Pathomkarn is a graduate of the Hannibal Lecter school of messing with law-enforcement officers’ heads, so he delights in laying the sorts of false trail that could conceivably convince them, say, that JFK and Elvis were abducted by aliens. Flummoxed and humiliated, they then administer a sound beating in response.

HBO Go’s On the Job: a Philippine crime thriller to rival any US series

While dexterous, the psychological contortions the deviant puts everyone else through, as he contemplates his moral duty to inflict pain on other people, mean a painfully slow set-up. But by episode two (of the 16 hour-or-so-long instalments), sinister has superseded sluggish: the young Tanwa, son of the police officer in charge of giving Pathomkarn a hard time, flirts with the dark side and falls under the slippery suspect’s spell. Life lessons from a presumed mass murderer can’t be ideal.

As we continue to see, in flashback, the impressionable boy succumb to persuasion, we find the older, criminologist Tanwa (Paopetch Charoensook) becoming a police consultant as the force flounders around trying to nail another serial killer.

Now revealed as something of an autistic savant, with an intelligence level way off the scale and all the social skills of a brick, Tanwa is – big surprise – soon thought to be the slayer.

Corralled by Detective Aye (Kemisara Paladesh), the ridiculously young-looking murder-squad officers, all specialists in clunky dialogue, resent their new associate and his clever-dick ways. They’d be thrilled to pin the killings on him, so obviously he’s not going to let that happen.

Eventually, the reasons for Tanwa’s strange ways – not least what looks like his father’s self-fulfilling prophecy that he would become a bad egg – filter through. And if he does turn out to be rotten, it won’t be his fault entirely; not when his father’s idea of teaching him how to live a “normal” life involved keeping him in a basement.

Acceptable in the ’80s

Behold, winter’s icy extremes: time to think about summer holidays (start waving those pandemic passports)! Meanwhile, why not take a trip back in time? Acapulco, in all its mid-’80s excess, awaits …

The resort of choice is Las Colinas, the hot ticket for world-famous fashion magazine photo shoots and pop stars’ “accidentally” press-leaked holidays. It’s also a lurid pink “bastion of lust and sin” that exploits the local staff (banned from speaking Spanish), indulges the whims of the tasteless and gullible (the guests) and glorifies a heroically shoulder-padded, dentally bleached workout-video queen who never quite made it onto Dynasty (the hotel owner).

While mercilessly sending up the said proprietor, Diane (played in all her blow-dried brilliance by Jessica Collins), Acapulco (Apple TV+, series one now streaming) is sly without being sadistic, charmingly comic and full of handy life lessons.

The chief beneficiary of these lessons is pool boy Máximo (Enrique Arrizon), a diligent lad from a struggling Mexican family perpetually swooning in the presence of saintly receptionist Julia (Camila Perez).

Abetted by the likes of Rafael Cebrián as fast-talking fixer Hector the Protector – like Neymar with a frizzy perm – Máximo has grander ambitions than hanging around the pool with the baggy-pants fashion-victim singers tearing through ’80s cover versions – singers who help remind us of the decade’s pre-tech simplicity. A payphone, we’re told, is “like a smartphone glued to the wall that you put coins in”.

Happy days.