pm, BBC Four), a TV version of Simon Armitage’s deeply moving piece for Lancaster, the 20-year-old who was killed by a group of teenagers in a park in 2007, because of the way she looked.

River

9pm, BBC One

It’s a little stinky of the BBC to begin this not-brilliant cop drama – in which the terrific Nicola Walker plays a sizeable role – at the same time as ITV is showing the actually-pretty-okay cop drama Unforgotten, in which Walker stars. Are they trying to Olivia Colman her? Lumbered with the lead here is the brilliant Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. He’s John River, a detective who sees dead people. Walker plays his sidekick, who is among the dead: witnessing her brutal murder short-circuited River’s mind, and he now cruises London trying to solve her killing, while hallucinating that she’s talking to him. For a while it’s almost batty enough to work as a dour Randall And Hopkirk, but writer Abi Morgan over-eggs it: Skarsgård is soon surrounded by guilty ghosts all muttering darkly to him, and the prospect of sitting through six hours of this daftness is not appealing. If you recall the delicacy and strangeness of the scenes between Bob Peck and his murdered daughter as his mind disintegrated in Edge Of Darkness, well, try imagining the opposite.

The Apprentice

9pm, BBC One

Alan Sugar returns as Alf Garnett in another series of the long-running comedy sensation. There are 18 gleaming new Apprenti competing for his tiny little whiskery hand in marriage this year, and, yes, a right horrible lot they would seem to be, and especially THAT ONE. And THAT ONE. However, to begin with, long-term fans will be far more interested to see how Claude Littner gets on as Alf’s new right-hand man: following the departure of Nick Hewer, Claude, formerly the fearsome camp executioner of the interviews round, has some sizable pumps to fill in the wincing, eyebrow-raising and nostril-wrinkling department. Meanwhile, Karren Brady is back in her role as Miss Paddington Hard-Stare. In the first of two exciting episodes this week, the contestants are commanded to buy produce at Billingsgate Fish Market, and then flog it to tourists. They’re back tomorrow night to make shampoo. It’s The Generation Game! Jack Dee takes over as the new host of the post-mortem companion show You’re Fired on BBC Two at 10pm.

Unforgotten

9pm, STV

Possibly traumatised by things they’ve read about Nordic noir, BBC drama commissioners are going through a sticky patch with their cop dramas at the moment. Telling a decent story with hooks and interesting characters isn’t enough, and the shows either have to be super-angsty (which is fine, if the material and handling supports it, which it doesn’t in the overblown From Darkness), or otherwise psychologically skewed (which is fine, if it isn’t just plain stooo-oooopid, like River). The refreshing thing about this ITV job is that it just gets on about its business old-school, with a carefully considered and well-paced story that gives actors room to do their stuff, and audiences time to appreciate it. As we continue, DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) is looking for clues in the diary of the victim who was murdered some four decades ago, setting her on the trail of a wide web of characters including Sir Philip Cross, a business czar with a shady past, played by The Interceptor/ Scum On The Run legend Trevor Eve.

Doctor Who

8.20pm, BBC One

It’s not been perfect, but this series got off to a relatively terrific start. There’s a drastic tumble in quality tonight, though – doubly disappointing given the episode is written by Jamie Mathieson, who, with Flatline and Mummy On The Orient Express, came up with perhaps the two best stories of Peter Capaldi’s debut series. Taken prisoner by Vikings, The Doctor and Clara must try to save their captors when their village is targeted by murderous alien warriors known as The Mire. The trouble lies in the decision to make these Vikings comedy sub-Horrible Histories sorts, with lots of knowing anachronistic ahistorical banter, a mode that fits uneasily with the attempted moments of epic weepiness (and the ridiculous timeslot). Still, Capaldi has a couple of good gags, there’s a nice nod to The Magnificent Seven as The Doc tries to teach the villagers how to fight, and Maisie Williams (Game Of Thrones) guest stars as a Viking girl with implications for the future.