Trailer for ALIEN: EARTH released

FX has released the trailer for Alien: Earth, the first TV series based on the Aliens franchise.

The series is set in the year 2120 and opens on Neverland Research Island on Earth (this is two years before the Nostromo visits the planet LV-426 in the original movie Alien), where human-synthetic interfaces are being developed. A spacecraft has returned to Earth with five apex alien lifeforms on board, each capable of tremendous violence and destruction, crashing into Prodigy City. One of the creatures, predictably, is our favourite xenomorph, but the natures of the other three are unclear. To deal with the crisis, the Company sends in a team of synthetics to investigate further.

Alien: Earth is written and showrun by Noah Hawley, the much-feted creative force behind the TV series Fargo and Legion. It stars Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adrian Edmondson and Max Rinehart, amongst many others. Ridley Scott is producing.

The series debuts on FX and Disney+ on 12 August 2025, and will run for eight episodes.

Atlanta: Season 4

Paper Boi and his friends have returned to Atlanta after the end of his European tour. Back home, they find the same old same old, leading Earn to make a momentous decision.

Atlanta's MO has always been to use surrealism and even horror to illuminate what should have been a fairly basic premise: an Atlanta rapper hits the big time and hires his more grounded cousin to become his manager. The show not so much lowballs as absolutely forgets about that premise on a fairly regular basis to tell unrelated stories about everything else under the sun. In the third season, the show even chucked out its regular cast for almost half its run to become an anthology show.

The fourth and concluding season of the show returns to Atlanta and what vaguely approximates its standard format, of following its four main characters as they consider the next stage of their lives, such musings interrupted by horrendously awkward social situations, ill-considered monetary decisions and continuously pervasive racism.

If this was any other show, it'd be easy to say this was a "back to basics" season, but Atlanta's boundless inventiveness makes that a fairly meaningless statement. In the first episode alone, Darius is targeted by a scooter-bound woman who mistakes his genuine attempts to return an unwanted air fryer to Target during a riot as looting, Al follows an insane Scavenger Hunt to attend the funeral of his idol, and Earn and Van get lost in a mall seemingly inhabited by all of their ex-partners, forcing them into increasingly cringey small talk. Later episodes feature Earn undertaking one of the most elaborate and expensive petty revenge schemes in human history, Al being sucked into the terrifying world of managing young white rappers and Van getting stuck on a filming lot by a deranged showrunner (any similarities to real-life figures, of course, coincidental).

Compared to the third season's four anthology episodes unrelated to the main premise, this episode throws up only one, creating a fictitious alternate history where a junior animator is accidentally promoted to the CEO of Disney in 1992 and sets about making "the blackest movie of all time," which turns out to be the underrated animated masterpiece A Goofy Movie. Presented as a mockumentary with talking heads (a mixture of real-life figures and fictional Disney staff) and an undetectable dividing line between comedy and pathos, the episode is both hilarious and heartbreaking. It's also remarkable to see Disney (via FX) bankrolling and then showing something so critical of Disney.

The show ends, not with a bang or some kind of major climactic event (despite teasing Earn leaving the gang for Los Angeles all season), but instead a pretty ordinary day for the team, "ordinary" doing some heavy lifting as a concept there. The gang are stuck in a posh restaurant with arty food but are distracted by the proximity of a popular chicken fast food joint, whilst Darius undergoes a self-imposed existential crisis which can only be remedied by determining the dimensions of Judge Judy's posterior. Obviously.

Atlanta's final season (*****) is a well-deserved victory lap, the creators taking everything they've done so far and assembling a final ten episodes which are as inventive, bizarre and amusing as anything they've done to date. They don't go quite as random as the third season, but still keep up the consistency to a very high level. Walking away after such a run of episodes seems both crazy but also so Atlanta. We need more shows which are as fearless and unbound as this one (only channel-mate Reservation Dogs seems to be willing to go as far at the moment), but at least we have the forty-one episodes of this show to fall back on in the future. It's been a ride.

The entire run of Atlanta is available on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in most of the rest of the world.

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Reservation Dogs: Season 2

The Rez Dogs have split up. Elora has taken off for California without the rest of the crew, who are dealing with their own hardships. Her inevitable returns sparks both joy but also anger and jealousy. The crew also have to deal with wayward curses, the need for full-time employment, family bereavements, an energetic Native conference, Bear's unreliable spirit guide and a sinister "Catfish Cult" up to no good in the woods.

Reservation Dogs' first season was a perfectly-formed unit of television. It set out to do what it wanted to do - combining comedy, drama and fleeting moments of horror on a modern Native American Reservation - and executed it flawlessly. 

Annoyingly, because I'd already maxed out the score-metre on the first year, the second season establishes a new goal - all of the above, but better - and then executes that flawlessly as well.

The season opens with the gang scattered after the Season 1 finale, and it takes a couple of episodes for everyone to reform. Even when they do, the shadow of mistrust lies heavily on the group and it takes some cathartic emotional releases (thanks to a family bereavement and a pair of deranged social media influencers with a horrible line in cultural appropriation) for them to regroup properly.

A new theme then develops and it's hard to suppress a groan at the cliche even as it's written down: the gang has to grow up. They're out of school, the older members are now in full-time work and are struggling as they mix their new-found adult friends with the existing group. These are all familiar tensions and they've been done to death, but Reservation Dogs treats them like they're the newest ideas in town.

The show also continues its fine line in sometimes just rolling in an anthology story for the sheer hell of it. One episode revolves around Bear's mother and her friends as they attend a Native conference, both to discuss Native affairs but, more importantly, to party and look for prospective boyfriends. Another episode follows local cop Big as he inadvertently teams up with junkyard owner Kenny Boy, even more inadvertently takes a lot of drugs and then finds himself up against a sinister cult in the woods.

As I said about the first season, Reservation Dogs' mix of drama, comedy, occasional horror and pathos is unlike anything else on television apart, maybe, from network-mate Atlanta. In this second season, the show adds a little bit more heart. If the first season ultimately drove the group apart, this second year brings them back together and things like forgiveness and cooperation are a lot more in evidence. The show hasn't gone all gushy or overly sentimental, but it's definitely a warmer show this time around, culminating in the gang joining forces for a major road trip. The season's ending is surprisingly final, to the point that I wondered if the writers had been told to wrap things up for good, but a third season has since been commissioned.

Reservation Dogs' sophomore season (*****) is outstanding television, being smart, funny, occasionally biting and always compelling. The show is available to watch on FX and Hulu in the United States and on Disney+ in much of the rest of the world.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Atlanta: Season 3

Paper Boi and his manager, Earn, have arrived in Europe for a tour and are soon joined by their friends Darius and Van. What should be a straightforward series of gigs becomes increasingly weird and convoluted, whilst Earn has a series of vivid dreams about what appear to be horror stories or alternate realities. Outside of the comfort zone of Atlanta, the group find themselves adrift.

Atlanta is a show that defies easy definitions. The project, headed by Donald Glover in collaboration with his brother Stephen and visionary director Hiro Murai, flirts with a standard setup where Glover plays the under-achieving cousin of a rising rap star, and manages to talk him into letting him become his manager. Shenanigans ensue. But the show undercuts, subverts or often just flat out ignores its own premise on a very frequent basis, dropping most of the cast to focus on one character, or forgetting its alleged status as a comedy-drama to instead turn into flat-out existential horror. In its first two seasons the show navigated these fluctuations with ease and verve.

