With so many entertainment options, it's easy to miss brilliant TV shows, movies and documentaries. Here are the ones to hit or miss.
Bodyguard
Netflix
You can mostly believe the hype coming out of the UK – this six-part BBC political-crime thriller is indeed a ripper.
Created by Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty) and starring Keeley Hawes and Richard Madden (aka poor old Robb Stark from Game of Thrones), Bodyguard is a cracking and distinctly contemporary yarn full of characters whose motivations and ambitions are nonetheless timeless.
At the heart of it all is troubled London copper David Budd (Madden), a former soldier deeply scarred by his experiences in Afghanistan and deeply resentful of politicians who display an unseemly enthusiasm for overseas military interventions.
As luck would have it, he finds himself being made the bodyguard of the unapologetically hawkish home secretary Julia Montague (Hawes), whose political ambition and determination to ram through new surveillance laws is rapidly expanding her already impressive suite of enemies.
Richard Madden and Keeley Hawes in Bodyguard.Credit:BBC/Netflix
People are out to kill her – and they're having some very serious cracks at it – but is David himself among them? And how long can the two of them continue working under such conditions without slipping between the safe-house sheets together?
Tune in, as they say, to find out.
As always, Mercurio knits a fiendishly tight plot, and Hawes is clearly a fan – having signed up for this after working across two seasons of Line of Duty (all four of which are currently on Netflix and Stan). Mercurio has written her another fine role here, and she delivers another fine performance.
Julia is one tough nut. Not only does she defy the chief whip (who happens to be her ex-husband) and the prime minister she's out to usurp; she's also busy establishing herself a troubling extra-parliamentary power base by empowering MI5 creeps at the expense of Scotland Yard.
Bodyguard is available to watch on Netflix.
Hawes makes clear that Julia doesn't need anyone to like her – nor does she need to put on any pretense of vulnerability. What makes her intriguing is the ambiguity about the extent to which she's manipulating David.
David, for his part, is beaten, bloodied, misdirected and abused from one end of the series to the other – but without ever losing his own glowering potential to change everything in a heartbeat.
One nagging plot hole doesn't detract from the momentum, and it's almost uncanny how deftly the series shifts the weight of the viewer's suspicions without coming off too tricksy. Good stuff.
Christine McConnell.
The Curious Creations of Christine McConnell
Netflix
Just in time for Halloween comes this delightfully bonkers cooking-and-crafts series in which Christine McConnell – a baker, model and actor with a steep inclination towards the macabre – makes some astonishingly intricate edibles and decorations.
And she does it all while dealing with puppet co-stars who include a hungry talking raccoon that she resurrected after it was crushed to death in a garbage truck, and a snarky, mummified cat that had previously spent several thousand years in an Egyptian tomb.
Seeing is believing.
Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar star in Unforgotten.
Unforgotten
Stan
There's an appealing ordinariness in the way that London detectives Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) go about their business.
There are no outsized personalities, no lightning leaps of deduction or intuition – just dogged, unspectacular police work that begins tugging on threads that lead to all points of the compass.
This first season begins with the reopening of a 39-year-old cold case. Many lives will be thrown into turmoil, but it's not immediately clear how everyone is connected.
Ritchie Blackmore, second from left, when he was part of the band Deep Purple.
Rainbow: Total Rock Review
Amazon Prime Video
Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow had one of the most bizarre trajectories of any rock band. After leaving Deep Purple the eccentric English guitar maestro started out with albums full of fantasy rock epics with Ronnie James Dio singing about wizards and whatnot.
Then Blackmore put the band through a series of sudden convulsions and reinventions – the first involving the incongruously yuppie-looking Graham Bonnet – and began chasing American radio success.
This doco has plenty of rare footage to play as admiring musos drill deep.
Kiernan Shipka stars as Sabrina.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Netflix, from Friday, October 26
Most of the time, folks making a new teen-driven drama – be it supernatural or mundane – need to take a pretty big punt on a relatively untried kid. Once in a while they have the luxury of casting an out-and-out star like Kiernan Shipka.
Shipka, who has grown through Mad Men and Feud: Bette and Joan via the unsettling 2014 adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, arrives in Netflix's unlikely Archie-verse at the top of her game and proceeds to smash things out of the park.
There are no big pyrotechnics, just a wonderfully engaged and sure-footed performance that combines perfect measures of nous and innocence, strength and vulnerability.
Shipka is, of course, teenage witch Sabrina, who ought to be focusing on her forthcoming "dark baptism", at which she will pledge herself to Satan and become hugely powerful.
Instead, she's preoccupied with her boyfriend and with changing the misogynistic culture of her high school. Her deliciously loopy and occasionally cannibalistic aunts (Miranda Otto and The Office's Lucy Davis) have their work cut out for them. Horror is judiciously delivered.
Liv Tyler stars in season two of Harlots.
Harlots
SBS On Demand
It's a cutthroat business, the brothel caper in 18th-century London – and literally so as this busy period drama returns for an immediately engrossing second season.
Liv Tyler is on board now – as an ostensibly wealthy woman whose sympathy for the sex workers might stem from her own slightly more subtle subjugation by the patriarchy – but it's the bitter conflict between chalk-and-cheese madams Lydia and Margaret (Lesley Manville and Samantha Morton) that continues to drive the colourful but earthy drama.
Well worth a look.
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