Here at theartsdesk we still receive the occasional missive from readers on several continents incensed at the BBC's axing of Zen in February 2011, a decision taken by then-controller of BBC One Danny Cohen. Zen didn't get a mention in Cohen's article in Wednesday's Times, entitled "Never mind the box-set brigade, let's celebrate British drama", but he managed to plug plenty of more recent BBC drama productions (and a couple from ITV, in a token attempt at even-handedness).

They’re calling it Dublin noir and, on first showing, there’s something very stylish about the BBC’s new three-part drama starring Gabriel Byrne. Pubs and cigarette smoke and long, smouldering looks help the cause. There’s plenty of rain too, and a lot of grey and blue in John Alexander’s film, broken up by flashes of colour and arresting, unusual camera angles.

There's a bit of Gene Hunt revisited in Peter Bowker's new three-part drama. Philip Glenister returns to the Manchester stomping grounds he patrolled in Life on Mars, and he even drives an Audi (though it isn't Hunt's celebrated Quattro).  But this time he's not a cop.

We've had endless waves of vampires, zombies and Frankenstein's monsters, so why not bundle them all together under the same doomily Gothic roof? Welcome to Penny Dreadful, created by writer John Logan and producer Sam Mendes (who previously worked together on the Bond movie Skyfall), in which we descend into a "demi-monde" of monsters and necromancy in Victorian London.

Swansea's much-mythologised son would have been 100 in October this year, but he died in New York in 1953, from a list of medical problems exacerbated by his colossal intake of alcohol. Thomas's doomed, chaotic trajectory could almost qualify as the first rock'n'roll death, since the New York that lionised him would soon hail the Beat poets, the Folk Revival and the Bob Dylan whose adopted name and freewheelin' versifying both bore Thomas's imprint.

After a tentative start, and several episodes of insipidity, Sarah Phelps's World War One nursing drama started to hit its straps just as series one reached its conclusion. The pace accelerated, the characters flung off their camouflage of tepid blandness, and suddenly everyone was struggling with crises, guilt and dark secrets.

"Policeman wrongly accused of murder" is possibly not history's most original story idea, but in Prey, writer (and TV debutant) Chris Lunt has turned it into a platform for a skilfully-controlled thriller that keeps your brow sweaty and your breath coming in short panicky gasps. It's greatly assisted by having John Simm playing the lead role of Manchester-based DS Marcus Farrow, since there's nobody better when you want a bit of earthy-but-sincere, with added soulfulness.

This German-made drama about World War Two scored huge ratings when it was shown in its homeland last year, but has also prompted scathing criticism. Chiefly, its detractors don't buy the series' portrayal of five photogenic young German friends as largely innocent victims of Nazism. Some are also outraged by the way Poles are shown to be even more anti-semitic than the Nazis, though that didn't occur in this first episode, A Different Time. 

"Oi felt a darrrkness creepin' overrr me," said Mary Yellan's voice-over as we launched into the second night of the BBC's festival of contraband, squalor and smuggling. Mary, ensconced in the stygian titular dwelling on Bodmin Moor with her subhuman uncle and cowering aunt, had been having another of her nightmares about drowning, flailing helplessly as towering green waves crashed over her. "Whateverr innocence oi 'ad left would soon be lorst," Mary lamented.

There's always room on top for another TV anti-hero. After Tony Soprano, Breaking Bad's Walter White and Mad Men's fatally flawed Don Draper, here's Martin Freeman as Fargo's Lester Nygaard, a downtrodden failure of a husband as well as a second-rate insurance salesman. It could have been worse - they could have made him a journalist or an estate agent.