Mécanique 4

In the wrong hands this would all fall flat – the characters would keep saying: “I can’t believe I did that! I can’t believe we went on the run together!” and every episode would end with a sinister phone call from the real world with a dun–dun drumbeat of dread – but Run has done something more bold-feeling: sketching the outline of the story, then filling in the details with colour later, at a pace that feels slow and deliberate and, crucially, interesting. Halfway through the first series, it’s impossible to tell whether you want Billy and Ruby to win, lose, or even whether you like the people they’ve become, and that’s a fascinating no man’s land to be stranded in. If this is the direction TV is going to go in, then cool. I’ll happily gobble up five more years of that.