Avoidance

Created by Ranganathan and Benjamin Green, Avoidance is a touching, funny picture of a man trying to make himself better for the sake of his son. We don’t know how much of Jonathan’s crippling fear of confrontation is part of Ranganathan’s personal history, but he and Green have created a character that we can all relate to on some level.

Avoidance doesn’t have quite the subtlety or complexity of those exceptional series [Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life, Aisling Bea’s This Way Up or Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s This Country] (yet?), but it is delicate, funny and truthful.

It’s not a tight, consistently funny comedy, or insightful enough to justify the meandering pace, and nor does it go the Gervais provocative route – unless you examine its dubious gender politics. Instead, it’s blandly sweet and curiously old-fashioned, like a sugar-free humbug.