For its much-delayed third season (arriving four years after the last), Atlanta flips the last vestiges of its format out the window. The gang are now in Europe, as Paper Boi's latest tour takes in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and London, among other cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, even this is not as straightforward as it could be as Paper Boi experiences the worst trip of all time, Earn has to interrogate a suspected phone thief, Darius inadvertently destroys his favourite restaurant in London and Van experiences an identity crisis in Paris.

These voyages into the surreal - and they are even surreal by Atlanta's elastic standards of reality - are meticulously-crafted, intelligent slices of drama, comedy and horror intertwined with the show's traditional verve. But there are also only six episodes of them, in a ten-episode season. The show dedicates the remaining four episodes to almost completely stand-alone anthology stories.

The first is a flat-out horror, as a young boy's teacher mistakenly identifies him as being the victim of child abuse at home and he gets cycled into the care system, with decidedly unpleasant results. In the second, white Americans who are the descendants of slave-owners are forced to pay reparations to the descendants of their slaves, resulting is a seismic shift in society, and one white man rails against the new system. In a third episode, a white couple are completely reliant on their Trinidadian nanny are inconvenienced by her death, but baffled when their son asks to go to her funeral. This draws them into the life of someone they never really knew and barely ever thought about. And in the final story, a mixed-race, white-presenting high schooler is incensed when he loses out on a scholarship because of his appearance, leading to a questionable strategy for retaliation.

These four stand-alone episodes are each impressive - Three Slaps may emerge as Atlanta's creepiest instalment - and delve into themes the show has tapped into before, but in a freer way when they are detached from the show's normal cast and continuity. The Big Payback goes as far as taking place in a fantastical alternate-timeline. And all four episodes are hinted to be unusually vivid dreams that Earn is having during the European tour. It doesn't really matter since Atlanta has only a passing interest in making itself even vaguely realistic (remember this is a show which once featured an invisible car for the sheer hell of it). Instead, the stand-alones enhance the themes of the rest of the series, dealing with class, ambition and the complexities and hostility of interracial relations in America (and elsewhere). That they are brilliantly-written and directed is taken as read, but some may bemoan the limited screentime we have for our regulars; the last episode is almost a one-hander for Van (who herself is absent from most episodes), meaning that Earn, Darius and Paper Boi sit out a full half of the season.

That sounds churlish to the point of ridiculousness - who, by its third season, is watching Atlanta for a conventional narrative with a regular cast? - but there is also a slight sense of queasiness this season, of unease beyond the show's norm. The show is at its boldest and most experimental here but sometimes it feels like the experiments don't always pay off. Paper Boi being suckered into helping a company avoid corporate fall-out for its racism feels predictable, and the normally-affable Darius spends most of the season in a surprisingly dark place. The show complicating its (normally) most likeable character is a good move, but making him as dislikeable as they do here (particularly when he just bounces on Paper Boi, leaving him to the night from living hell) feels like a misstep. Van also spends most of the season on an extended strange journey separate to the rest of the characters, which feels initially disappointing - Zazie Beetz is the show's ultimate weapon of a performer, often floating around the fringes of episodes until she becomes the focus, when she absolutely kills it - but does pay off in the very clever finale.

Atlanta's third season (****½) is its boldest, strangest, weirdest, most scattershot and possibly patchiest. Perhaps you can even call it disappointing, in the same way that finding £500 on the street is disappointing after finding £600 the day before (twice!). But it's also maybe the most interesting and weirdly experimental of what is already an interesting and experimental show. The season is available to watch on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK.

Reservation Dogs: Season 1

Bear, Willie Jack, Cheese and Elora Danan (named for film Willow) are four youngsters frustrated with their life on a small reservation community in Oklahoma. In honour of their friend Daniel, who died a year previously, they plan to save up some money and escape to California. But their hopes are interrupted by a series of challenges, including the arrival of a new, rival gang; family issues; and Bear acquiring a somewhat incompetent spirit guide who tries to give him useful life advice.

Reservation Dogs is an off-kilter, low-fi comedy series created and showrun by Sterlin Harjo, with Taika Waititi attached as co-creator and producer. The show is noteworthy for being the first American scripted series to entirely be written (or co-written) and directed by an indigenous North American team, as is the majority of the cast (Waititi is notable as the only non-indigenous creative involved, and notes his job was using his name to get the show set up and then getting out of the way of everyone else). Set on a reservation in Oklahoma, the show attempts to show how people live in an isolated rural community, making the best of things or, in some cases, not.

The show centres on four key protagonists: Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs), Bear Smallhill (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Cheese (Lane Factor) and Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), who plan to escape their small town existence by fair means or foul, whether that's selling dodgy meat products or robbing vans. At the end of the first episode the gang gain a name and identity, the "Rez Dogs," which fires them up in their mission. Several of the eight episodes involve the Rez Dogs getting into various scrapes in the closest the show gets to acquiring a traditional format. However, the series also eschews that to focus on each character at a time, as they each get a solo mission which explores their character and backstory in which the other members of the gang don't appear, or appear only briefly. Other episodes focus much more firmly on supporting castmembers, such as local cop Big, Willie Jack's father Leon, Elora's uncle Brownie, or Bear's mother who is anxiously trying to find a happier life for herself.

The show is also not afraid to change gears and tones. The show is ostensibly a comedy, but several episodes are more serious, dealing with more dramatic issues. One episode is even something of a tragedy. At least one episode conjures up a genuine horror movie vibe with some decidedly disturbing moments.

Where Reservation Dogs works is by making all of this work so absolutely effortlessly that it's genuine pleasure to watch. Each episode is exactly what it needs to be in tone and style. The direction is frequently original and fresh, the young cast is absolutely on point, the supporting cast is brilliant and the comedy moments are genuinely hilarious (especially Dallas Goldtooth's brilliantly incompetent spirit guide). The show's low-fi, laidback vibe and the way the action unfolds very slowly through long, lazy summer afternoons in the middle of nowhere gives it a chill feeling, but the short running time and tight focus means it's never boring.

In fact, although the subject matter and characters are completely different, Reservation Dogs recalls FX sister show Atlanta, which similarly uses off-kilter humour, drama, tragedy and horror to explore the lives of a small number of characters. That's a high bar to raise as a point of comparison, but Reservation Dogs rather handily meets it. 

The debut season of Reservation Dogs (*****) is brilliantly-executed television. At times strange and artistic, at others accessible and riotously funny, it mixes and matches styles, stories and tones with assured ease and a confidence that belies its status as a debut show. The show is available to watch on FX and Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in most of the rest of the world.

Y: THE LAST MAN TV series dropped by FX

In a surprising move, FX has decided not to proceed with a second season of Y: The Last Man, its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan's much-lauded comic book series. The decision is especially startling as it was taken when only seven of the ten episodes had aired in the United States, and six worldwide. Typically such decisions would only be taken or announced once the whole season was available, so as not to put people off watching the rest of the season.

