Silk

Best described as 'solid'.  One of those not-great-not-terrible legal dramas with a better cast than it deserves.  Really don't understand the praise this has garnered, although the second series which finishes tonight has been better than the first.  The omission of the irritating pupils was a good move, ditto the single-career-woman-in-mid-life-pregnancy story.


More moral dilemmas with slightly less predictable turnouts and this would be a cut above.  And perhaps less of the insufferable Clive's bedroom antics.

Whitechapel

As cop shows go, this is about as absurd as it gets.  It's a sort of television version of those old true-crime weeklies for obsessives.  Each case DI Chandler investigates with his burly and nerdy sidekicks turns out to be deranged copy-cat killers, who just happen to fixate on notorious crimes and criminals of the past.  So far we've had Jack the Ripper and the Krays.  Now we have the early 19th Century Ratcliff Highway murders.  It would be shorter to list the 'That Would Happens' than the TWNH moments, but the tone is most curious thing, veering between serious and rather bloody killing and tongue-in-cheek humour.  Could we take it seriously if we tried?

Trashy, pulpy, guilty-pleasure fun, but any serious devotee of cop shows should hook up with Sarah Lund, and anyone with a yen for murdered linen drapers should try crime's Grand Dame, PD James' book 'The Maul and the Pear Tree'.