The ancient Greeks would probably have liked a lot about Charlie Covell‘s manipulation of mythic material. After all, Euripides was prepared to have a laugh about the notion of Helen whisked off to Egypt while a phantom version wrought havoc in Troy. Helen doesn’t figure in this mostly modern-dress gods-vs-humans drama, but so many other legendary figures do, as well as several you probably won’t have heard of.

You may spend some of Adam Sandler's new Netflix Special wondering what's going on. But if you're a fan of his alma mater, Saturday Night Live, you'll guess that the clearly staged first few minutes act as a homage to its “cold opening”, as we see Sandler arrive at the venue, walk through the backstage mayhem of greeters, fans and hangers-on, and then take the stage.

Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.

New York in the 1980s is the setting for Abi Morgan’s new six-part drama, and it’s a city riddled with squalor, homelessness, racism and rampant crime. The Aids pandemic is also beginning to rear its hideous head.

An appearance on Taskmaster and the publication of her acclaimed memoir Strong Female Character have helped propel Fern Brady into the comedy big time – and now comes the accolade of her first Netflix special, Autistic Bikini Queen, which was recorded in Bristol last year.

Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. 

Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling French drama. Nonetheless, its story of a bizarre cult, a rapacious medical corporation and a trail of dead bodies stretching back through 30 years of history does somehow keep you coming back for more, if only to wonder how much more berserk proceedings can become.

There would have to be a good reason for making another screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, already successfully adapted by Anthony Minghella in his 1999 film. 

What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis which probed his alarm-bell-jangling relationship with serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring attempt to dramatise Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem. A mind-bending sci-fi epic spanning multiple decades, while also reaching centuries into the past and future, it can scarcely be faulted for lack of ambition, but sometimes there's just too much going on to digest properly.