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When Bryan Cranston staggered on-screen in the opening scene of Breaking Bad in 2008, stumbling out of a crashed RV dressed only in his underpants, and addressed the camera with, “My name is Walter Hartwell White…to all law enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt,” he immediately changed perceptions of who he was as an actor. Previously, he was best known for being the goofy dad in Malcolm in the Middle, and despite some effective straight performances, most thought of him as a comedic performer, rather than the star of what became the most talked-about crime drama series since The Wire. Jason Bateman would, one presumes, like to follow Cranston’s lead.

When I previewed the 2025 Emmys in July, I wrote “it must feel pretty good to be Seth Rogen today.” His Hollywood satire, The Studio, had been nominated for a mighty 23 Emmy awards, and Rogen himself was up for acting, writing and directing. Well, today it must feel even better to be Seth Rogen. The show trampled over its competition to win a hugely impressive 13 awards – the most ever won by a comedy in a single season, let alone a debuting one – and Rogen himself won Best Actor, Best Director (for the self-consciously tricksy one-shot episode "The Oner”) and shared the Best Writing award with Evan Goldberg, Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez.

Apart from hunting, one of the very few consolations of the end of summer is that telly stops being quite so dire. But that moment hasn’t quite arrived yet – as you can tell from the fact that I’m reviewing Hostage. There’s so much that is annoying about Hostage that I don’t know quite where to begin. But let’s start with its cloth-eared use of the word ‘abducted’. Suppose you were the prime minister (Suranne Jones) and your implausible Médicins Sans Frontières husband Alex (Ashley Thomas) had been kidnapped by a masked terror group in French Guiana and you had to brief your teenage daughter on what had happened, which verb would you use: the formal, uptight, Latinate, police-procedural one or the normal spoken-English one?

If you enjoyed Apocalypto – that long but exciting Mel Gibson movie about natives being chased through the jungle with (supposedly) ancient Mayan dialogue – then you’ll probably like Chief of War, which is much the same, only in Hawaiian. Like Apocalypto, it even has sailing ships appearing mysteriously from Europe with crews that serve the role of dei ex machina, rescuing endangered native protagonists at key moments. This time our based-on-a-true-story hero is Ka’iana, the 18th-century Maui chieftain who succeeded in uniting the four warring island kingdoms (Oahu, Maui, Molokai and Lanai) and turned them into the kingdom of Hawaii.

I preface this review by saying that – unless you are the greatest admirer of Lena Dunham or anyone in the (admittedly impressive) cast of her new Netflix series, Too Much – it is very easy to give this particular show a miss. It is a tedious, unfunny collection of clichés, strange American-centric perspectives on life in London, a charmless, Dunhamesque lead, a chemistry-free central pairing and guest appearances from her famous friends that seem somewhere between embarrassed and incongruous. Yet there are many worse shows on streaming services, most of which have not attracted anything like The Discourse that Too Much has thus far – and which, I am painfully aware, this article is contributing to. Why this? Why now?

When I studied English literature at Oxford about two decades ago, the issue of tutor-student relations was a vexed one. On the one hand – so the reasoning went – students were adults, over the age of consent and entitled to make their own decision as to whether they wanted to indulge in sexual congress with the men and women responsible for inculcating a knowledge and, hopefully, love of their subject into them. On the other, there were clear – although sometimes blurred – conflicts of interest relating to these invariably older figures also on occasion being responsible for marking their favored students’ examinations.

Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma Rasheed would have her work cut out that’s for sure: the wicked gamekeeper on the grisly toff’s estate who murdered a hen harrier and then blamed its decapitation on an innocent wind turbine; the haggis butcher who misgendered his vegetarian assistant; the Englishman who made a joke on Twitter about a Scotsman going to the chippy and ordering a deep-fried can of Coke… It would get lots of awards, obviously, but I doubt it would do that well in the ratings. As with Slow Horses, this is about enjoying the company of loveable misfits But you needn’t worry about Dept. Q (Netflix).

You had a narrow escape this week. I was about to urge you to watch Sirens, the latest iteration of that fashionable genre Ultra-Rich Lifestyle Porn, currently trending on Netflix. But luckily for you I watched it right to the end and got to witness the whole edifice collapsing like a speeded up version of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. Normally, this doesn’t happen. Like most critics I have neither the time nor the work ethic to view a TV series in its entirety before putting in my tuppenny-ha’penny’s worth. I just assume that if something starts well or badly it’s going to continue that way. Not Sirens, though.

The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if you are of a certain age, you’re really going to enjoy it. I think the litmus test is whether you’re old enough to remember the 1981 Alan Alda film on which it is based, which I do, just about, vaguely. It’s that kind of movie where a bunch of old friends who have been holidaying together regularly since university – does anyone actually do this? – are discombobulated by and rebond over a traumatic event.

‘Next time you do a review, you’ve got to find something you like. You’ve been far too negative,’ said the Fawn. ‘Well, it’s hardly my fault if everything on TV is crap at the moment. I can’t just call up good stuff to order,’ I said. ‘Try,’ said the Fawn. Luckily – and unwontedly – Netflix has come to my rescue with a dystopian sci-fi series called The Eternaut. Though I’m not totally convinced by the name – a conflation of ‘eternity’ and ‘astronaut’ – it’s a very enjoyable watch, which confirms, yet again, Delingpole’s Iron Law of Television: always go for the shows with subtitles. This one is from Argentina, based on a graphic novel written by Hector German Oesterheld with artwork by Francisco Solano-Lopez.

“And now, the end is here, and so I face the final curtain”... If Tom Cruise isn’t quite Sinatra performing “My Way,” then the long-anticipated, much-hyped apparent finale to the Mission: Impossible series has a similarly valedictory feel to it. Ever since a youthful Cruise first took to movie screens in 1996 in the first, Brian de Palma-directed film – which those with long memories might recall was unfairly criticized on release for being virtually incomprehensible – the movies have been a welcome part of the contemporary movie-going experience.