Vaughan's Y: The Last Man comic book series, co-created and drawn by Pia Guerra, ran from 2002 to 2008 and was a marked early success in the post-apocalyptic comic genre (Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead debuted a year later). The comic posits a world where every single mammal with a Y chromosome (even sperm) has instantly dropped dead or become unviable, apart from two: the titular Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The two find themselves at the mercy of the surviving female population, some of whom want to clone them, others who want to use their genetic material to create a cure, and a nihilistic cult which wants to kill him and end any hope of survival for the human race. The comic was applauded for its unpredictable story turns.

There were several attempts to bring the show to the screen before FX landed the rights in 2015. Development was repeatedly stymied by changes in personnel and disputes between the studio and various showrunners on the tone of the show. A pilot was filmed in 2018, which created a mixed reaction at the network. Eliza Clark finally landed the showrunner gig in 2019 and was able to steer the first season into production. However, the production period for the show then ran into problems and delays resulting from the COVID pandemic before finally concluding in July 2021, three years after shooting on the pilot began. The show began airing last month after a further change, a last-minute move from FX itself to American streaming service Hulu.

The show has received fairly mixed reviews, with a common consensus being that the opening episodes are too grim and humourless before the show is allowed to breathe in later episodes. Other criticisms include the writing for protagonist Yorick Brown, which makes him very unlikeable for large chunks of the season, and a scattergun narrative that careens between three storylines (Yorick on the move, his sister who has fallen in with a cult and his mother's precarious position as the President of the United States) with some severe pacing issues. Some critics also noted that the show's grimdark tone is not necessarily the best fit for the world in general right now, and that also some of the show's thunder and power has been stolen by several other post-apocalyptic shows, including The Walking Dead and its two spin-offs, as well as the recent mini-series version of The Stand. However, critical appreciation for the series has grown over the course of the season, with special praise reserved for Ashley Romans' powerful performance as Agent 355.

The actual reasons for the cancellation are unclear - FX has not commented so far - but it might be that the show's initial release has simply not delivered the required viewing figures on Hulu and, worldwide, Disney+. The delays have meant that the show is very expensive and it needed to be a massive hit right out of the gate.

For my part, the show started sluggishly but has picked up momentum over the course of the season and the story has become more interesting. Certainly the source material, if adapted well, has the potential to take the show on a wild ride which should avoid comparisons with other post-apocalyptic series.

Showrunner Eliza Clark has noted that they have the opportunity to take the project elsewhere, and it may be possible to save the show on another network or streaming service. The show has picked up a few high-profile fans, with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk revealing he's a fan on Twitter.

UPDATE: The Hollywood Reporter has the inside scoop on why the show was cancelled. There was a hard deadline of 15 October when FX had to decide to spend $3 million on renewing the cast contracts or not, and they decided they would not do that without a renewal decision. Since they did not have enough viewing figure data to make the call, they decided not to renew. It also sounds like FX may have become somewhat disillusioned with the project given its six-year gestation period and frequent changes of showrunner and actors.

However, FX are reportedly keen to help the show find a new home and it sounds like discussions are underway for Y: The Last Man to move to potentially HBO Max, which might be a better fit for it. This is unusual given that FX is part of the Disney family and the show could perhaps move somewhere else within its empire, but a sign of good faith that FX has in the production team. Given that the cast contracts have now been terminated and the cast could start getting other offers soon, such a transition would have to happen pretty quickly.

Brian K. Vaughan's Y: THE LAST MAN to hit screens on 13 September

After years in development hell, a protracted development process involving a pilot that had to be heavily reshot and then production delays due to a pandemic, Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man finally has a release date and trailer.

The series is set in a world where, in one single moment, every living mammal on the planet with a Y chromosome drops dead, including sperm and embryos. With, to all intents and purposes, every man on the planet dead, the remainder of humanity grapples with the prospect of extinction and also the sheer difficulty in keeping everything running when ever other member of the species has expired. As chaos spreads and civilisation threatens to unravel, it is revealed that two Y-bearing mammals have survived...and are now the #1 target for every government, scientist and nutcase in the world.

The original comic series ran for sixty issues between 2002 and 2008. It made Vaughan's name, paving the way for his later work on the TV show Lost and later comic series including Paper Girls and the massively successful Saga.

The TV version is executive produced by Eliza Clark and stars Diane Lane as President Jennifer Brown, Ben Schnetzer as Yorick Brown, Ashley Romans as Agent 355, Diana Bang as Dr. Allison Mann, Olivia Thirlby as Hero Brown, Juliana Canfield as Beth DeVille and Marin Ireland as Nora Brady.

Y: The Last Man will debut on 13 September on FX on Hulu. International broadcast partners have not been revealed, though due to a deal with the BBC in the UK, it is likely to air on the BBC and iPlayer streaming service there.

Noah Hawley confirms his ALIENS TV series will bring the xenomorph to Earth

Noah Hawley, the much-feted writer of Fargo and Legion, is working on an Aliens TV series for FX as his next project.

The writer had been working on a Star Trek movie for Paramount, but apparently Paramount shelved his idea because it had been revolving around new characters rather than established players. Shrugging, Hawley has swapped one classic SF universe for another, even finding time to pen a novel (Anthem, due in January 2022) inbetween.

He has confirmed that his Aliens project will bring the xenomorphs to Earth for the first time in the main series (they did appear on Earth in the non-canon, Aliens vs. Predator splinter timeline, and in comics and novels) and apparently the Weyland-Yutani Company is finally going to reap what it sows when the xenos run amok in their white collar heartland.

Hawley has confirmed that series regular Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) will not appear, saying he feels her story is complete, and the series will rely on brand new characters. He also confirmed that he wants to make a fifth and final season of Fargo that ties the whole series together and gives it a definitive conclusion, but that's a bit further off at the moment.

The Aliens TV series is currently planned to go into production in early 2022, probably to debut on screen in 2023.

ALIEN to get its first TV series from the showrunner of FARGO and LEGION

Fargo and Legion writer-director Noah Hawley is bringing Ridley Scott's xenomorph back to Earth.

Hawley is developing a TV series for FX which will bring the alien to Earth in the "not-too-distant future." It's unclear what this means, since the original Alien movies were set in 2122 and 2179, not too far in the future at all. Given Fox's ambivalent regard for the canonical status of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, and pretty much confirming that they do not consider the Alien vs. Predator films canon any more, it may be that the new film will be set after the events of Aliens and could see the return of the Sulaco survivors to Earth, possibly bringing xenos with them.

The alternative, a story bringing xenos to Earth in the much nearer future (perhaps tying in to Scott's Prometheus and Covenant films), would struggle with the continuity that no one has heard of the xenomorphs before in the original film.

The project is in development for a likely 2022 debut, with Hawley to write and direct and Ridley Scott in talks to produce. Scott is also developing a third film to connect Prometheus and Covenant to the original Alien, but this project has so far not been greenlit.

Archer: Seasons 7-10

Sterling Archer and his team of former anti-terrorist secret agents are now jobless, both their private security firm and attempts to work for the CIA having ended in failure. Relocating to Los Angeles, they set up a private detective agency and are soon embroiled in a complex mystery involving a Hollywood starlet and a movie set hiding a lot of secrets. However, Archer finds himself in over his head and a shocking reversal leads him to three very strange places indeed...

