What to watch as a family
Now that television has fragmented, with everyone having an individual slate of programmes tailored just for them, family viewing risks becoming a thing of the past. But that all changes at Christmas, when the trick is finding the cross-generational overlaps. This might be the only time of year when The Grand Tour (Amazon Prime) looks remotely appealing, but it will transcend generations. Your parents enjoy the work of Jeremy Clarkson, your kids like fast cars and watching people fall over, and you will relish the opportunity to switch your brain off for an hour. In a similar vein, Ultimate Beastmaster is still on YouTube if you want to experience the bonding power of people falling off things into stuff. Judi Dench: My Passion for Trees (20 December, 8pm, BBC One) – a documentary about Judi Dench in her garden – also seems precision-engineered to be watched with parents, kids and grandparents alike. Everyone loves Judi Dench. Everyone loves trees. The only way this show could fail would be if it contained an unnecessary torture scene in the middle, which I’ll assume it won’t.
Television works in reverse for children at Christmas. For the rest of the year, it exists as something to keep them entertained while you cook their meals. But at Christmas, when they’re jazzed up to the eyeballs on tinsel and Haribo, it’s the perfect vehicle to calm them down. Sticking them in front of something beautiful but slow, such as Mudbound (Netflix), is an effective way to lull them into a blissful state of catatonia. Blue Planet II (BBC iPlayer) is also a highly recommended calmer-downer, at least until the inevitable point when all the fish start murdering each other. And then there is Okja (Netflix), for when you decide that their seasonal cheer must be repaid with a heartbreaking treaty on humanity’s cruelty to animals.
Naturally, teenagers have a higher tolerance for gore than their younger counterparts: so Stranger Things 2 (Netflix) should be top of your list, as should the similarly silly Preacher (Amazon Prime) or Peaky Blinders (BBC iPlayer). They will have already watched them, of course – they’ll have almost certainly found a way to illegally stream them – but it’s Christmas so they should humour you.
Finally, I must mention Doctor Who (Christmas Day, 5.30pm, BBC One), even though I have never once in my life had a remotely successful Doctor Who-watching experience at Christmas. In my experience, it’s far too complex a show to watch at teatime on Christmas Day, when everyone is in full swing and arguing over the yule log. However, it is now a family tradition that I must fruitlessly squint and shush and tut at everyone whenever it’s on, and traditions exist to be upheld. Much better is the other tradition where I rewatch it alone on iPlayer on 28 December once everyone has gone home. That, to me, is what Christmas is really about. Stuart Heritage
See also The Crown, Mystery Science Theater 3000
Avoid The Keepers, House of Cards
What to watch as a couple
If you’re in a couple, wield your wisdom by debating the merits of the three suitors in She’s Gotta Have It (Netflix), Spike Lee’s zingy, woke-smart update of his own 1986 movie. Advanced practitioners can brave the love/sex stories of the underrated Easy (Netflix), although the anthology format does bring risk: if you and your other half aren’t rock solid, the episode Open Marriage could play to cringing, electrified silence.
The textbook cosy couple binge delivers endless episodes of easy quality, avoiding the sideways glance and barely audible sigh that says: “What’s this weird shit you insisted we watch?” The Good Wife (Netflix) is the all-time champ here, with Parks & Recreation (Amazon Prime) its comedy equivalent. Parks’s natural successor is The Good Place (Netflix), a purring sitcom that – leaving aside the opportunity it offers for a “guess, then triumphantly announce and thus spoil, the big twist” death-match – is the effortless half-hour failsafe every shared viewing strategy needs. Also fitting that bill are new seasons of laidback dating dramedy Casual (Amazon Prime) and Tig Notaro’s more challenging but still bite-sized One Mississippi (Amazon Prime).
Becoming jointly locked into a cliffhanger-driven drama is not just another way to remove the need to discuss what to watch; it makes evenings in on the sofa a slightly exciting shared journey. Catch up with the addictive Anglo-French thriller The Tunnel (Now TV) now if you haven’t already, before it concludes in 2018, or for a fresh hit see Jessica Biel in The Sinner (Netflix), an amnesia-based thriller that’s like a beach read in visual form.
Perhaps the best couples’ binges offer something for everyone. Glow (Netflix), the true-ish story of America’s all-female 1980s TV wrestling show, has a sisterhood ensemble and a keen eye for the hardships endured in a world where feminism was even more necessary than now, but if that pill needs sweetening it’s still about wrestling. Jack Seale
See also Ozark, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Avoid I Love Dick, The Affair
What to watch post-turkey
Ah, the afterglow. With Christmas dinner now just 2,416 calories you can walk off with your new Fitbit, as the vital signs roll like cherries on a fruit machine to “food coma”, it’s finally time to relax the brain as much as the oesophagus. Time, of course, for BBC Three. The youth-pandering arm of Auntie does its IQ-lowering job well. People Just Do Nothing (BBC iPlayer) is not only the motto of a good Christmas, it’s also gaining a spot in the all-time British comedy pantheon. There is also Man Like Mobeen (from 17 December, BBC Three), the project of Birmingham comedian Guz Khan, in which his dealer character gets a job in a nursing home. Hilarity ensues? Maybe. Accidental weed-dosing of pensioners ensues? Definitely.
