TV review: Romcoms battling may be a contradition in terms but Alice & Jack is superior to One Day

Aidan Smith casts his eye over the week’s television. Alice & Jack (C4), Kin (BBC1, The New Look (Apple TV+), Too Good to Be True (C5)

In the battle of the romcoms One Day lands the first blow by starting early and its target audience is already snuggled up with heart-shaped chocolates and swooning at the Netflix show before the rival Alice & Jack gets going.

I know, it’s not really a battle. Romcoms aren’t predisposed to fighting, just like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant weren’t predisposed to that scrap in Bridget Jones’s Diary, apologising profusely to all the diners whose tables they smashed. It is possible to like One Day and Alice & Jack and many will have room in their hearts for both. But the Channel 4 drama, which waited until Valentine’s Day as a demonstration of its cool, is superior. And I will fight you over this.

“Love is the best thing we have, and maybe after stripping away all the bull**** it’s the only thing we have.” These are the opening words, spoken by Jack (Domhnall Gleeson), a biomedical researcher, who hooks up with Alice (Andrea Riseborough) via an app. She questions his job, how there will always be another auto-immune disease to investigate, and that as work it must have a “hazy reward calculus”. So what does she do? “I make money,” she says bluntly.

Francis Magee in Kin.

The date appears to be going nowhere but, wait, she calls him a “crusader” and “adorable” and, back at her place the following morning, “kind, handsome and a good lover”. So why’s she kicking him out? What a shame. Their first snog was lovely.

Told not to try getting back in touch, he spots her the following night, taking another guy home. He pines, clings to what he perceived as the “sub-text” of her kiss-off. “Sub-texts can get you killed,” warns a friend, but they meet again only to part again. Something’s gnawing at her but she continues to obsess him, despite the relationship’s hazy reward calculus. Ratio of time spent with her to time spent broken-hearted? “One to 60,000.”

Victor Levin’s script is sharply truthful - here’s how the modern “situationship” works, or doesn’t - and the performances in this six-parter are superb. I’ve always loved Riseborough and, honestly and objectively, this has nothing at all to do with how smart, funny and - yes - flirty she was when I interviewed her back in 2008. Okay, maybe a little it has. She’s the only actress to have ever given me her phone number. (I was to call later in the hope she’d secured a ticket for me to see her woo Kenneth Branagh on stage, the second seduction of that day).

Time passes, Jack meets Lynn (Aisling Bea) who gets pregnant right away and they marry. Then from nowhere Alice re-appears. Her mum’s just died and Jack accompanies her to the funeral. Gleeson and Riseborough captivate in each tiny gesture; just the way Alice glances admiringly at Jack while he’s comforting her father is profound. But we’re starting to get some idea of what’s troubling her. Then Lynn confronts Jack: “What percentage of the days since you conned me into marriage have you thought of her?” The answer comes straight back: “One hundred percent.” These two divorce, our star-crossed lovers reunite, but sat on a hill at a kite festival, Alice suddenly takes flight once more. Oh no!

Now, a wee tip: maybe don’t go straight from Alice & Jack to the return of BBC1’s Kin. The violence could be too much, the schlockiness, too.

The second series opens with a supermarket shooting which leaves the only witness whose testimony could keep that right bad yin Eric Kinsella in jail with more holes in him than in all the Spaghetti Hoops on the nearby shelves.

Of course all of the Kinsellas in the Dublin-based crime clan are right bad yins. Aidan Gillen as Frank, guilt-ridden enough to slope into church, is the best-known here although coming up fast behind is Emmett J. Scanlan, possessor of the hardest-working beard on TV who plays Jimmy. Michael is the most-wanted. Turkish heavies try to kill him in his bed but he survives.

Frankly I’m getting bored of guns, molls, snarling and torture. Of black suits, blacked-out cars but zero black humour. Of blingy mansions, porno kitchens and bowls of fruit never touched. Eric’s revelling in his new-won freedom, enjoying knee-tremblers and, you can bet, kneecappings too. Though maybe the most offensive thing about Kin is the man’s horrible taste in tracksuits.

I’m appalled by them but am guessing they’d so disgust haute couture grande dame Coco Chanel she might want to declare war. She’s at war in The New Look (Apple TV+) or at least in exile because in 1943 the Germans rule Paris. Only then she returns and is immediately being wined and dined by Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Holocaust. But hasn’t she just accused her great rival Christian Dior of not downing sketchpads and scissors during the occupation, his frocks being eagerly seized by the Nazi wives?

This might work as dark satire but it’s not that. Rather, yet another, high-end, sumptuous drama where doubtless even the needles are historically spot-on, but can’t we have too much of a good thing? Chanel is played by Juliette Binoche who revels in the role. When actors are required to over-act, dramatic entrances and even more dramatic exits, they must love it. Her performance is in sharp contrast to that of Ben Mendelsohn as Dior, a troubled soul.

Chanel slagging off Dior’s style - it’s the woman who wears the dress, she asserts, not the other way round - and declaring she’s back to “save” couture are obviously not the most pressing issues around, no matter The New Look’s assertion at the start that it’s the story of “how creation helped return spirit and life to the world”.

And anyway, Dior works on because he has dependents including his sister who bicycles at night on dangerous missions for the French Resistance. And don’t read too much into Chanel making a stand because her refuge turns out to be the Ritz. She gets into bed with the enemy - literally - and laughs at Himmler’s jokes. I’m with Team Dior here though am not sure how long I’ll be sticking this, a case of Paris fiddling while the world burns.

Channel 5 are now the go-to network for more than just Jane McDonald, the captain’s table warbler. Current specialisms include talking-head tributes to other broadcasters’ comedies, talking-head tittle-tattle about the Royals and potboilers. Or maybe they’ve brought a new and contemporary twist to this genre - the air fryer drama.

Too Good to Be True is the latest. Ex-EastEnder Kara Tointon is Rachel, a single mum who can’t find enough cleaning jobs to provide for her son Liam, especially when her abusive ex comes round and nicks the money for the lad’s school trip. She’s in desperate need of a break.

Enter Elliot who tells Rachel’s boss (John Thompson, mercifully not hamming it up like in a recent Silent Witness) he wants to recruit her for his mansion. “What does he want me to do?” she wonders. “Clean, and that’s all?” The opening scene before the story unfolds in flashback - Rachel and Liam running for their lives - confirms she’s right to have her suspicions. And that crackle you hear is C5 igniting the air fryer, all the way up to 11.