The first six seasons of Archer saw the titular agent and his back-up team at private security firm ISIS (hurriedly renamed and then removed from references for fairly obvious real-world reasons) getting into scrapes and hijinks against an ambiguous historical background. Season 6 was the final one for the "classic" Archer set-up, with the crew working for the CIA directly against hostile foreign powers whilst getting into their standard inter-team banter. Season 7 moves the team to Los Angeles and a private detective agency setting, which works well but also feels a little too reminiscent of Season 5's Miami-set "Vice" season.

At the end of Season 7, however, the show takes an abrupt turn for the surreal. Archer is shot and falls into a coma; the subsequent three seasons unfold entirely in his mind (shades of classic British genre shows Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes) with the regular cast re-conceptualised each time. Season 8, subtitled Dreamland, sees the team in 1947 LA and riffing off classic film noir tropes. Season 9, Danger Island, puts the team on a tropical island. Season 10, Archer 1999, is set in the future with the regular team now crewmembers on a starship.

For a show to completely rejig its premise like this and for so long is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented. Archer was so firmly immersed in the world of spies, espionage and modern pop culture references that yanking the show completely out of it and forcing it into areas away from its comfort zone feels unsettling, but also extremely brave and, when it works, quite inventive. For any show, six seasons and 75 episodes in one milieu is more than enough, so to switch to a new approach helps in keeping the show fresh.

Or at least it should. Truth be told, these latter four seasons of Archer are a mixed bag. Season 7 feels very much like a reheated version of Season 5 and very little of the season's storylines or characters have remained memorable. Fun to watch in the moment, but a little too reliant on running gags. The three "concept" seasons are all better, and there's a lot of fun seeing the characters reimagined in new situations. However, the characters quickly fall back into their more familiar roles and a lot of the running gags and repetitive character tics from earlier seasons return. There's no denying that the "high concept" idea does inject fresh energy to the show at a moment when it was running out, but it doesn't solve all of the problems.

Of the three high concept seasons, Archer 1999 is by far the best. Putting the team on a spaceship is a brilliant idea and allows the writers to bring in a lot of new concepts that they couldn't touch previously. It features some of the best laughs since the show's early seasons, with Mr. Deadly Goes to Town (starring the incomparable Matt Berry as the titular Mr. Deadly, a sentient bomb who just wants someone to detonate him) being a stand-out moment. Danger Island is okay, but it feels like we visited a lot of these ideas in previous seasons when Archer had to go to exotic locations to undertake one-off missions. Dreamland has a lot of promise but the noir setting isn't really compatible with Archer's usually cynical and biting humour, so it does go to waste a little.

If the three high concept seasons don't entirely work as intended, they still help keep Archer (***½) fresh, and it's good to see that at the end of Season 10 the idea is put to bed permanently. Season 11 should see the return of the "real" world and Archer catching up with everyone over what has happened in the past three years should hopefully result in a more interesting show. The series airs on Netflix in the UK and FXX in the United States.

Atlanta: Season 2

Earn is continuing to manage his cousin Alfred, whose career as rapper "Paper Boi" is blowing up. Alfred is unhappy with Earn's management style, whilst Earn feels that Alfred isn't taking advantage of social media and other opportunities to boost his profile. Meanwhile, it's "Robbin' Season" in Atlanta, the pre-Christmas crime spree, which results in a lot of weird stuff going down.

The first season of Atlanta was a mash-up of comedy, hard-hitting drama and bizarre psychological study. It cemented Donald Glover's (formerly of Community) position as a hot up-and-comer. After that season aired, Glover's music career (as Childish Gambino, of "This is America" fame) went stratospheric and he starred as a young Lando in the Star Wars movie Solo. Other castmembers also went big, with Lakeith Stanfield nailing a major role in Get Out and Zazie Beetz starring in Deadpool 2.

On that basis, it's perhaps a surprise we got a second season of Atlanta so soon, but Glover prioritised it and managed to create something even stranger, sadder, funnier and more heartwarming than the first season.

If Season 1 of Atlanta was a surrealist tone poem, Season 2 is a full-blown odyssey of the strange and the grotesque. It moves through a dense period of several weeks in which a lot of stuff goes down for the characters, so much that rather than try to cover events chronologically it instead splits the events between characters. This means we get few episodes where all the major characters appear, with instead most episodes focusing on a single character or group of characters. This results in an intense focus which at times feels claustrophobic, but this is appropriate for the stories that are being told.

Atlanta remains hilarious, with comic highlights including Darius and Earn trying to defuse a confrontation between Earn's insane uncle and the police, involving an alligator. A later episode sees Earn and Van defusing their relationship problems with a game of table tennis at a German party. Barbershop sees Alfred going for a simple haircut, but gets dragged into an increasingly hilarious road trip with his eccentric barber, whilst in Champagne Papi Van and her friends attend an offbeat house party where they hope to meet Drake. In North of the Border Earn, Darius and Alfred travel to a college campus to take part in a publicity event, but things go sideways and they end up taking refuge at a very uncomfortable frat boy initiation ceremony.

The season also goes dark, very dark. It feels like the shadow of the movie Get Out lies heavy on this season and Glover leans into it, delivering in Teddy Perkins possibly the freakiest 35 minutes of television of 2018. Woods is also a dark and depressing episode, but one that ends on a bizarrely redemptive note.

The season ends by coming almost full circle, as major events in the opening episode come to fruition (including one of the most literal uses of the Chekhov's Gun trope you'll ever see) and leaves things in an interesting place for the third season (which isn't expected to air until 2020).

The second season of Atlanta (*****) improves on the first to become a study in tension and tragicomedy, and has an infusion of horror running through it which is both incongruous and compelling. It remains one of the most unique and distinctive shows on air.

FX greenlights Y: THE LAST MAN TV series

FX have formally greenlit a TV series based on the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man, co-created by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra.

FX have produced an internal pilot based on the comics and clearly decided it was good enough to move forward with a full first season, due to debut in 2020.

The TV series will just be called Y. Closely based on the graphic novels, it follows what happens when every male animal on the planet, including humans, drops dead without warning. The human race faces extinction...until it is discovered that one solitary man has survived. He becomes torn between different factions, some of whom want to kill him and others who want to use him to help repopulate the species.

The TV adaptation stars Diane Lane, Barry Keoghan, Lashana Lynch, Imogen Poots and Amber Tamblyn.

Cast announced for Y: THE LAST MAN TV adaptation

Or, more accurately, the cast was announced back in July and I missed it at the time.

Y: The Last Man, originally a graphic novel series by Saga writer Brian K. Vaughan, opens with the death of every single male mammal on the planet with a Y-chromosome, apart from Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The sixty-issue comic series explores the aftermath of this event, with various factions battling to take control of Yorick, kill him, or use him to repopulate the human race.

