Monday

Scream Queens 10pm, E4

This spoofy new series from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, creators of Glee and American Horror Story, falls more or less smack in the middle of those two. From the former comes the bright, bitchy school setting: in this case, we’re following the awful elite of mean girls perched at the top of a college sorority. From the latter, a gleeful, campy riff on horror that isn’t always quite as entertaining as they seem to reckon. A full-on slasher satire, a serial killer known as The Red Devil is at work on campus, slaughtering students at a rate of (at least) one per episode. The tone can get grating, and the Clueless-meets-Halloween approach isn’t exactly original, but it’s a hell of a lot more fun than American Horror Story as the bubble-gum-coloured queen bees meet their messy fates. There’s great work from Glee’s Lea Michele as Hester, a misfit new member forced on the sisterhood. Best of all, the mighty Jamie Lee Curtis has a ball as the uncompromising university dean who hates most of her students.

Tuesday

Catastrophe 10pm, Channel 4

Sharon Horgan gained cult success with Pulling and Free Agents, but the first series of this anti-romantic comedy, co-starring and co-written with American comedian Rob Delaney, finally saw her getting the kind of widespread acclaim she’s deserved for years. Back for a second series, Catastrophe remains cynical, enthusiastically filthy and unsentimental on top, yet secretly sweet and believable beneath. Horgan and Delaney play Sharon and Rob, who met as complete strangers then found their one-night stand leading to an unexpected pregnancy, and then an unexpected marriage. The first series ended on a wedding-night cliff-hanger, and to spoil it would spoil it, but we join them a little while later, still gently bickering and slightly bewildered to find themselves a couple. Things are much the same, much as things always are, except new problems are looming, as they discover during the course of a memorable family gathering.

Wednesday

Cuffs 8pm, BBC One

We haven’t exactly been suffering from a lack of cop shows, but this new series is strangely refreshing for being so modest in its ambition. Maybe it’s something to do with the pre-watershed timeslot, but rather than bending itself out of shape trying to be all dark (The Fall, From Darkness) or different (River), and rather than trying to go Scandinavian or American, it’s just a solid meat-and-potatoes affair about life on the beat in Brighton, grounded by a strong cast including Ashley Walters, good as ever as a PC on the street, and Amanda Abbington forming a likeable partnership with Shaun Dooley (thankfully, for once, not cast as the edgy bad sort) as the detectives back at the station. The cases and characters throw up issues – you’ve got your racism, your gay officers, your mental health and your nudists tonight – and, while it’s nothing life-changing, its sturdy, soapy structure might be just the dependable thing for a Wednesday night.

Thursday

Detectorists 10pm, BBC Four

Series two of the best thing on TV begins with an unexpectedly epic sequence that is genuinely spine tingling. What’s truly remarkable, though, is how it then settles down to hit exactly the same groove that made the first series such a rare gem. Written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who stars in a perfect double act with Toby Jones, Dectorists is in touch with something that sets it apart from every other contemporary sitcom. It’s ostensibly about two men with metal detectors, Andy (Crook) and Lance (Jones), who wander empty fields looking for treasure. But it’s really about life passing, how we get through, and how Britain looks when it is quiet. Everything that made series one terrific remains: the banter about University Challenge; Rachael Stirling, owner of TV’s greatest laugh, as Lance’s bemused partner, Becky; Johnny Flynn and Dan Michaelson’s glowing music. But some things have changed. Andy and Lance have a new companion as they scour the meadows, Lance is lonely, and Andy is feeling the weight of unemployment. Meanwhile, a stranger arrives with a mission for Danebury Metal Detecting Club. Diana Rigg, Stirling’s real-life mother, co-stars as Becky’s unimpressed mum, and if any TV commissioners want to discuss my idea for putting them together in a flashback adventure about Emma Peel in the late-1970s, do get in touch.

Friday

Girl In A Band: Tales From The Rock ’n’ Roll Frontline 10pm, BBC Four

There was a time you could literally go decades without seeing an interview with New Order’s Gillian Gilbert on TV, but here, this is the fourth Friday night running she’s been on. See? Things can change for the better. Presented by Kate Mossman, the only thing wrong with this fantastic documentary about women in rock and roll is that it isn’t three times longer. The first interviewee is Carol Kaye, the guitarist/ bassist who played with the elite LA session musicians later dubbed The Wrecking Crew and graced countless classics across the 1950s and 60s, working with Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, Phil Spector, Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys, Glen Campbell and many more. She’s worth two hours alone, but there are so many voices worth hearing from, including Elkie Brooks, Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth, The Slits’ Viv Albertine, The Fall’s Brix Smith, Penetration’s Pauline Murray, and members of The Runaways, Girlschool, Lush, The Breeders, Savages and American femme-rock pioneers Fanny, who know exactly what the word means here. As they chew over sexism, the creative process, and life with Mark E Smith, it’s inspirational stuff. A compilation, Girls In Bands At The BBC, follows at 11pm.

