Heaven knows they’re miserable now | 1 June 2017

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in common, with one set in a determinedly present-day Britain, the other in a dystopian American future. What they do share, though, is a general air of classiness, some impressively understated central performances and, above all, an almost heroic commitment to unrelenting misery.

In the first episode of Broken (BBC1, Tuesday), a typical scene consisted of single mother Christina — who’d just been sacked from her badly paid job and told she was ineligible for benefits — reluctantly selling off her wedding and engagement rings, before returning home to find her mother dead. The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4, Sunday) began with the heroine’s husband being shot and her young daughter taken from her by men with machine guns. In most shows, this might have meant that she called the police. In this one, unfortunately, those men were the police.