The principle roles for the series have been cast as follows:

• Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk) will play the protagonist, Yorick Brown, the last man alive.
• Diane Lane (The Cotton Club, Chaplin, Man of Steel) will play Senator Jennifer Brown, Yorick's mother and a high-ranking member of the US government following the disaster.
• Imogen Poots (V for Vendetta, 28 Weeks Later) will play Hero Brown, Yorick's sister who falls in with an extremist group following the disaster.
• Lashana Lynch (Captain Marvel) will play Agent 355, a member of a top-secret American intelligence organisation who is - reluctantly - tasked with protecting Yorick.
• Juliana Canfield (Succession) will play Beth, Yorick's girlfriend who is in Australia when the disaster strikes and is subsequently stuck there.
• Marin Ireland (Sneaky Pete) will play Nora, the US President's right-hand woman and confidante.
• Amber Tamblyn (Two-and-a-Half Men, Django Unchained) will play Mariette Callows, the daughter of the US President and a new character created for the TV series.
• Ampersand the monkey will be portrayed through the medium of CGI.

The pilot episode of the show is shooting now and, if ordered to series, will debut on FX in 2019. The current plan is for the TV series to just be named Y, apparently due to concerns over confusion with the recently-cancelled Last Man on Earth.

Atlanta: Season 1

Earnest "Earn" Marks is a man who feels his life is drifting aimlessly, with an unrewarding job and difficulties in supporting his young daughter and his on-off again girlfriend Van. When his cousin Alfred starts a rapping career under the stage name "Paper Boi", Earn convinces him to take him on as his manager. And then life gets even more complicated.

Atlanta is a very hard TV show to pin down. Created and partly written by Donald Glover (Community, Star Wars: Solo), who also stars as Earn, it's a strange show that moves between different tones with assured ease. It's a comedy about an intelligent young man who constantly feels let down by society and his idiotic peers, but who also makes plenty of his own mistakes. But it can also go quite dark: the first two episodes see Alfred shooting a man after a parking lot altercation and both him and Earn ending up in the police station, where Earn endures a stark and uncomfortable night alongside drug-dealers, violent criminals and brutal cops.

Later episodes go out-and-out surreal. An entire episode is spent with Alfred as a guest on a strange Atlanta talk show, whilst another is set in a nightclub with secret doors and a lunatic rich guy who apparently drives an invisible car. Another episode revolves entirely around a search for a missing jacket, and another feels like the prototype for the movie Get Out, with Earn enduring the increasingly disturbing attention of a middle-aged white man who is crawling with inappropriately over-earnest guilt for slavery (co-star Lakeith Stanfield also has a prominent role in Get Out, which feels appropriate).

Atlanta is weird and fluid, flowing from being a show about one thing into a show about another. At first it's difficult to know if you even like the show or not: is it a comedy? A drama? A surrealistic visual tone poem? But the final analysis is that Atlanta is meant to represent Earn's life, which for all of its specific elements is a life pretty much like anyone else's, which moves from being funny to sad to being busy to being boring and back again.

What Atlanta remains throughout, however, is both entertaining and compelling. The direction (some of it by Glover himself) is remarkable, drawing the viewer into each episode's unique set-up. The writing is always sharp, the dialogue often joyously clever (especially when Earn gets up to speed and starts cutting down other people's idiocies with withering contempt), the characters immensely interesting even when they're not the most likeable. Earn may be (most of the time) our viewpoint character, but it's his long-suffering sort-of girlfriend Vanessa (an assured performance by Zazie Beetz) who emerges as one of the strongest characters, someone with drive and ambition but lacking the resources to fully achieve her goals.

Atlanta may not always be a comedy (despite its billing as a comedy-drama), but when it is it's the funniest show on television. Lakeith Stanfield's performance as philosopher-stoner Darius, master of the non sequitur, provides some of the show's best moments, but all of the cast have their moment in the sun.

Atlanta's first season (****½) is smart, engaging and endlessly inventive television. A second season aired earlier this year and a third season has been commissioned.

FX commissions Y: THE LAST MAN pilot

FX has formally commissioned a pilot episode for a TV series based on Bryan Vaughan's critically-acclaimed comic, Y: The Last Man.

After three years in development hell, the project is now moving forward at FX with Michael Green (American Gods, Logan, Blade Runner 2049) and Aida Croal (Jessica Jones) on board as producer-showrunners, with Melina Matsoukas (Master of None) set to direct the pilot.

The comic ran for 60 issues between 2002 and 2008 and told the story of Yorick Brown and his monkey companion Ampersand, the only two male mammals left in the world after an unknown virus or genetic mutation wiped out the rest of male-kind. With the human race doomed to extinction, Yorick and Ampersand quickly become the target of governments, scientific organisations and criminals looking to either reverse the crisis, continue it or profit from it.

Once the pilot has been produced, FX will decided whether to proceed to a full series, although given the credits of everyone involved (including Vaughan himself, who has spent time working on TV series such as Lost and Under the Dome) it seems reasonably likely.

The impact of the Amazon/Tolkien deal on the WHEEL OF TIME TV show

The news broke last night that Amazon are in talks with Warner Brothers about making a big-budget TV series based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, despite the perception that Peter Jackson's movie trilogy is too recent and a remake at this time is unnecessary. What's been less reported is how this will impact on Sony's TV version of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels, which were widely expected would end up at Amazon.

To rewind, in April 2017 it was confirmed that Sony TV had optioned the rights to The Wheel of Time in a complex deal involving the Robert Jordan Estate (aka the Bandersnatch Group) and Red Eagle Entertainment. A few months earlier it was heavily rumoured that Amazon were seriously considering making the series, as Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos is a huge fan of SF and fantasy in general (he had a cameo in the latest Star Trek movie, Beyond) and - apparently - Wheel of Time is one of his favourite book series. Amazon also recently reorganised their TV production division, cancelling several smaller shows and Bezos mandating the acquisition of a big-budget SFF project to compete with Game of Thrones on HBO. Wheel of Time was a no-brainer for this treatment.

However, seven months after Sony confirmed it had optioned the book rights, no production partner has been confirmed. Although not completely unusual - many years between optioning a property and greenlighting it is not unheard of - it was expected that studios would move quickly to snatch up the rights to a property that could comfortably go toe-to-toe with Game of Thrones in terms of epic scenes, number of characters and scale. Now it appears we know why there's been radio silence: Warner Brothers have been (quietly) shopping around their new Lord of the Rings TV project around at the same time. Although studios appear to be dubious about making a new LotR screen project so soon after Jackson's film series, they are also weighing carefully the benefits of picking up a much more well-known franchise which would get a lot of viewers from the off.

This leaves The Wheel of Time TV project in an awkward place. WoT was - comfortably - the biggest and most successful epic fantasy series not currently under an option, so it had a degree of brand value in the marketplace. With Middle-earth in play, that is no longer the case and the problems of adapting Wheel - its immense visual effects requirements, high budget and the challenges of adapting 14 books totalling 4 million words (eight times the length of Lord of the Rings) in a reasonable timeframe - may have come into greater focus.

It's worth looking now at the channels and broadcasters who may be in the running to adapt WoT and see how likely they are to follow through:

Amazon

Amazon are in deep discussion with Warner Brothers over the LotR TV show and Jeff Bezos is a noted fan of the books. He is personally involved in negotiations. They are clearly taking this approach very seriously. However, they have not committed yet. WB are asking for an astonishing amount of money up-front (totalling a third of a billion dollars) and are not bringing anything new to the table. Only The Lord of the Rings is on offer, with perhaps a possibility of The Hobbit as well, but none of Tolkien's other Middle-earth books are included in the deal, so no new material can be brought to the screen that hasn't been adapted previously. Although the deal is tempting, Amazon will likely have to weight up the benefits of the brand name and value versus the likely criticisms they will get for not going for a more original project.

