We are hospitable and irreverent, but also cynical and parochial. When things get difficult, who do we want to be?

Patrick Freyne: Love Triangle UK’s contestants are earnest and well meaning – not, as so often on dating shows, monstrous, sexually prolific sociopaths

On With Love, Meghan, you mainly cook. Given how long the Meghan-and-Harry industrial complex took to create this series, I feel a little let down

Reacher’s inevitable fisticuffs are an adorable masculine power fantasy, there to soothe struggling menfolk in the audience

Or maybe If We Just Leave It Derelict We’ll Make Money on the Land Value Alone. Hugh Wallace could still present it

The celebrity clan have so Truman Show-ed their existence that all significant events in their lives have occurred on camera

Celebrity Bear Hunt review: From the dawn of reality TV it has been clear it would culminate with an apparently unhinged survivalist hunting helpless celebs

A Dublin project explores how the world shapes young men by helping some of them to create ‘boys’ as they really see them

What golden specimens they are, you think, as they propel themselves across God’s good earth like Accenture employees here to rationalise a business

There is no rhyme or reason to success or failure on Prime Video’s gameshow. MrBeast’s message for our children seems to be that life is arbitrary chaos

Including Severance, White Lotus, The Studio, Poker Face, Stranger Things and Black Mirror

Patrick Freyne on the 2 Johnnies, Rivals, Say Nothing, Baby Reindeer and television trends of the past 12 months

Youth work is not an optional extra, it is essential to our communities

I keep meeting people who are extremely burned out. I meet them so often that I’m beginning to think burnout is something that exists by design

From Santy and selection boxes to Christmas pudding and Mariah Carey, these are some of the truths you won’t hear elsewhere

Hot Frosty, Netflix’s latest reboot of The Snowman, at last brings some ‘hubba-hubba, vroom-vroom, arooooga!’ to Raymond Briggs’s family favourite

From HR Pufnstuf to Battlestar Galactica, what can we learn from political television shows through the ages before we go to the ballot box?

Patrick Freyne: here are my favourite corporate psy-ops of the season – or Christmas TV ads, as I believe you call them in the suburbs

Patrick Freyne: Cruising takes on an alternative meaning in this medical melodrama, with Joshua Jackson visiting multiple ports of call

Patrick Freyne: If I was in Disney+’s Jilly Cooper adaptation, someone would surely compliment my ‘magnificent column’