This week, Playing Nice continues, while crime favourites Silent Witness and Grantchester make their welcome return. Fans of horror are also in for a treat, with Goosebumps: The Vanishing and Video Nasty.
Playing Nice
Monday
ITV1, 9.00pm
James Norton (Joy) stars as a father who has to make an impossible choice.
Pete (Norton) and Maddie (Niamh Algar, Mary & George) are happy raising their son, until they realise he’s not their son. It emerges that he was switched at birth with the boy currently being raised by another couple, Miles (James McArdle, Andor) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey). Do the parents swap so as to raise their biological sons, or do they stay with the children they’ve believed for years to be their own?
Silent Witness
Monday
BBC One, 9.00pm
“Would you rather hold onto some hope, or be told all hope is lost?”
Welcome back to the world of Silent Witness. The crime drama’s 28th series opens with the murder of an elderly woman whose remains are found in a cave. Joining Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox, Merlin) and Jack Hodgson (David Caves, Jackie) are new Lyell Centre chief Harriet Maven (Maggie Steed, Paddington 2) and analyst Kit Brooks (Francesca Mills, The Witcher: Blood Origin).
Grantchester
Wednesday
ITV1, 9.00pm
The detective show is back for a ninth series. This will be Tom Brittney’s (Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool) final outing as parish priest Reverend Will Davenport, before hanging up his dog collar for good. New on the scene is Alphy Kotteram (Rishi Nair, Hollyoaks), a vicar ready to step up and help see justice delivered in the Cambridgeshire village.
Video Nasty
Wednesday
BBC and Netflix
‘Video nasties’ were all over the place in the 1980s. Low-budget horror films that were passed around under the radar of the British Board of Film Classification, the impact they had on film and TV still lingers today.
In this comedy series, three Irish teenagers in 1985 are caught up in the craze. Whilst trying to complete a collection of decidedly seedy VHS tapes, they find themselves mixed up in a murder. Will their macabre viewing habits prepare them for when real life gets grisly?
Goosebumps: The Vanishing
Friday
Disney+
The Goosebumps anthology series returns, this time with David Schwimmer (The People v. O. J. Simpson) taking the reins as Anthony, a dad with a creepy basement.
Having never recovered from his brother’s 1994 disappearance, the recent divorcee’s search for answers quickly goes south. As you’d expect from a series based on R. L. Stine’s work, there’s all manner of creepiness afoot. Cars start driving themselves, evil-looking sludge emerges from sinks and Anthony tells some truly atrocious dad jokes.