If Amazon passes on LotR I could see them picking up WoT. This is a new project (for the screen) but also one that will last easily six or seven seasons (at least) and they can cross-market the show with the books and other merchandise. Amazon also appear to be the only company in the running who can stump up the significant budget that Wheel of Time will require. However, I strongly suspect that they will be more inclined to go with LotR if they can make the finances work.

HBO

HBO have already shot down the LotR project, citing their ongoing commitment to Game of Thrones and its in-development spin-offs. I think we can comfortably say that if they're not going to pick up LotR, they're not going to pick up Wheel of Time either. HBO are now 100% out of the picture.

Showtime

Showtime have committed to Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle prequel TV show. Until this project succeeds or fails, Showtime are also unlikely to seriously consider Wheel of Time.

AMC

Sony and AMC have an excellent prior relationship from Breaking Bad and I suspect AMC will be seriously considering the advantages of adapting Wheel of Time to add to their enviable SFF programming, which currently includes The Walking Dead and Preacher. However, AMC's preferred business model has them making shows for a very, very low budget and just making them look impressive, allowing them to maximise profits. They have already faced heavy criticism for the shoestring budget that The Walking Dead is made under, despite the show's massive global success. It is unlikely that AMC would give The Wheel of Time the $6-7 million per episode budget it will need as a minimal starting point. Still, AMC may still be in the picture if they can be persuaded to loosen the pursestrings.

Starz

Starz are also enjoying a spectacular surge in genre programming, with both Outlander and American Gods doing very well. Wheel of Time would be an enviable addition to their lineup, and Starz certainly are prepared to spend more money than AMC. They may be tempted to take another look at Wheel of Time if Amazon are now out of the picture.

FX

FX have been quietly building a slate of excellent shows recently, including Fargo, Legion, American Horror Story, Archer, The Americans and Atlanta. A high-budget, high-profile fantasy show is precisely what they are missing, and they also aired Red Eagle's proof-of-concept Wheel of Time pilot thing a couple of years ago, for which they received a lot of interest from viewers.

CBS

I'd previously dismissed CBS as being a likely home for the show, since their budgets for network shows are pretty small. Since then, however, they've launched the CBS All Access platform and achieved significant success with Star Trek: Discovery, which has a budget of $7 million per episode. If CBS wish to maintain momentum with the All Access project they will need another high-profile killer app, and Wheel of Time could well be it.

SyFy

SyFy has achieved some success with the TV show The Expanse, but has recently cancelled several shows and their bandwidth for making lots of big-budget shows at once is limited. I consider SyFy to have only an outside shot at the moment.

Netflix

Netflix would seem like a very probability on the list. They have developed a portfolio of shows, but they don't yet have an epic fantasy show to go toe-to-toe with GoT. It would seem likely that they would be interested. However, Netflix have gotten into significant debt to deliver their current slate of of shows and have axed expensive series such as Sense8 and House of Cards (it was widely reported that the sixth season would be the final one even before they axed Kevin Spacey) in favour of much cheaper programming, such as GLOW and American Vandal. Although Netflix's overall programming budget is increasing, the amount they are willing to pay per-show is definitely decreasing (although they have noted this may increase again, and certainly Stranger Things is not a cheap show to make). Wheel of Time would likely remain of interest to them, however, and if they decide a new high-profile show is needed they would likely stump up more money.

ETA: Netflix are developing a TV series based on The Witcher video games and books by Andrzej Sapkowksi, which likely would reduce their interest in another top-tier fantasy show.

Conclusion

The Amazon/LotR discussions are troubling to Wheel of Time fans as they would seem to shut down the most logical pairing of network and project. However, other networks remain in play. I would say at the moment that Starz, AMC and FX may now all be more likelier destinations for the project, with CBS All Access and Netflix as outsider players. If Amazon choose not to proceed with LotR, I suspect they would also take another look at Wheel of Time.

More concerning will be oversaturation of the market: if, by 2021 or thereabouts, we have a Kingkiller Chronicle TV show, a GoTspin-off (or two), a Lord of the Rings TV series and additional seasons of Shannara and American Gods all on air at the same time, it might be felt that further fantasy series would be redundant. As usual, time will tell.

TABOO renewed: Tom Hardy's Hat will return

Splendid news for fans of Tom Hardy and the Greatest Hat in the World: BBC grimcamp romp Taboo has been renewed for a second season.

Airing at the start of the year, the drama starred Tom Hardy as James Delaney, an enigmatic guy in a hat who inherited some land in Vancouver that the East India Company wanted and was willing to do anything to steal. The drama was magnificently nonsensical, but as a slice of watchable hokum it was thoroughly enjoyable. The series only did okay in ratings for the BBC, but attracted a more impressive audience on FX in the States and also picked up a lot of views on the BBC iPlayer service.

The second season will pick up on the adventures of Tom Hardy, his hat and his crew of misfits and scoundrels as they arrive in the New World to investigate his newly-acquired land and, presumably, uncover some more of Delaney's Dark Past. Season 2 of Taboo will likely air in late 2018 or early 2019 on the BBC and FX. Hardy and writer Steven Knight are apparently already planning a third season as well.

Fargo: Season 3

2010. Two brothers, Ray and Emmit Stussy, have been feuding for years over the inheritance from their late father. Emmit took his part of the inheritance and transformed himself into a millionaire, the "Parking Lot King of Minnesota". Ray took his part, his dad's car, and did nothing with it. Fuelled by bitterness and resentment (and his new girlfriend, Nikki Swango), Ray plots to get even. The result is a case of mistaken identity, a spate of killings and the hostile takeover of Ray's company by a mysterious Englishman named Varga. Caught in the middle is Gloria, a police officer whose imagination is fired up by the case but whose new boss is keen to sweep it under the carpet as soon as possible.

Fargo is an anthology series where each seasons forms one complete, self-contained story, each story linked to the rest (and to the original 1996 Coen Brothers movie) by a shared background. The third season is set five years after the events of the first but has almost no characters in common (one, relatively minor Season 1 character does show up later on though), although some background elements and similar themes are explored. What this season does share with its two forebears is an off-kilter, bizarre atmosphere and some rich, satisfying dialogue along with absolute killer performances by some exceptional actors at the top of their game.

Leading the charge this time around is Ewan McGregor. McGregor is always a fine actor, but is utterly exceptional in Fargo, playing the brothers Stussy with flair and wit, imbuing each brother with a different personality and even physical sensibility. It's not quite at Tatiana Maslany levels of exceptionalism as a multi-character performance, but it's an impressive piece of work. The other heavy-hitters, David Thewlis and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, are also superb but the higher-profile actors' work is almost stolen out from under them by the lesser-known Carrie Coon as Gloria, who is charismatic, funny, passionate and smart. There's also a host of scene-stealing performances from other actors in smaller roles, such as the always-fantastic Mary McDonnell, Olivia Sandoval as another police officer and Shea Whigham as the PTSD-suffering new police chief who is looking for a quiet life.

