Catch up TV: Gotham, The Knick and The Code

Gotham, as any dumbo with a dongle can testify, was a village in Nottinghamshire with a healthy population of goats. The name was borrowed by Washington Irving for a satire of New York City in 1807, and later by Batman co-creator Bill Finger, who took it from a jewellery store in the phone book. From there the city has been developed and revised. Just as Batman has gone from comic-book hero to camp crusader to crimefighter with dissociative identity disorder, Gotham (Demand 5) presents an idealised, fictional comic-book metropolis that exists outside normal time.

At first this is confusing. How can there be satellite dishes in the new Gotham if Bruce Wayne is still a boy? Logically, that would mean Batman would externalise his underpants in or around the year 2030, which would be an oddly futuristic environment in which to don a feline gimp mask and a spiffy cape.

But hold on. The characters in Gotham wear suits and ties, and hats, like they’re walk-ons in a Weegee photograph. They drive battered old cars. They don’t do much chatting by mobile phone. All of which means Gotham isn’t really set anytime that ever existed — it’s a landscape of the mind, a quadruple exposure of all previous Gothams, viewed by director Danny Cannon through the grimy lens of American cinema of the Seventies, so it’s closer to The French Connection than anything contemporary.

Does it work? Surprisingly, yes. Essentially, it’s an origin story, showing the young Bruce Wayne at the moment of his parents’ murder, which is witnessed also by a girl who may become Catwoman (aka The Cat). The young Penguin is around, and a particularly freaky young man he is too. But mostly, it’s the story of Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), the cop who later becomes police commissioner, and his hard-boiled sidekick Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue). It’s a Gothic Gotham, a dark and scary place in which Jim, who is harder than he looks, is on a mission to bring light. Watch out also for Alfred the gorblimey butler, played with distinction by Sean Pertwee.

Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick (Sky on Demand) is equally ambitious but it’s set in the New York of 1900, a place of dung-covered streets and tobacco skies. The central character, Clive Owen’s Dr John W Thackery, seems at first to be an unsympathetic character, possibly on account of the “Uncle Parker” he’s injecting into his urinary meatus. His obvious genius as a medical maverick is no excuse for the racism he displays towards his prospective deputy, Dr Algernon Edwards (André Holland), who has arrived with ideas of his own from his time in Europe, where they do things differently.

As The Knick is essentially ER with cocaine and interesting shoes, the chances are they’ll end up getting along just fine. There is much gruesome surgery, and a slither of wit. “It’s been tried once before on a labrador retriever,” says Thackery of an experimental surgery. “There isn’t a day goes by when I don’t miss that dog.”

Australian thriller The Code (BBC iPlayer) is a fiction assembled from familiar parts. A young girl is murdered in the Outback, her male companion has little more than a vague recollection of an oncoming truck and the girl telling him to run. An online reporter, Ned Banks (Dan Spielman), finds himself drawn into a political intrigue, partly because his brother, a gifted hacker with “particularities” (he’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum), crashes into a corner of cyberspace which disturbs a deep and nasty conspiracy. The plot’s not entirely plausible but it unfurls with real energy.

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You have to wonder about Peaky Blinders (BBC iPlayer). After an explosive start it has meandered, notably up the side-street of Polly’s lost son, but there are signs that the energy is ramping up. Tommy (Cillian Murphy) now speaks in a menacing whisper instead of a faint murmur, and episode three includes a decent Daily Mail joke and a further visit to Camden Town, where the Blinders are now master bakers, supplying aerated bread to Italian goths.

There is an outbreak of ultra-violence from Tom Hardy, who swears with distinction. His verbals are a bit rich but his rage has a certain dignity. Anyway, Tommy buys a horse and meets a posh girl with sultry eyes. “I do bad things,” he tells her saucily, “but you already knew that.”