Shameless | 4OD
Episodes | iPlayer
Kidnap and Ransom | ITV player
Human Planet | iPlayer
It would be unfair to say that Shameless (C4) has grown aimless because it was always about lives that lacked what might be called orthodox direction. When it began in 2004, with a cast that included James McAvoy, Anne-Marie Duff and Maxine Peake, one of the show's obvious charms was a manic, scattergun energy that refused to conform to any preconfigured narrative or moral shape.
Here was the underclass in all its feckless, drunken, irresponsible, irrepressible, resourceful, violent and promiscuous splendour, and there were no homilies or apologies or tales of transforming personal growth. After all the plastic melodramatics on EastEnders, this was a series that revelled in mundane minor victories over an absent landlord state: dole scams, housing benefit fraud, disability swindles.
What's more, in Frank Gallagher we heard the slurring, finger-jabbing voice of Asbo Britain. He was an antihero for our times, rat-like in his cunning and rat-arsed in his habits, a man whose waywardness made Yosser Hughes seem like Alan Partridge. Frank was a brilliant creation, not just emblematically but in terms of the story itself. His chronic dysfunction lent a tragicomic grandeur to the Chatsworth Estate.
The anticonscience is a tough act to maintain, however, and after seven years Frank's no longer just a drunken bore. He has also become boring. The show has come to rely on his ranting dereliction as a kind of dramatic prop, a lifeless symbol of continuity, like Ena Sharples's hairnet. And as Frank has become louder and more obnoxious, the other characters have also been sucked into caricature.
Last week the first five episodes of the new series played out on consecutive nights in a story that had Frank appearing in a variety of classic film and TV settings – Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Dr Who – but it turned out that he was drugged up in a psychiatric unit, where he'd been sectioned by his ex-wife Monica.
Yet even within the "reality" of the mental hospital, the film-makers couldn't resist pastiching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with Frank recreating Jack Nicholson's role as the rebel patient Randle McMurphy. In fact all five episodes were awash with hallucinations and dream sequences, a disorienting prospect at the best of times, but deadeningly exhausting over the course of a week. It was as though jumping the shark – the moment at which a long-running TV series collapses into absurdity – had been turned into a marathon sport.
Everything about the new series – from the surreal film references to the relentlessly transgressive plotlines and the coarse, preachy tone – spoke of a frantic desperation to be meaningful. In seeking to demonstrate an urgent sense of purpose, Shameless may not have lost its aim, but it has lost its point.
There has been a lot of advanced publicity about the "return" of Matt LeBlanc – Joey from Friends – in the new comedy Episodes (BBC2). It was either a clever postmodern joke or a foolhardy gambit that the star of the show didn't appear in the first episode of Episodes, other than a brief glimpse of him driving a car.
I'm inclined to think it was a smart move, if only because it gave Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan a chance to establish themselves without the distraction of LeBlanc's comeback moment. They play a married couple of English sitcom writers who are wooed to Hollywood to make a US version of their hit British show. Once there, of course, all the promises they were made evaporate as quickly as a spilt cocktail in the Californian sun.
It's not a bad premise, the opener had some promising scenes, and Greig (who would be a shoo-in for the lead part if there were ever an Emma Thompson biopic) and Mangan strike a nice balance between insecurity and irony. But if there's one thing that Hollywood excels in it is sending itself up, and there was nothing in the first episode to suggest that Episodes (co-written by Friends creator David Crane) is going to deliver a fresh or especially funny perspective on a familiar scene.
Everything remained safely within the confines of established tropes, as though the novelty of having English leads would be enough in itself to give new life to an old joke. That may change with the introduction of LeBlanc, who is said to reveal a "darker" side of his real-life character. As no one knows what LeBlanc is like in real life, what that means is darker than Joey Tribbiani, the lovable dope from Friends now immortalised on permanent cable rerun. Which is like saying darker than Noddy.
For the show to gain the rocket blast that will take it beyond a comfortable observational orbit, it will need LeBlanc to draw on a mighty payload of bitterness lurking in a pitch-black soul. That's a tough challenge for a limited comedy actor who had the extraordinary fortune to become a multimillionaire global star.
For some reason Trevor Eve looks like he could play an embittered man with a pitch-black soul. Perhaps it's his face, a handsome arrangement whose default position seems to be set to mild irritation, as though he's detected a bad smell – perhaps the ashes of his burning ambition.
In any case, the expression has served him well, particularly in parts that lack animating definition. In Kidnap and Ransom (ITV1), for example, there wasn't a lot going on with his character, a hostage negotiator whose previously unblemished record takes a turn for the worse. He wasn't called on in the first instalment to do much more than drink a glass of red wine at dinner and get in and out of his car, but Eve brought a suppressed peevishness to those actions that made for much more entertaining screen time than the scenes deserved. If it's not quite acting that would wake the dead, it certainly gives a jolt to the living.
Given the finite dimensions of the world, and the endless number of nature programmes, is natural history in danger of reaching a point of diminishing returns? The thought occurred during Human Planet (BBC1), another brilliantly filmed example of the genre, which had loads of fabulous images but no real organising idea, other than its focus on humans and our interaction with wildlife.
The first episode focused on man's relationship with the ocean, which "begins", intoned John Hurt in his best Attenborough voice, "on the coast". You don't say. In one scene, Indonesian fishermen took turns launching themselves from their boats and spearing a sperm whale. It was like an aquatic bullfight, except these sea-matadors ate their quarry afterwards.
There was also remarkable film of a free diver stalking a fish on the seabed as though he were running on land. With such scenes still worth capturing, perhaps natural history isn't quite ready to jump the shark. For now it can make do with jumping the whale.
