Rachel Aroesti

Our crime-solving heroine is utterly charming, it’s stuffed with A-list stars and some episodes are just great. If only the cases were a bit more clever

This tribute to case-of-the week crime dramas is so nearly a brilliant TV show. Starring Natasha Lyonne (Orange Is the New Black, Russian Doll) as Charlie Cale, a woman with a foolproof ability to tell truth from falsehood, the series follows in the footsteps of classic story-of-the-week crime dramas; each episode features a tranche of excellent guest stars and a freshly covered-up misdeed for our thoroughly charming citizen-detective to uncover. With her gravelly-chipmunk New York tones – or “voice like a rusty clarinet”, as one character has it – Lyonne ensures Cale is an idiosyncratically charismatic protagonist you can really get behind. She’s cool: her catchphrase is “bullshit” and her aesthetic is 1970s-hued indie sleaze; shades, spray-on jeans, biker boots, shrunken T-shirts, wild, matted hair. She’s chaotically good, too: mischievous enough to bend the rules but essentially golden-hearted, in possession of an old-timey garrulousness and an inability to let things lie. What’s not to love?

She was in a girl group and starred in a Harry Potter film, but it was her genius turn as Oregon in Fresh Meat that made Ritchie a TV favourite. Now, she’s wrapping up her hit Netflix serial killer series and entering her detective era

In the beginning, Penn Badgley assumed his new co-star in the smash-hit Netflix thriller You was a lot like her character. This, jokes said co-star Charlotte Ritchie, was “somewhat rude. Because it shows he did no research about me.” If he had, Badgley would quickly have deduced that the Londoner was nothing like Kate Galvin, a ruthless British heiress, who – for some godforsaken reason – decides to marry his serial killer protagonist Joe Goldberg. Instead, the 35-year-old has cemented her place in the British comedy firmament with her perky, subtly goofy screen presence and impeccable comic timing, as showcased in beloved comedies from university life opus Fresh Meat to the BBC’s ingeniously silly supernatural sitcom Ghosts.