The third season is still off-kilter and bizarre, featuring an extended animated story about a robot travelling into the distant future, an awful lot of people playing Bridge and some slightly surreal sequences in which an all-knowing character (played by Ray Wise) shows up to comment on the metanarrative. There's also a whole episode set in the distinctly non-Minnesotan location of Los Angeles, just to mix things up a little. Those hoping for closer ties between the seasons may be disappointed; one minor Season 1 character showing up in a recurring role and a few nods to the bizarre UFO scene in Season 2 aside, this season stands mostly alone.

However, the third season of Fargo does have some problems. Season 1 of Fargo is probably the single finest season of television made in the last ten years and was utterly sublime and pitch-perfect from start to finish. Season 2 had a slower start but eventually got up to speed and almost rivalled the opening season. Season 3 starts very strongly, with a compelling story, richly-detailed characters, but then goes off the rails a bit. Producer-writer Noah Hawley seems to feel the strain of going back to the well for a third time and there's a lot of make-work mid-series as he tries to delay Gloria solving the murder mystery pretty much straight away. Fargo has never been necessarily rooted in outright realism, but some of Varga's abilities as he stays one step ahead of everyone seem quite ludicrous even by this show's generous standards. In fact, the characters are painted a little more broadly than in previous seasons, slightly larger than life without the grounding family roots the likes of Molly and Peggy had in previous seasons. This is still fun, but a little depth has been lost along the way. There's also the issue of violence: Fargo has never shied away from spilling blood when needed, but Season 3 gets a little trigger-happy and ends up wasting most of its cast by the end, often in ways that feel random rather than rooted in the needs of the story.

The show eventually circles back round and delivers a thrilling finale rooted in a fantastically-played central question: is the world good and does justice exist, or is there no justice and are those who do evil always doomed to get their comeuppence? The show doesn't offer an easy answer, but frames the question extremely well.

Season 3 of Fargo (****½) is the weakest to date, which is to say it's still probably the best-acted, best-shot and one of the best-written and directed shows you'll see this year. It struggles for pacing and energy a little more than the first two seasons and the news that there'll be a two-to-three year hiatus before Hawley returns for a fourth season does feel like a wise move. The series will be released in October 2017 on DVD in the UK and USA (and hopefully Blu-Ray, but there is no listing yet).

Taboo: Season 1

London, 1814. Horace Delaney, a merchant and landowner, has died. His daughter Zilpha and her grasping, ambitious husband Thorne stand to inherit everything. But, to Thorne's dismay, Zilpha's older half-brother James has returned from a decade in Africa (where he was presumed dead) to take on the inheritance. Part of this inheritance is land on Vancouver Island, of great importance to both the British Empire, the United States and the burgeoning Pacific trade with China. The East India Company is hungry to get its hands on that land, but finds that James has his own plans and he will not be moved from them.

Taboo is a dark and grim historical drama series conceived by actor Tom Hardy almost a decade ago. It's been a passion project for the actor, as he convinced his father Chips and his Peaky Blinders collaborator Steven Knight to write it and finally became famous enough to get it made as a co-production between the BBC and the American FX cable channel.

Taboo tries - and tries very hard - to be a dark and serious drama series. The lighting filters are turned down to the extent that some scenes may as well be in black and white, and characters utter, or mumble indistinctly, dark and portentous dialogue at the drop of a hat. Speaking of which, Tom Hardy struts around the series wearing an epic and impressive hat. The hat does a lot of the heavy lifting of characterisation that the writers don't bring to the party: James Delaney is a bit of a weirdo who fancies his sister and likes to talk in Native Americanese and keeps getting decent people killed, but we side with him regardless because he rocks that hat. The hat is all.

The series meanders and roams backwards and forwards. The central plot is that James Delaney owns some land and the East India Company wants to buy it and he doesn't want to sell it, so the East India Company embarks on plans of varying degrees of lunacy to try to get Delaney to sell it, or killed so it passes to his more flexible sister and brother-in-law. The East India Company as an Evil Organisation is well-established in fiction (in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy it even stood in as a sort of Galactic Empire of the seas) and here this mostly ahistorical image is sold by its boss being played by the always-utterly-magnificent Jonathan Pryce. Pryce's villainous monologues are utterly magnificent, improved by his splendidly belligerent use of English swearing.

Tacked on to this central storyline is a lot of other stuff. James and his sister have a weird and unhealthy relationship, his late father was remarried to a much younger woman who is recruited to dispute the inheritance but instead sides with James after he charms her with the hat, and James also has an interest in international politics, developing a curious relationship with an American intelligence agent. There's also a superstar celebrity chemist, played with excellent charisma and wit by Tom Hollander, and a bunch of local honourable prostitutes with hearts of gold (kind of) whom James recruits for various whimsical reasons. There's also the cross-dressing East India Company operative whom James recruits after he falls in love with him (or the hat), and the young wharf rat who attaches herself to James because she believes that - in the utter absence of any evidence - that he's really a good man and not the psychopath he first appears to be (and never really moves away from: in Taboo character development is optional). Oh, and Mark Gatiss shows up as the sleazily corrupt Prince Regent who steals every scene he is in.

Taboo certainly has fantastic production values. British shows set in the 19th Century are commonplace, but usually resort to clever camera angles and digitally painting out CCTV cameras to pretend it's a period piece. Taboo goes beserk with CGI establishing shots of the entire city of London, some terrific visuals of the Thames that eliminate all of the modern buildings and warps things back to two hundred years ago and also some very subtle manipulation of background images to sell the setting and imagery. Sometimes the CG is too obviously fake - some of the shots from bridges are obviously greenscreen - but mostly this extra money and CG whizz is used to sell the setting. There's also some great costume work and a great final battle sequence involving explosions, gunfire and sword fights that is excellently choreographed.

The main problem with Taboo will also be, for some, its main selling point. This is a series that aspires to be Dark. The themes are dark, the ideas are dark and the characters are dark. But there is a very fine line between things being dark and things getting a bit silly. Taboo not only crosses that line, it smashes through it with a sixteen-wheel truck (complete with Tom Hardy strapped to the top playing flamethrower guitar, probably). In fact, Taboo may have created an entirely new subgenre: grimcamp.

It's really not possible to take Taboo seriously as a real piece of drama: it is far too po-faced, utterly implausible and nonsensical for that. But treat it as Tom Hardy trolling the entire world and as a slice of high hokum, and it springs to life. You can play the Taboo drinking games (one shot each time Zilpha has a naughty dream about James, another each time James appears to have been thwarted before it's all revealed to be part of a Xanatos Gambit, another each time Jonathan Pryce drops an F-bomb), go online to extol the virtues of Tom Hardy's hat (which deserves its own place in the credits) and ponder real estate values of land on Vancouver Island and why the USA gives the British landowner rights any credence at all.

This is also the Tom Hardiest thing that Tom Hardy has ever done. He struts into scenes with his big black coat and his epic hat and mumbles incoherently about his Dark Doings in Africa and/or America before having a vision of his Native American mother and then leaving. You'll have no idea about what he's doing or what's just happened, but he sells it so well that you don't really care. James Delaney is incredibly po-faced but you can tell that Hardy is having the time of his life. With that hat.

