The best and brightest boxsets
It’s 15 years since The Sopranos first aired and there’s a big, fat Blu-ray box set out to commemorate the fact. For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, what have you been doing? For anyone who has, there are more than five hours of extras here.
Without The Sopranos, there would have been no Breaking Bad (now out in a ritzy, limited-edition ‘Heisenberg tin’) – or any of the other high-end, long-form series we now enjoy.
Here, for instance, is Gomorrah, an Italian gangland show inspired by Roberto Saviano’s bestselling history of the Neapolitan mafia. It’s violent stuff, but it catches the feel of suburban Naples terrifyingly well.
More terrors in
Penny Dreadful, a Victorian horror thriller in which Eva Green (pictured) and Timothy Dalton battle a gaggle of gargoyles – all of them disgusting. So give me Sleepy Hollow any day. This cops-meet- Catweazle show tells of the adventures of Ichabod Crane, a colonial soldier from the American War of Independence who somehow fetches up in
present-day upstate New York to help the police with a series of beheadings. Gloriously costumed, and with a nice line
in Blackadder- ish historical gags, this is a winner.
A show about imprisoned drug dealers doesn’t sound much fun, but Orange Is The New Black is so tightly written that it finds comedy in the weirdest places.
The same can’t be said for Happy Valley, with Sarah Lancashire as the troubled but sturdy police sergeant Catherine Cawood. Written by Last
Tango In Halifax creator Sally Wainwright, this was the Beeb’s standout production of 2014. No prizes for guessing ITV’s standout series: the fifth season of Downton Abbey. Since I seem to be in a minority of oneon over the merits of this show, I’ll say no more than echoe Miss Jean Brodie. ‘For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.’
Talking of old faithfuls, here comes the first half of the seventh and final series of Mad Men, with Don Draper plumbing new moral depths in every episode. We’re at the tail end of the Sixties now, so be warned: flower-power has gone mainstream and you may need to adjust your set for brightness.
There’s nothing so astounding in the fourth season of Boardwalk
Empire – save for the fact that the show has got this far (and it’s now just finished season five!). I’d rather have Peaky
Blinders, because Stephen Knight’s Brummy gangster epic moves at such a clip you can forgive the often baldly explicatory dialogue. For lighter moments in these dark, end-of-year days, you could do worse than The Trip – in which you get both series of the comedy masterclass with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan. Bumpertastic, as Alan Partridge would say. And don’t miss Sgt
Bilko, a cake-box-sized collection of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.