Kiwi Michael Dorman delivers another performance of tough, melancholy substance in this unheralded but involving series about a game warden trying to keep himself and his family alive as murder stalks the lonely hills of Wyoming.

Part of the problem is that Joe Pickett (Dorman) is what Americans call a hard-ass. The old warden would let things slide but Joe doesn’t, which puts him at odds with desperately poor locals who poach wildlife to make ends meet and might just be desperate enough to kill him and leave him for the crows out under that big, big sky.

The series, adapted from the novels by C. J. Box, has plenty of mildly rustic and moderately menacing characters (including an ornery old emu) as well as a gimlet eye for America’s extreme inequalities. The real meat of it, though, is in Joe’s reckoning with the legacy of his own upbringing in a family terrorised by a violent father. Dorman, who was so brilliant in the underrated tar-black spy-thriller series Patriot (Prime Video), remains one of the most quietly compelling actors of his generation.

Bridgerton
Netflix

The smash-hit soapy costume romance has never looked better. Characters old and new are bursting with vim, vigour, machination and comedic foible as eldest Bridgerton boy Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) steps to the fore in the new season. Smitten by one potential paramour but courting another, he’s not quite the cad he seems – we get affecting new insights into his traumatic past that put things in quite a different light. There are still plenty of low-key laughs, and the whole brilliant ensemble hums.

Phoenix Rising
Binge, Foxtel

This harrowing two-part documentary by actor Evan Rachel Wood and Oscar-nominated documentarian Amy Berg (Deliver Us from Evil) is more than just a truly shocking account of the physical, sexual and psychological abuse that Wood suffered at the hands of rock star Brian Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson. It’s also a rare examination of coercive control, and why it takes some victims of domestic violence a long time to leave their abuser. There’s a ray of light in Wood’s success at getting California to extend its statute of limitations for domestic violence.

Harry Wild
Acorn TV, from Monday

Jane Seymour is such a joy to watch that this slight and slightly silly amateur-sleuth series immediately becomes something you could easily idle away a couple of hours on. Seymour is Harry, a newly retired English academic living in Ireland near her semi-detached son and daughter-in-law and smart teenage granddaughter. Harry still has all the appetites of a younger woman, if you catch our drift, and her specialist knowledge of Elizabethan playwrights is guaranteed to solve a murder or two.

Taboo
Netflix

Tom Hardy strides through his own dark period piece at his most glowering and enigmatic. It’s the London of 1814, where dogs gorge on the flesh of the suicides that jump from Blackfriars Bridge, and the craggy old character actors come direct from Game of Thrones. Hardy plays the distinctly dangerous James Keziah Delaney, who has long been presumed dead somewhere in Africa but is now back in town to claim his inheritance. Cracking Gothic fun that also stars Stephen Graham and Oona Chaplin.

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