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I May Destroy You (BBC One) | iPlayerSitting in Limbo (BBC One) | iPlayerJeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich NetflixMcMillions Sky DocumentariesStaged (BBC One) | iPlayerDas Boot Sky Atlantic

Michaela Coels new 12-part drama I May Destroy You (BBC One) has already been described as the one thing you have to watch this year. I would find it hard to disagree. Mid-2020, mid-Covid-19, anti-racism protests lacing our news, a temptation might be to retreat from culture wars and goodness knows, thats the kind and gentle option but the first stage of survival generally means opening ones eyes.

Its not an easy watch. Its not a joyous watch. It features rape, heaving, bare-bottomed sex, anger, slums, counselling, slang, mad wigs. It also features humour and says quite everything about Coel, who also stars, that she has managed, somehow, to combine the tale of a grim personal experience with such a valuable exploration of what consent means, and make the whole eventually warm.

It is often infuriating. But Coel has tackled so many subjects around which our generalised prejudices congregate, from recreational drugginess to bloodied tampon-sex to blackness, via the blitherings of mindfulness, the joys of sex and the horrors of sudden distrust, and done it with wit and several nods to the power of friendship. Goodness, but what a rethink to have come out of one drama.

One of the strengths of Sitting in Limbo (also BBC One), which certainly didnt lack for strengths, was the fact that we the audience were never vouchsafed any more information than the real Anthony Bryan (played with just-so weary dignity by Patrick Robinson), whose life was just one of many upended in the Windrush scandal exposed by Amelia Gentleman in the Guardian. We never found out why Anthony, in his dealings with authorities, had to provide his mothers passport details from 1950 or whenever, nor why authorities had quietly destroyed all landing cards, nor how he had found himself in this MC Escher stairway: we were equally confused. (Turned out it had all been a brilliant lash-up by politicians keen on self-promotion. Hurrah! Such fun!) And such a grand story for all those who thought themselves to be British over 50 long, hardworking years until imagine their surprise! An absorbing, rewatchable drama that quietly told loud truths, and wore its anger remarkably lightly.

There is one moment towards the middle of the third of four instalments of Netflixs Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, between the searing testimonies of Sarah Ransome and Chauntae Davies, when you see a brief snapshot of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein together, swanking and preening. There have been more beautiful pictorial encapsulations of the male persona. No one can have been left in any doubt whatsoever as to Epsteins guilt: and yet even incels, the involuntarily celibate of the far right, can not have been left in much doubt as to the nature of the dog turd which was the sum total of Epsteins moral balance. Nor the wit and gumption and, yes, beauty, of all those who came together, hand in hand, to have their final say in court, 18 years on: I almost understand now the concept of closure.

McMillions, the documentary which has been running on Sky Documentaries, came with sprightly fun at a far less brittle tale, that of the Monopoly scam that dogged the burger giant around the turn of the millennium, in which hundreds of millions of fast-food customers peeled back tiny tokens unaware that the only winning tokens had been snaffled by one security chief over the course of a decade. Much more focused and enjoyable than Tiger King, which just went sad and loopy by the end, it was executive produced by Mark Wahlberg and thus had a gleeful sheen of vintage heist to it all.

Arguably about one episode too long, it nonetheless drilled down with panache into the semi-fascinating lives of a staple of American fiction (and presumably life), which might best be termed likable scumbags: the borderline and the barfly, the dandy and the dude, the mobsters molls and the rueful Mormons. None of whom you could truly bring yourself to loathe or even dislike, despite the fact that theirs washardly a victimless crime: the many lost jobs of blameless blue-collar printers and such, the huge knock-on effects ofthe scam on, as ever, the patsies who were least able to afford the fallout from the eventual sting. Never mind the damage to McDonalds reputation. Seriously, do not give a spat rat to that.

For two such seemingly unrelated subjects, these lengthy televisual explorations had a couple of things in common: first, the doggedly stoic work undertaken by a couple of unremarked south-eastern law enforcement agencies Palm Beach police department, and the teensy Jacksonville FBI. And weirdly, the scam posted up on that Jacksonville wall had precisely the same pyramid-scheme-style structure mild culpability ensuring the secrecy of those recruited on a couple of levels, who then recruited more below them, and so on down the pyramid it spreads and infects as that employed by Epstein with his pyramid of girls. He got them from the less serene side of Palm Beach, poor and thin and young and lucky only in their prettiness, and then they recruited again below until a report happened to chance across the desk of an individual whose duty to self happened to outweigh their duty to greed or self-aggrandisement.

Staged (BBC One) is the latest lockdown drama lockdown dramas being an entire new genre, which Wikipedia will define as a needs-must 2020 phenomenon in which, under the strictures of coronavirus, a rich person is seen questioning their values, a poor person is seen struggling yet being gamely cheeky, and core workers are celebrated. The genre must feature a Zoom-glitch or similar technological embarrassment. And yet Staged was a hugely refreshing addition to the genre, featuring simply a couple of immensely personable actors playing heightened versions of themselves. David Tennant and Michael Sheen, aided hugely by wives Georgia Tennant and Anna Lundberg, are lockdown-rehearsing an unpalatable, 100-year-old absurdist Italian drama, urged and egged on by Simon Evans, who wrote and directed Staged, and gave himself, in fairness, the very worst lines, the lines which those aged eight to 80 will lift eyebrows to and wonder Did he really say that? What a dick.

It is grand fun, even if slight, although I suspect that the good friends Sheen and Tennant are, no matter how inadvertently, auditioning even in lockdown for the next series of The Trip.

For those who underwent series one of Das Boot, das Sky Atlantic reboot of the classic 1981 Wolfgang Petersen film, youll have known what to expect from series two, which launched this week. Far from a faithful, tense, bitterly claustrophobic paean to bravery and sacrifice in a submarine, we got a wider, bowdlerised tale of mutinous good crews with bad beards and bad crews with good beards, and stirring yearnings to have been part of the resistance in La Rochelle in 1942.

And so it goes on. The handsome-but-evil SS is man is still hunting down local Jews, the decent, sad, bespectacled German is still trying to stay his hand, the French are either gorgeous and incompetently brave or possessed of ferret-faced cunning and playing both sides and deserve to die with bats gnawing their cheesy innards, and the one complexity we are permitted a good-guy U-boat boss with, confusingly, a good beard is trying to deliver his tin-can to the Americans, along with the Enigma machine.

If Covid-19 gets us all, I would shudder to think burgeoning 26th-century civilisations might find this under a scrimshawed rune-rock and consider it a documentary of life as lived 1930-2030. Mind you, could say the same about McMillions or Epstein.

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The week in TV: I May Destroy You; Sitting in Limbo; Staged; McMillions; Das Boot - review - The Guardian