 

Saturday

Doctor Who, 8.15pm, BBC One
This series got off to a great start, but it’s hitting a rough patch now. Using their shape-shifting ability to blend in, misunderstood old foes The Zygons have been living peacefully among us on Earth for years, but now there’s an uprising brewing, and The Doctor, Clara and UNIT must scatter to try and prevent all-out war. There’s a good body-snatchers adventure lurking in here, and some icky David Cronenberg-like equipment, but it’s buried under a lot of noisy padding, including some heavy-handed attempts at contemporary resonance (extremist Zygon youth are being radicalised, apparently). Everything is overblown to the point of incomprehensibility, but the last five minutes get good again. How come, though, with all this time travelling business, The Doctor can’t jump in the Tardis and nip back to hook up with the 1970s version of UNIT, and have a decent story with them? It never seems to work with this new lot.

 

Sunday

Jekyll & Hyde 6.30pm, STV

WRITER Charlie Higson has scored a triumph with his mad and scintillating spin on the Jekyll And Hyde story, although not everyone will thank him for it. In particular, I’m thinking of households with younger children, who might reckon that settling down together for a Sunday teatime show is a fairly safe thing to do, and will have to put up with the screams in the night later, as the bad dreams begin. And will then have to deal with different kinds of screaming next Sunday, as the same traumatised children beg to be allowed to watch episode two.
Picking and mixing comic-book sources including The Hulk, Hellboy and Alan Moore, while adding a deviant spice entirely his own, Higson’s Jekyll is not Robert Louis Stevenson’s. We glimpse the original divided soul in a flashback to a dark and stormy 1885, but the action begins 50 years later, in Ceylon, where Jekyll’s grandson, Robert (Tom Bateman), oblivious to his family history, has been brought up as adopted son of a kindly doctor.
Sometimes, when his emotions are roused, Jekyll experiences … funny turns, which his surrogate father damps down with special pills. But these outbreaks are growing increasingly ferocious, as demonstrated when young Doctor Robert saves a girl by lifting a 10-tonne truck with his bare hands.
This act brings unwanted newspaper attention, destroying the careful anonymity in which Robert has been raised. A message arrives from a London lawyer, promising news of Jekyll’s true family, and so the bewildered hero sets off, hoping to discover who he is. But other eyes are watching, and closing in.
We learn of two opposing forces. In London, a secret government agency (headed by Richard E Grant, having sterling fun) is devoted to battling monsters and freaks of supernature. Meanwhile, in the shadows lurks a monstrous cabal, Tenebrae, led by dapper Captain Dance (Enzo Cilenti, in splendidly callous form). It’s with this latter lot that the glittering nightmares commence. Episode one features undead ninjas and a truly unsettling dog-man thing called a Harbinger. But the government agents are equally unnerving – and the most disturbing creature of all might be our clean-cut hero, as Jekyll falls under the lusty, violent sway of his Hyde side id-monster. Even when saving that little girl from being crushed by the truck, there comes a startling moment when it seems he might break her neck himself, just for the fun of it.
Jekyll And Hyde is ITV’s first attempt in a while at Doctor Who-style family-friendly fantasy, and it has things to teach the BBC. For one, unlike Doctor Who, which has recently been finishing after 9pm, it’s on at the right time to capture and scare 50 shades of creeping bejesus out of kids in the safety of their front rooms. For another, while building a comic-book world – set in a stylised 1930s, scenes are framed at Batman angles, and put together like panels on a page – within that world, everyone keeps a straight face, as if they know no other. There’s none of the nodding to the audience that can clutter Dr Who, none of the self-congratulation that renders Sherlock 75 per cent nauseating.
Instead, Higson crafts something like the clean lines, forward drive and two-fisted adventure of a Tintin book or Indiana Jones movie. Thrilling, weird, stylish, spooky and fast, he pulls off the most difficult trick: it’s good fun.