Must-watch TV: Apple TV+’s Pachinko reviewed

Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s so little by way of laughter or a redemptive pay off you might be tempted to end it all like one of the numerous doomed characters do – off camera, fortunately – in the almost relentlessly catastrophe-laden season one.

Now we’re back for season two and with the second world war (from the Japanese/Korean perspective) and the Korean war yet to be covered, I’m sure this one ain’t going to be a barrel of fun either. But don’t let anything I’ve just said put you off. Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television: for the acting, for the unfamiliar setting, for the sweeping melodrama of the masochistically compulsive plot and, most instructively, for the handy history lesson.