Aidan Smith's TV week: The Drowning, ZeroZeroZero, The Mallorca Files, Firefly Lane

How, in what we must call the post-Carey Mulligan age, am I supposed to describe this week’s leading ladies?

Andrea Riseborough with Gabriel Byrne and Dane DeHann in the drugs thriller ZeroZeroZero

Should I dare to venture an opinion on Jill Halfpenny in The Drowning lest it be construed as sexist? Same with Andrea Riseborough in ZeroZeroZero, Elen Rhys in The Mallorca Files and Katherine Heigl in Firefly Lane?

Mulligan was outraged by a review in Variety magazine which she read as implying she wasn’t “hot enough” for her latest film role and managed to extract an apology. Read another way, though, the crit could be highlighting a failure of the wardrobe department. Some felt compelled to defend the right of critics to exist, otherwise there would just be press departments. But reviewers are bound to ponder what they write now.

So, first up, Halfpenny. As Jodie Walsh isn’t she brilliant at hitting the bottle? Even though the Merlot is distinctly Ribena-ish in The Drowning (Channel 5), doesn’t she look absolutely mental most of the time?

In The Drowning Jill Halfpenny thinks she's found her missing child but Rupert Penry-Jones claims he's the boy's father

With good reason. Her best friend stole her husband and her mother’s response to Jodie thinking she’s spotted her son nine years after the boy was believed to have drowned in a lake is to propose sectioning her.

Admittedly, Jodie then does something quite mad. Unimpressed by the police’s lukewarm interest, she inveigles her way into the lad’s school as a music teacher and in no time is offering tuition at his home so she can sneak about for confirmation that Daniel is in fact Tom.

The house is one of those ridiculous, show-offy Grand Designs affairs and The Drowning is briefly involved in a property-porn face-off interlude with Keeley Hawes’ futuristic pad in Finding Alice before Jodie clobbers the dad (Rupert Penry-Jones) with an item of high-end kitchenware and kidnaps the boy who by this stage is calling her “Mum”.

She flips but it doesn’t seem like an overreaction. Jodie’s drowning - in grief. Halfpenny, a veteran of molten melodrama (Corrie, Easties and Waterloo Road where her character was stabbed to death in a playground) handles the heavy stuff like the trouper she is, but hang on, that just sounds patronising, doesn’t it?

Odd couple detectives Elen Rhys and Julian Looman in The Mallorca Files

Lockdown has been great for taking a run at operatically epic crime sagas with high body counts and allusions to Shakespeare and Greek tragedy such as The Sopranos and The Wire and I envy anyone diving into these two for the first time. If they’re Premiership then Narcos, which I’ve recently finished, is probably Championship but any new series which has the two sides in a drugs war tearing around dusty Mexican streets faster than cocaine is snorted hundred of miles away in a nightclub VIP area must measure up to that show.

The car chase in ZeroZeroZero (Sky Atlantic) is terrific. This is a relief because the season opener is otherwise as slow-moving as the floating containers set to be integral to the story.

Based on the novel by Roberto Saviano, it’s three stories in one. High in the Calabrian hills in southern Italy there are intergenerational tensions in a Mafia family which quickly result in one double-cross victim being turned into pig-feed. In Monterrey the leader of rogue anti-cartel soldiers is God-fearing but not adverse to torturing. In New Orleans, a struggling shipping brokerage hides cocaine in jalapeno tins. What links them all is the marching powder. “You know why we’re not gonna lose money?” the boss (Gabriel Byrne) asks his daughter, played by Riseborough. “What we do keeps the world economy afloat.”

Never mind cutting the coke, how many ways can you cut a tale like this? Not many, I fear, so ZeroZeroZero feels a bit late to the roped-off party. Narcos seems to be boasting with its viewer warnings: “Sex, nudity, language, violence, injury detail, drug misuse.” I hope there are no plans for this series to attempt to trump the tally for I now know for sure I’ll never try pork scratchings. The most promising strand is the New Orleans one although Riseborough’s hairstyle is disconcerting. No offence, but she’s either come straight from an alien invasion B-movie or the cycling velodrome.

Friends for life Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke in Firefly Lane

Just because I don’t have the stomach right now for pork scratchings or jalapenos or ultra-violent crime it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m ready for The Mallorca Files (BBC1) where Rhys and Julian Looman are, respectively, uptight Brit and jokey German detectives serving as mere fluffers for the sun-kissed scenery. You have to remind yourself in the show’s return that there’s been a murder - of a celebrated opera tenor - as our duo skip along cobbled lanes in their breathable linens. But this is drama for daytime and I haven’t actively watched any since Crown Court when skiving school.

In Firefly Lane (Netflix) there’s reference to a wife feeding her bumped-off husband to a cat but this is nothing like ZeroZeroZero. It’s the kind of subject matter in which TV presenter Tully Hart (Heigl) must trade now. “I used to be a journalist,” she sighs.

Snug and sweet and not without charm, the drama time-hops on the enduring friendship between Hart and bestie Kate, both now middle-aged. The latter, newly divorced and nervous, is reliably informed: “Upside: you’ve been with the same man and the same penis for 15 years. Just think of all the new penises you’re going to meet!”

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