What to watch
Motherland BBC TWO, 10.00PM
Dispensing with the calamitous set pieces of previous episodes and instead documenting the quiet desperation of this ill-starred band of sisters (plus one brother), this superb, exhausting sitcom from a writing supergroup including Graham Linehan and Sharon Horgan has been an exquisitely painful delight.
We join Julia (Anna Maxwell Martin) in an unusually good place, with everything running smoothly thanks to her new Australian nanny, Lyndsey (Sarah Kendall). The kids are clean and happy, the school run is easy, the fridge is stocked – but could she be too good to be true?
Amanda (Lucy Punch) has gone to ground after the revelation over her threesome, while her hapless confidant, Kevin (Paul Ready), is desperate to avoid having to get a job. And, should all the mugging get too much, there’s deadpan Liz (Diane Morgan), negotiating tricky relations with her dismal ex and his new, pregnant partner. After an orgy of passive aggression and desperate people in denial, the façades crack, just a little. Happily everyone reverts to fundamentally appalling type just in time for the end of the series and a surely inevitable recommission. Gabriel Tate