The challenge for the makers of Das Boot is to keep finding new ways to move the show forwards and outwards without losing touch with its foundations in World War Two submarine warfare.

Sarah Perry’s 2016 bestseller The Essex Serpent has been described as “a novel of ideas”, which almost sounds like a warning to anybody wanting to televise it. Happily, director Clio Barnard and screenwriter Anna Symon picked up the gauntlet, and have wrought a kind of contemplative television in which the story’s historical and philosophical preoccupations are expressed through landscape and imagery as much as dialogue and action.

As the final slew of episodes in the last series of Ozark begins, Marty and Wendy Byrde, ever more the Macbeths of Osage Beach, are “in blood stepp’d in so far” that we don’t much care about their fate. Sympathy has long shifted to trailer girl Ruth Langmore, so clever and empathetic that in another life she would have taken wing, as much caught in the web of drug-dealing and cartels as her elders, but still the nearest thing we’re going to get to a moral core among the leading players.

The real-life case of Michael Peterson and the death of his wife Kathleen in 2001 has generated a steady stream of TV documentaries, though this new series from HBO Max (showing on NOW) is the first time anybody has actually dramatised the story. With Colin Firth as Michael and Toni Collette as Kathleen, it’s a compelling mix of conspiracy theory, forensic detective thriller and legal drama, bristling with false trails and tantalising clues.

Somehow or other, fictional representations of the police have become an off-the-cuff index of changing times and evolving values. Dixon of Dock Green’s cops were stern father figures who knew right from wrong and considered it their duty to give villains a clip round the ear. The Sweeney weren’t quite so sure about right and wrong but gave everybody a good kicking anyway, while risking a bollocking from the boss for their blatant rule-bending.

It was inevitable that someone would soon tackle the question of how does Hollywood start behaving in the post-MeToo world, but few would have put money on a comedy drama starring Steve Coogan, the creator of Alan Partridge. But here it is, a whip-smart satire he co-wrote with Sarah Solemani, who also stars as Bobby, the indie filmmaker who is the polar opposite of his old-school (for which read, attracted only to women half his age) film producer Cameron.

When the English-language version of Dix Pour Cent (aka Call My Agent!) was announced, my cafe au lait went down the wrong way. The French TV comedy about machinations at a top-flight Parisian talent agency is a miraculous mix of insouciant charm, an hommage to France’s beloved cinema history and a lot of naughty fun, with just a hint of sadness at its core. It’s so indelibly French, who on earth would want to anglicise it? People who simply can’t cope with subtitles?

If we could keep living our life over and over again, would we get better at it? This is the premise underpinning Life After Life, the BBC’s four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s novel.

British political life in the Boris Johnson era routinely seems stranger than fiction, and this adaptation of Sarah Vaughan’s novel about a Flashman-style Tory MP should delight all those who view Westminster as a sewer of privilege, corruption and back-slapping old-boy networks. Refreshingly, it doesn’t dabble in actual politics at all, but the action speeds along with an easy fluency which comfortably carries the viewer over its multiple absurdities.

Into the BBC One Sunday slot just vacated by Tommy Shelby of the Peaky Blinders returns Suranne Jones’s Anne Lister, another costume-drama maverick with striking headgear, definite leadership qualities and a way with a pistol. “They’re all a bit scared of you,” her younger sister Marian (Gemma Whelan) tries to explain to her after she has given an insubordinate servant 20 minutes to pack up and leave. “Why?” demands Anne, uncomprehendingly, as she loads her gun.