Review: River (S1 E3/6), Tuesday 27th October, BBC1

(C) Kudos – Photographer: Nick Briggs

After two episodes of this well-made crime drama we had gone from cooing over the relationship between John River (Stellan Skarsgard) and Jackie ‘Stevie’ Stevenson (Nicola Walker) and their perfectly meshed, affectionate chalk-and-cheese dynamic to not quite knowing who Stevie was or is anymore. Not quite an unreliable narrator, but certainly an unreliable character. So the question remained: who was Stevie?

Review: Hinterland/Y Gwyll (S2 E7/8), Sunday 25th October, S4C

This second series of Hinterland/Y Gwyll has been of the highest quality, but now it’s time for the final two-part story of the series. In the last episode we saw the re-emergence of Iwan Thomas, a character who first appeared in the final episodes of the last series. He has some serious beef with Prosser, and everything pointed to something that the taciturn chief was covering up. But what? And what kind of gruesome case would Mathias and Rhys be thrust into this time?

Review: Fargo (S2 E2/10), Monday 26th October, Channel 4

The first episode of this second series of the excellent Fargo left me a little bit perplexed – I felt it was a bit too eager to introduce a new, larger cast of characters and also a new, very explicitly 1970s tone. If that first episode was a bit all-but-the-kitchen-sink, things settled down considerably in this second instalment, revealing why Fargo is often, ahem, a cut above the rest.