Lucy Mangan

There is no real explanation given for why Riley did it. There’s no insight here. Just a good story. Is it enough? I’m not sure.

Best Medicine is softer than Doc Martin. .... But it does exactly what it sets out to do – soothe viewers’ souls with a celebration of smalltown values, of the secret goodness hidden behind even the prickliest of men and the promise that nothing for the next 42 minutes plus ads will distress us. It’s perfect rubbish and we need it very much.

The ending is ridiculous but all of a piece with a main story in which nothing is convincing or authentic and nothing is earned or resolved. The ick is the least of Alice and Steve’s problems.

It is, to be sure, a masterclass in tension, in taking things right to the edge of credulity but never over and it never forgets the power of the jump scare.

Kaling’s scripts try hard but rarely shine, let alone dazzle as the Friends’ dialogue almost unfailingly did.

Star City has none of the glossy blandness that For All Mankind did at the beginning, before it found its feet, and none of the soapiness that has occasionally beset it since. By relocating to the USSR, the stakes are immediately higher and inescapable.

It gestures at the intersection between race and class prejudice, and it aims to criticise the privilege money buys while it salivates over its material trappings – but it would have done better either to commit to that or to developing a proper rich froth that would put it firmly into the escapist nonsense category. As it is, it remains just fun enough for the run.

The whole is fast enough and fun enough to get away with it. Everything is shot with style and confidence, while the script contains just enough sharp dialogue and witty banter (even if it does occasionally veer into screwball comedy territory when it occurs between men and women) to keep it aligned with the templates of the past.

Plot happens, but the pleasure of the show is in the deepening friendship between the women. Maybe it shouldn’t work but it does. It’s a mashup of genres and tropes, but it is its own thing too – and an unexpected treat at that.

It is, obviously, a fine cast and any fears (deriving from the presence of the Duffer brothers, famed for Stranger Things, as producers) that some of the best actors in the business are about to be wasted on hokum are soon laid aside by an intelligent, witty script and a plot that nods to all the most entertaining monster tropes without being slavishly devoted to them.