Destination X
BBC1, Wednesday, 9pm

Pray For Our Sinners
RTE1, Wednesday, 9pm

Dexter: Resurrection
Paramount

Parenthood
BBC1, Sunday, 7.20pm

Mrs Brown’s Boys
RTE1, Friday, 9.35pm

It’s very easy to see the bloodline of BBC’s new “reality travel” series Destination X: it’s obviously taken the successful travel-by-teamwork theme of Race Across The World and mixed it with the take-nothing-for-certain twists of The Traitors, hoping that those two successful formats can generate a third. Does it work? Partly. But it’s touch-and-go at this stage, often because, like the contestants, viewers are too often a bit confused about what’s going on and where we are.

The gist is as follows: a group of contestants gather in Germany, to begin a mystery tour on a bus with blacked-out windows, trying to work out from various clues where they might be. In fact they’ll be going to one European destination per episode, taking part in challenges along the way, finally placing their best guesses about where they are on a map – and being eliminated if they’re, well, lost. It’s hosted by a well-dressed Rob Brydon, and the contestants are the usual mix, chosen for talking points: a young man who’s been almost nowhere before, an author tormented by having to fib to advance, one or two charmless, win-at-all-costs types…

…and it’s fine, no more. Most travel-based shows have some interest to them, after all, and you can play along as you watch, trying to recognise not just places but “the feel” of places: is that street more like Amsterdam or Vienna? Some of the challenges are just confusing, though, and while extra clues are given to the people who get the most correct answers, we don’t always learn what those answers were, so we’re never fully engaged. It’s fun at times, but somehow doesn’t yet feel fully formed.

PRAY FOR OUR SINNERS

It’s been such a long, wearying story of church abuse in Ireland that you might flick guiltily past a new documentary about it. But journalist Sinéad O’Shea’s film Pray For Our Sinners, turned out to be an effective exploration of a slightly different aspect: the scandal’s effects on smalltown Ireland (specifically her own hometown of Navan), and the people who resisted the cruelty even as it happened.

She speaks to people who stood against church abuse as far back as the 1960s, most significantly Dr Mary Randles, who (with her husband, now deceased) set up the first family planning clinic outside Dublin, directly approached schools when children were abused, and campaigned to let young women keep their own children. It’s a familiar enough story now, but in some ways more shocking the further we move from that callous mindset: how, for example, do we rationalise the mentality that in part allowed babies to die as a kind of additional, unspoken punishment for their young mothers, or allowed for children to be beaten bloody for writing with their left hand?

The film is not without its problems: not all the dialogue is clear enough, and not all the subsequent subtitles are correct, and it’s sometimes too slow, building a local atmosphere when it should be piecing the story together more efficiently. But Navan is a good macrocosm of the country at the time, and the heroic work of people like the Randles, who were not always supported in their own communities, deserves to be remembered.

DEXTER: RESURRECTION

You have to hand it to the character Dexter Morgan: he seems unkillable. His original series was good for four seasons, but ran for eight, finally ending in 2013 with a notoriously unsatisfying lumberjack finale. But then in 2021 there was Dexter: New Blood, which brought him back to meet his son Harrison (Jack Alcott), who, horrified by what his father was, shot him in the heart and left him for dead in the snow. In 2024 a prequel series called Dexter: Original Sin was launched, with Patrick Gibson in the role. And now, in 2025, we have Dexter: Resurrection, in which, yes, actor Michael C Hall returns again as the man himself (the cold weather prevented him from bleeding out when his son shot him, apparently). The man has had more callbacks than a listeria salad.

The continuing off-screen story is ludicrous, as if executives simply can’t see when a good character has been exhausted. The onscreen story is (inevitably, given the existing plot it must accommodate) scarcely more believable. Here, Dexter (remember: he’s a serial killer who only preys on other serial killers) spends a while recovering from his coma, then moving to New York where his son is working (and believing Dexter dead) and leaving a bloody trail of his own. But in New York, Dexter also falls in with – wait for it – a kind of rarefied social club for serial killers.

it should be a complete disaster, but surprisingly it’s not quite: on its own terms, away from its real-life production history and despite its faults, there are still things to enjoy. A lot of that comes from Hall, who can effortlessly suggest both a man uneasy in his own skin and a devilish kind of dark charm. He’s better supported than usual too (the new series includes significant actors like Peter Dinklage and Uma Thurman), and the show leans into its “serial killer theme park” elements with self-aware wit, like a more tongue-in-cheek The Originals. Does it justify its own implausible existence? Probably not, at least not yet; but, trashy as it is, it’s the best Dexter since the fourth (Trinity Killer) season.

PARENTHOOD

BBC natural history documentaries have always featured scary situations, but the new one devotes five whole episodes to what might just be the most terrifying of all. Parenthood, narrated by David Attenborough, looks at the relationships and strategies necessary for nature to keep perpetuating life on Earth, from the initial choices of mate and home, to the education and sacrifices needed for the next generation to thrive.

The first episode included the usual celebrity animals: lionesses in the bleak Kalahari raising each other’s cubs, a Tanzanian hippo risking death by lion just to find food for her child. It’s all filmed to the usual standards (with some eerie infra-red work) and while it’s not quite as fresh as some previous series, the cosy title hardly does justice to the toothy dangers on the screen. And I suspect the most memorable sequences of the first hour might well be the hordes of African spiderlings: I mean, scuttly things can put some viewers off anyway, but co-ordinated scuttly things eating their elders alive is another level of unease altogether.

MRS BROWN’S BOYS

And speaking of parenthood and uncomfortable viewing, yes, I dipped back into Mrs Brown’s Boys, returning again for yet another series barely distinguishable in tawdriness and obviousness from the other series. The first episode, in which Agnes gets into podcasting (with a man called “Roger”, who wants to improve her “diction”…and that’s about all the information you need to predict most of the subsequent jokes) had the customary mawk and schlock, but the performances felt flatter than usual, as if this was all just a contractual obligation. And there’s even less trust in the audience: jokes that would be best left hanging in the air (because they’re so obvious) are invariably explained in the bluntest and least funny terms. You know, just in case you can’t see where witty tangents like “exploit a gap in the market” will go.