But these are mere stocking stuffers compared to the return of The League of Gentlemen (18-20 December, 10pm, BBC Two). Kick off all Judeo-Christian morality and relax with a tray of Hillary Briss’s “special stuff”, as Shearsmith, Dyson, Gatiss and Pemberton debut their first new work in 12 years. If all the laziness means you’re brewing up some self-loathing, why not pop on season four of BoJack Horseman (Netflix)? Giggle rhythmically at its expansive writers’ room’s polished product, and observe that thankfully life for you is not an endless-formless gilded cage of cheap sex and expensive coffee tables in the Hollywood Hills.
Search Party (All4) runs a tight second. Fitting into the small but promising genre of “millennial murder mystery”, this pungent future cult classic comedy is basically what would happen if a narcissistic Nancy Drew solved crime inside your Instagram feed.
300 Years of French & Saunders (Christmas Day, 10.35pm, BBC One), as the title suggests, celebrates 300 years of the comedy duo. That dates them to before Nelson’s Column, steam locomotion or Pitt the Younger. A fine achievement. Highlights and a few new sketches offer a Terry’s Chocolate Orange whiff of yesteryear, reminding you of when Christmas was still magical, before the soldiers came, and then the night sirens, and then the endless shrieking of the robot drills, digging up the cold barren earth. Gavin Haynes
See also Paul O’Grady’s For the Love of Dogs at Christmas, Top of the Pops
Avoid Chimp Rehab, Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme Christmas Special
What to watch alone
It is not the kind of tip offered up in Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas (18-22 December, 5pm, Channel 4), but if you really want to ensure your festive season is a resounding success, contracting a cold virus circa 23 December is the way to go. This gives you an excuse to stay in bed with your laptop straight through to Boxing Day.
Alias Grace (Netflix) was unfairly overshadowed by the success of that other Margaret Atwood adaptation, but utterly compelling thanks to Sarah Gadon’s performance as an enigmatic female prisoner in 19th-century Canada. The six-part series also serves as a timely reminder that we can never truly know another person. So, really, why waste time on chit-chat over sausage rolls? If that sounds depressing, keep those feelings pent up till New Year’s Eve with the help of Alan Partridge: Why, When, Where, How and Whom (27 December, 9pm, BBC2). It’s a richly deserved retrospective doc about a comic creation-turned-national-treasure and your best hope of understanding Brexit Britain.
In a similar vein of merry misanthropy, there’s the new Black Mirror (from 29 December, Netflix), featuring the kind of starry talent list that Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology now routinely attracts. Jodie Foster directs the Arkangel episode; there are guest turns from Maxine Peake, Michaela Coel, Andrea Riseborough and Fargo’s Jesse Plemons; USS Callister is a full-scale feature-length space opera; and the snowscapes in the truly chilling Crocodile were shot on location in Iceland. Yet, however cinematic this series becomes, somehow Black Mirror will always make most sense when viewed alone, late at night, bathed in the unhealthy blue glow of your laptop screen. Ellen E Jones
See also Travel Man: 48 Hours in Hong Kong With Jon Hamm
Avoid Strictly Come Dancing: Christmas Special
What to have on in the background
For all the fuss that is made about Christmas TV, much of it works best as pure background ambience while you are busy socialising, wrapping presents or ripping out turkey innards. The nostalgia channels such as Gold understand this most perfectly. You’ll know their Christmas Day offerings so intimately that they’ll function as TV wallpaper, the odd joke or scene or emotional climax simply oiling the wheels of interaction. Only Fools and Horses. The Vicar of Dibley when she eats all the Christmas dinners. You know the drill. Ideally, you will want something that is capable of drifting in and out of the periphery. It’s Christmas: Live from the Royal Albert Hall (8pm, 23 December; and 7pm, Christmas Eve, Sky One) fits the bill perfectly. It’s a heart-stopping feast of full-fat, processed Christmas cheese and for the sake of your sanity, you’ll need to ignore vast chunks of it. There’s also Chas & Dave’s Christmas Knees Up (Christmas Day, 10pm, Gold), a Christmas special from 1982, filmed in “a replica of an East End pub”. Starting at the exact hour at which the effects of evening drinking will have merged with the effects of morning and afternoon drinking, this will be just the ticket for people not fortunate enough to have an old Joanna to sing around but fancy singing anyway.
Thanks to slow TV, modern telly needn’t be something you have to pay much more than cursory attention to. Netflix currently has a range of magnificently soporific TV treats including the six-hour Train Ride: Bergen to Oslo and National Firewood Night, which is literally just a fire, burning away in the corner of your room. It’s a lovely thing to set the scene for traditional festive activities such as playing board games, opening presents and arguing furiously about Brexit.
BBC Four has joined in, too, offering Turtle, Eagle, Cheetah: A Slow Odyssey (27 Dec, 9pm). Perfect for people who found Blue Planet II too demandingly plot-driven, this documentary is simply 90 minutes of the aforenamed beasts crawling, flying or loping around their traditional habitats. By this point in the festivities, there’s every chance this will be all you can handle. Phil Harrison
See also The World’s Best Christmas Lights
Avoid The Royal Institution Christmas Lecture
