If it’s about magic, and features sanitised cobbled streets and dark gothic interiors, then Harry Potter comparisons will no doubt be inevitable.

They must have run out of contemporary Danes to bump off, or coalition governments to form. 1864 is something completely different from Danish national broadcaster DR, and it’s safe to presume it wouldn’t have made it onto British TV without a prior softening up of the audience. An epic drama about Denmark’s disastrous attempt to claim Schleswig-Holstein in the eponymous year – would you honestly have watched that if Sarah Lund and Birgitte Nyborg hadn't paved the way? Helpfully it’s also riddled with actors familiar from The Killing and Borgen.

As he died in 2010, we can never know what John du Pont was like in person, but if Steve Carell’s rendering of the maniacal American multi-millionaire with a wrestling fixation is even close to the real thing, the experience must have been disturbing. Foxcatcher, the story of du Pont’s immersion in wrestling, is disquieting but Carell stands out. Creepiness defines every moment he is on screen.

Already a couple of Golden Globes to the good after debuting in the States last year, The Affair effortlessly hit its stride as it landed in Blighty. This opening double episode began generating a subtle miasma of intrigue and vague menace from the off, as teacher and aspiring novelist Noah Solloway (Dominic West) gathered his untidy family together for a summer holiday trip to the in-laws in Montauk, in the Hamptons.

"I sometimes wish we were more normal," sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the froth and the substance of this early play, written in a blaze of youthful elan over three days in 1924.

There’s been much hullabaloo surrounding the new series from Paul Abbott – and with good reason. It’s a decade since we’ve seen any TV from the creator of State of Play and Clocking Off and, given the impact and lasting legacy of Shameless, anticipation has been as high as Frank Gallagher at the business end of a three-day bender.

What Nashville did for country music, Empire may very well be about to do for the lurid world of hip hop. If not more so. Created by Lee Daniels (director of Precious) and written by Danny Hunger Games Strong, it's about ailing music mogul Lucious Lyon and how he must decide which of his three sons to hand over his Empire Entertainment conglomerate to.

If A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence induces reflections on the nature of existence, the resultant mood could initially be very glum indeed. Swedish director Roy Andersson’s meditation is the self-declared “final part of a trilogy about being a human being”. It opens with three vignettes focusing on unexpected deaths and is, overall, grey in tenor. It is also, though, laced with humour and a very precise eye for changes of mood, the subtle differences between each of us and the tenderness which can bond even those who seem directly opposed to each other.

The pupils at a girl’s school are afflicted by fainting. It’s spreading. A teacher is affected too. The epidemic began after Lydia and Abbie's friendship has irrevocably ended. Lydia became the first to faint. The school’s headmistress, Miss Alvaro, is determined to ignore what’s going on and ascribe it to baseless hysteria. The stern teacher Miss Mantel is equally unyielding. When medical examinations are finally undertaken, no causes are determined. Lydia is isolated and then expelled as a Typhoid Mary figure.

The Falling, released in cinemas this week, charts the events surrounding an epidemic of fainting among pupils of a girls' school in the late 1960s. The trigger appears to be the end of the friendship between the intense Lydia and the outgoing Abbie. Much in the dream-like film is unexplained. Abbie’s difficult home life is perhaps a contributing factor, as may be the institution’s disconnection from the liberal world evolving beyond the school’s gates.