Made for a now-defunct American cable network and created by filmmaker Peter Farrelly (Green Book) and writer Bobby Mort (The Colbert Report), Loudermilk has a familiar outline. There are trace elements of House and Curb Your Enthusiasm in Sam’s psychological profile – he leans in with an insult and appears to value being right over doing right, although his instincts to help invariably kick in. The show can be irreverent, but it understands that irreverence is a coping mechanism.

From the start there’s a pithy cohort, including Sam’s sponsor, Ben Burns (Will Sasso), and a young wastrel he takes under his wing, Claire (Anja Savcic). What helps elevate this drily funny series is that the characters don’t reset every episode, as in a sitcom. There are revelations and decisions that shift the dynamic, while casting Sam in a different light. Loudermilk is ultimately about more than Sam’s dismissive tirades. The show evolves.

Balenciaga
Disney+
If you can’t wait for next week’s Christian Dior drama on Apple TV+, The New Look, there’s already a Spanish language series about one of the designer’s haute couture contemporaries: Cristobal Balenciaga. An artist in the atelier who was forced to be a pragmatist during the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s, and who reached his creative peak in the 1950s and ’60s, Balenciaga (Alberto San Juan) is dedicated to elegance. The show operates in a similar way: refinement in the period detail and production values shines through. Any scandals come with subtle reflection.

Maryland
BritBox

The British actor Suranne Jones has been on an absolute tear these last few years, impressively headlining both the lesbian period romance Gentlemen Jack and the Scottish crime thriller Vigil. Add another string to her bow with this incisive family drama about a pair of estranged sisters, Becca (Jones) and Rosaline (Eve Best, House of the Dragon), who discover that their late mother lived a second, secret life. The realisation doesn’t set off a reconciliation so much as a reckoning, with the past’s wrongs dragged into the present.

The Thief Collector
DocPlay

It’s actually not giving too much away to say that this nimble documentary feature begins with an Arizona couple, Jerry and Rita Alter, brazenly stealing a Willem de Kooning portrait Woman-Ochre from a local museum one morning in 1985. The abstract painting wasn’t recovered until 2017, alerting authorities and ultimately director Allison Otto, to the pair. But the theft by the retired teachers is just the starting point, as the story opens up both their complicated past and the very different lives connected to a painting now worth over $200 million.

Trigger Point (season 2)
Stan

The first season of this British bomb disposal thriller, produced by Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio, did just enough with its nail-biting deactivation scenes, where a technician from London’s Metropolitan Police, Lana Washington (Vicky McClure, another Line of Duty alumni), sweated her way through shutting down one explosive device after another, to compensate for the implausible plotting and boilerplate dialogue. The new season addresses the implausible plotting – it’s now wildly implausible. But as corny as this series gets, it moves fast and it has a magnetic lead performance from McClure. You can’t cut her wires.

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