stairways

If you loved The Mire, The Killing etc, avoid this because it's both utterly incoherent and so badly directed that it's almost a pastiche of dark crime shows of the type. Indeed there's one scene in the first episode where the new partner of the central character is left by him alone with his moody father and, getting up alone in the house she opens the fridge so 'momentously' that I wondered aloud if they were really going to use the old cliche of revealing him standing beside her when the door shuts. And, guess what, that's exactly what they did. The only things that you can follow here, you've seen a thousand times before. Everything else is a mess. Sorry, Poland, though it's mired down in bad acting and worse direction, The Mire this isn't!

Okay, let's be clear about this: the sixth episode isn't great. The plot slows down so much just minutes in that you know the next half hour is designed to lull you into a false sense of security before the closing twist. And the closing twist, when it comes, is a bit am-dram or amateur dramatic. It's a bit too loaded in its thesis that rich people will do anything to hold on to what they have, even those of them who think of themselves as good and morally driven. But, that aside, and usually one cannot put the last episode of six aside, the thing is that the first five episodes here are so well done, so well acted, well shot and directed that it's hard not to go from one directly into the next, carried along on the sheer expert pacing of this tale of familial intrigue and the privileges of wealth.

There's a sense of forward propulsion and indeed sheer style about this show (despite the fact that it seems to borrow its soundtrack and indeed its casting style and preferences from Bad Sisters, despite never reaching the brilliance of that script and dialogue.

But as shows about class difference, about family obligations and rights, about the wealthy West and the often scramblingly desperate East (personified here by a young generation of Filipina babysitters who find themselves marooned in basement bedrooms of wealthy upscale Denmark), this is a well-made, sharp-edged and sympathetic tale that is also (for all of those first five episodes and at least for parts of the sixth) highly entertaining and highly recommended.

It takes more than ripping off the visual style and preferred palette of Wes Anderson to make a bad idea seem even barely tolerable.

But bringing to it one of the most pointless, linear, feel-good ( so-called) scriptsof recent times doesn't exactly give this attempt at social comedy a place to start.

When the hero, on the eve of being released from prison, accidentally stabs and kills his cellmate, the following day, instead of being burdened by guilt, he arrives back to his former wife and sons, ready to start the new adventure of his life as an inventor.

This is, after all, the 60s, but Rockets and the space race, references to Tesla and other nods to the recent history of American invention do nothing at all to give this shallow dirge some historical depth.

If you thought that focusing a show on the ambition and the challenges faced by a black family in contemporary America could only produce both laughs and insights, you'll be disappointed to find that government cheese, smug throughout, produces neither.

No wonder Apple TV is losing billions annually. They sure ain't spending it on writing.