Amongst the supporting cast and crew - most of whom have been poached from Game of Thrones, Pirates of the Caribbean and/or Peaky Blinders, which is appropriate as the series feels like a fanfic mashup of all three - Tom Hollander and Jonathan Pryce do outstanding work, Jessie Buckley is excellent (and I suspect a star in the making) and Mark Gatiss does scene-stealing debauchery as only he can. Some of the cast is less successful: Oona Chaplin clearly does not have a clue what the hell is going on and sleepwalks through half her scenes, whilst Jefferson Hall (also ex-Game of Thrones) plays her arsey husband without much motivation.

Take the first season of Taboo (***½) seriously as a piece of drama and art, and you will be massively disappointed. Accepted it as a piece of pulpy cheese presented to you by Tom Hardy wearing a fun hat, and it becomes altogether more enjoyable. Implausibly, the series will return next year for a second season, apparently set in the Azores. Whether Tom Hardy's hat will also return is as yet unclear.

Archer: Seasons 1-6

Sterling Archer is a suave, skilled secret agent with excellent combat skills and a knack for meeting beautiful women. He's also an arrogant and spoiled man-child with terrible interpersonal skills and an overbearing, controlling mother, who is also his boss. Along with his co-workers, Archer is put into situations where he has to use his wits to survive...which is often a big problem.

Archer is an animated comedy drama which riffs on spy movies, action thrillers and the Cold War. It's a bit like James Bond, if M was James Bond's mother and everyone was incompetent. Its setting is ambiguous (the Soviet Union and KGB still exist and cars look like they're from the 1970s, but everyone has a mobile phone and internet access) but that's not really important. What is important are the central cast of characters and the increasingly bizarre situations they get into.

Some viewers bounce hard off the show because of Archer himself, a misogynistic and arrogant bully who has no respect for anyone and tends to disparage everyone around him, unless they're a woman he's trying to seduce. He refuses to read full mission dossiers (preferring to skim them for the gist), a fact that nearly gets him and others killed on several occasions. Archer is, of course, supposed to be initially unlikable and in some respects even repugnant. Creator Adam Reed based on the character on the original depiction of James Bond as seen in the novels, where he is far more amoral, cold-hearted and self-centred a character as presented on screen. As the show continues, however, Archer shows both increased depth and character development. He is far more intelligent than he presents himself as and over the course of the series grows friendships with the rest of the character which appear genuine. He is also a massive Lord of the Rings fan (the books, as the films don't seem to exist in this universe yet), dropping frequent Tolkien references, and is also a grammar perfectionist, insisting on the correct use of "literally" and "whom" even in the midst of firefights. Voice actor H. Jon Benjamin plays Archer brilliantly, with excellent comic timing.

The only character in the show who appears to be both sympathetic and relatable is Lana Kane, played by Aisha Tyler. Lana is an expert in hand-to-hand combat and has formidable firearms skills. Initially she has a slightly more abrasive personality but over time she evolves into the conscience of the team. She is also extremely attractive (she and Archer have an on-off relationship through a lot of the series) but is noted as having unusually large hands, which is mentioned frequently. Lana's exasperation when Archer does something monumentally stupid (usually at least twice an episode) can be seen as a stand-in for the audience's reaction. Far less sympathetic is Malory (Jessica Walter), Archer's borderline-alcoholic and controlling mother, and the source of his various neuroses and personality problems. Malory is thoroughly dislikable but later episodes show her background as a secret agent during the height of the Cold War which at least hints at why she is the way she is. In later seasons, when she is no longer in charge of events as much as she was before, she becomes a bit more of an interesting character.

The secondary cast is amusing but a bit more variable in its treatment. Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell) is initially presented as a sympathetic figure, a geek who has somehow ended up in a relationship with Lana and despises Archer. However, he is quickly revealed to have his own massive personality problems and issues. He gets some good character development in the first three or so seasons, but then becomes less of a prominent figure later on. Pam (Amber Nash) is the relaxed head of HR for the office and evolves over the course of the series into a force of nature, an occasional cocaine addict and drinker who is also a good listener and becomes, improbably, Archer's best friend. She is also a drift racer, a member of a fight club and has a tendency to "Hulk out" and go on the rampage at inopportune moments. She is many viewer's favourite character. Cheryl (Judy Greer) is much more of a random character, Miss Moneypenny if she was a secret millionaire with an incontinent pet ocelot (whom Archer inexplicably dotes on). And yes, that's a Salvador Dali reference (one of Archer's less obscure references). Cheryl provides much of the offbeat and surreal humour of the show, but her random bouts of insanity mean she doesn't have much of a character herself. Ray (creator Adam Reed himself) is a background character, a gay and more flamboyant secondary agent who picks up Archer's slack, who evolves into a more prominent character later on. Rounding out the regular cast is Krieger (Lucky Yates), a mad scientist who provides most of the team's gadgets and weapons but also has his own, dubious experiments going on.

The show does have several over-arcing storylines which span the first four seasons. In these seasons Archer and the team form a private security and spy firm called ISIS (a name which is abandoned in later seasons for obvious reasons). They have an ongoing rivalry with another firm, ODIN, and are also engaged in ongoing battles with the KGB, complicated by Malory's secret affair with the head of that organisation. Archer is also trying to find his father and reignite his relationship with Lana. Episodes in these seasons revolve around fairly obvious James Bond and Cold War spoofs. At the end of Season 4, the agency is shut down by the CIA and the team decide to become criminals and sell a vast quantity of cocaine they've come into possession of. This results in the offbeat fifth season, subtitled Archer Vice, in which all other long-running storylines are (in some cases mercifully) abandoned and the show focuses on a much more tightly serialised narrative. This experiment is successful, but the sixth season reverts to more episodic storytelling with the agents now working for the CIA directly. It ends with arguably the funniest storyline to date, a riff on Fantastic Voyage with the team being miniaturised and injected into a dying scientist. The seventh season, which just started airing in the USA, recasts the team as private investigators based in Los Angeles, with Archer and Lana now parents and in an apparently committed long-term relationship.

At its best, Archer is witty, clever, inventive and funny, mixing slapstick, satire and rapid-fire banter with action. The animation is effective and occasionally - especially in later seasons after a fairly obvious budget hike - spectacular, but many of the best moments of Archer come from when the characters are just standing around talking. The show is much smarter than it first appears, taking on subjects ranging from racism to corporate greed to government irresponsibility in a creative manner.

On the negative side of things, Archer is highly reliant on running gags, catchphrases and recurring villains and situations, which for some viewers will get older and more tiring faster than others. Barry the rival agent was amusing the first few times he appeared, but by the end of Season 4 that storyline had not only outstayed its welcome, but it had been wrung dry and become irritating. Fortunately, later seasons seem to realise this and are less reliant on recurring villains in favour of more original stories.

Archer (****) is a very funny, enjoyable and surprisingly sophisticated comedy series that is well worth watching. The first six seasons are available now on Netflix in the UK and USA, and Season 7 is currently airing on FX in the States.