Defending The Guilty

Opinion: top TV comedies 2019

Mostly below, in no particular order, are the shows that simply made me laugh the most this year. Shows that totally tickled my funny bone first and didn't necessarily do anything else.

Euan Ferguson's best TV of 2019

Fleabag, of course, but also GameFace, Aisling Bea's This Way Up, Motherland - and that lovely, short sweet run, State Of The Union. Black Mirror as well, although too few episodes. There was sadcom too - don't forget Don't Forget The Driver, Defending The Guilty. And with Stath Lets Flats and Flack, we were laughing all the way until we suddenly stopped.

In the penultimate episode of this breezy litigating comedy, our ethically compromised trainee barrister Will (Will Sharpe) is put through his paces this week in a mock trial, where he learns the art of cross-examination, while rivals Danielle (Gwyneth Keyworth) and Liam (Hugh Coles) have a romantic run-in with their fictional clients.

This legal comedy is superb: laced with the right amounts of misanthropy and sentimentalism and unafraid of a textbook set-piece such as, tonight, a bungled speech. The relationship between Katherine Parkinson's barrister and Will Sharpe's bewildered pupil, meanwhile, is thawing nicely.

Defending the Guilty: review

Though the plot is engaging, it feels as if it ends too quickly.

The fate of the inept, self-obsessed barristers and their lowlife clients didn't seem to matter much when the six-part comedy Defending The Guilty started a couple of weeks ago.

Who cared which of the four trainees landed the coveted post in chambers? They were all as selfish and shallow as each other. But after three episodes, a more compelling story has started to take shape as shy student barrister Will (Will Sharpe), who wanders around in a millennial daydream with his headphones on, has accidentally fallen in love with a juror.

Katherine Parkinson is especially good as his needy pupil-master Caroline, ordering him to call her 'Mummy' and fetch her sticky pastries.

The show is based on the autobiography of a real-life legal trainee, Alex McBride, and although some of the incidents do feel too closely cribbed from real life, it is all shaping up to be much better than it originally seemed.

Worth a second look.

Caroline (Katherine Parkinson) and Will (Will Sharpe) viciously butt heads with Lady Justice once again, this time over the case of an elderly victim and an unrepentant thug. The real aggression, however, is reserved for the pupils' competition back at chambers. What new dirt has Danielle dug up on Pia?