By Paul Bradley

Ballard Amazon Prime

It’s not long since the last season of Bosch: Legacy ended, but Amazon are still interested in the character and his milieu (all of which come from author Michael Connelly): we’re back in it again with a new spinoff following Los Angeles detective Renee Ballard, who was briefly introduced during Harry Bosch’s own investigations. She’s played here by Maggie Q, and the show wastes no time at all in showing us what a committed and no-nonsense officer she is, with a violent opening scene, and a second scene which shows her surprising her colleagues just by showing up for work after it.

It also wastes no time in telling us she’s regarded with some suspicion by her colleagues: it’s all because of an incident the story takes some time to relate, but which has seen her relegated (like the troublesome detective in Netflix’s Dept Q) to a ramshackle, underfunded Cold Cases division, operating with a team of volunteers and retirees. Well, motley they might be, but the likes of former cop Samira Parker (Courtney Taylor) and retired detective Thomas Lafont (John Carroll Lynch) are trustworthy and supportive – important qualities when it becomes apparent that a murder case they’re working on (as well as several personal stories) pits them against police corruption, involving senior male figures. And there’s also a city council man (played by Noah Bean, with a very late-Bowie haircut) who has personal reasons to be in their face seemingly every day (if Ballard, the show, gets anything unexpectedly right, it’s the sheer impossibility these days of actually having a minute to do the work that all your interruptions are about).

Spinoffs can be difficult to get right: you need it similar enough to the original, but different enough to be its own thing. Ballard gets that largely right: it looks like Bosch and even shares some characters (including Bosch himself at times), but it doesn’t quite feel like it, with a less jazzy, crepuscular mood. And the central pairing of Ballard and Parker put the focus not on one white man but on two females of different ethnicity, and therefore with very different grievances with the very force they work for.

All that said, it’s not a show that upends any expectations, generally hitting the usual beats of mainstream shows like this. I’m not totally convinced of Maggie Q’s acting ability either: she’s certainly a stern presence, but a slightly stiff one, and it’s the support of Carroll Lynch and Taylor who bring whatever heart the show has. But if you don’t expect anything lifechanging, it’s a solid cop show, slightly preachy at times but perfectly enjoyable.

Too Much Netflix

Following the success of Girls, there was a backlash against its creator Lena Dunham that went on for so long that you imagined she might just disappear with no further productions. But she’s back on Netflix with a sitcom called Too Much, which follows the life of thirtysomething Jessica (Megan Stalter) as she moves to London after the end of a relationship in Noo Yawk. Not that she’s actually over the split or anything: she’s still obsessed with her ex (Zev, played by Michael Zegen), even as she starts a new relationship (with Will Sharpe’s Felix), and continues to struggle with the strange parts of London life……or at least, the parts that seem strange to her, given her own emigré misunderstandings: what a London “estate” is (it’s not parks and flowers), or how to negotiate a London pub toilet. They’re perfectly valid comedic ideas, but often a bit laboured here, and arguably out of place: farcical jokes in a show that seems to want to be about enduring trauma. Tonally it’s all over the place, mainly because Jessica herself is all over the place, according to whether the scene needs her to be efficient, awkward, or borderline murderous – an opening scene in which she breaks into Zev’s apartment does nothing to earn your sympathy, largely because it comes too early and we haven’t seen how she ended up in that situation.

But there are some sharp lines here too, some very good acting, and some identifiable male personalities, from Sharpe’s messy introvert to Andrew Scott’s fabulously egotistical director. There’s an unpredictability in numerous scenes which is welcome in theory, even if in practice it doesn’t always deliver something convincing. It’s the kind of series I can see becoming a bit of a hit, the kind that generates some chat in the office – but it’s often a bit scattershot and heightened for me, and too often lives up to its own title.

Human BBC2, Monday, 9pm

It seems like a long time since we had a decent documentary about our evolutionary past, one that explores it rather than just mentioning it. BBC2’s new series Human, presented by palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, does just that, kicking off with the discovery of homo sapiens bones in Morocco that not only expanded our story beyond the traditional Eastern African origins, but pushed it 100,000 years back in time too.

Of course it’s the biggest human story there is, and Al-Shamahi updates us with the latest findings: evidence of art and ritual far earlier than we had expected, climate change that nearly wiped us out (ahem), and the fact that there were at least six other human species around when homo sapiens emerged (how different would the world be if any of those had also survived until today?). As well as the story itself, the camera follows some actual digs as old bones emerge, and we track our changing faces, mental abilities, and, inevitably, propensity for weaponry. It’s a good scientific update, nicely filmed and more, well, human than some other similar shows I’ve seen in the past – probably something that should be updated and rescreened every few years.

The Veil RTE2, Monday, 10.30pm

Are we sure there’s only one Steven Knight? He seems to pump out new series like Conor McGregor pumps out idiotic bile, to the extent that RTE have just picked up one that’s gone under most radars while we were busy talking about Peaky Blinders and A Thousand Blows and Rogue Heroes and…the list of Knight productions goes on a bit, as do some of his shows. As does, in fact, The Veil, in which Elisabeth Moss plays an MI6 agent called Imogen Salter, off on a mission to find and relocate Adilah (Yumna Marwan), a woman on the border between Syrian and Turkey, who might have good information about a breakaway ISIS cell and its next planned attack.

It could be exciting: if it was, for example, like Killing Eve in its one good year, if it was made by Steven Knight when he’s not being glib and overstylised. And in the central pairing of two strong women who are interdependent but have divided loyalties, there’s the possibility of an unusually charged dynamic. It never quite materialises, though, partly because of Knight’s thin characters and overblown dialogue, but also partly because Moss, a gifted actor, is just not suited to her part: she can’t quite master the British accent, and her agent, neither suave nor troubled, is just dull. The show itself, despite having some promise, is dull and shallow too, and would have been better served with one nimble, less heavy film.