TV to talk about this autumn

Me too" shows are the hallmark of the autumn schedules, as programme controllers from stations both large and small try to grab a slice of what their rivals were having last season.

So, no Mad Men (not until summer next year) but louche behaviour, painstaking period detail and enough Sixties fashions to fill a Don Draper-size hole. The influence of The Shadow Line looms large too, as political conspiracy thrillers pop up all over the place. And who would have thought that troubled teenagers would have so much televisual reach?

Lovers of decent British comedy, high-concept US drama and cult foreign language output will also be making appointments with their sofas as the new season delivers show after show familiar enough to understand but just different enough to still find worthwhile. Autumn, after all, is the time for hearty meals, warm socks and liberal quantities of comfort viewing.

THE TOP TEN

1 Hidden (BBC1, October)
As The Shadow Line showed, ye olde conspiracy thriller is back. Who better, then, than Philip Glenister (aka Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes) to play a low-rent solicitor on the trail of something murky and add the sort of grit TV veterans will remember from 1985's brooding Edge of Darkness. Ronan Bennett wrote this brain-knotting four-parter in collaboration with Walter Bernstein, the screenwriting legend behind 1964's nuclear gripper Fail-Safe.

2 The Jury II (ITV1, November)
With a run of screenplays including Frost/Nixon, The Queen and The Damned United behind him, Peter Morgan might seem too grand for TV. Not so. His first small-screen gig since he redefined courtroom drama with the original The Jury in 2002 is a five-parter stripped across an entire week. It pits passionate defence counsel Julie Walters against grandstanding prosecutor Roger Allam. Casting alone will put bums on sofas.

3 Life's Too Short
(BBC2, October)
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's new six-part mock-doc follows small person Warwick Davis and his daily hustling to keep his talent agency afloat. Shaun Williamson, Keith Chegwin and Les Dennis again generate new employment opportunities through humiliating self-caricature, while high-profile guests - Johnny Depp, Sting, Helena Bonham Carter - line up for some carefully tailored abuse.

4 Spy (Sky1, September)
Sky is hoping for a hit with its
six-part family-friendly comedy. Dirk Gently's Darren Boyd plays the accidentally employed spy, a man so ineffectual that even his own son pities him. Meanwhile Robert Lindsay, released from My Family, plays his unhinged spymaster.

5 Pan Am (BBC2, November)
Whether you will like Pan Am is moot but you will watch at least the first couple of episodes since it's designed to net anyone still pining for Mad Men's chic and sass. Set up in the sky in the Sixties, when flying was still glam, this aiming-to-be-long-run series can boast an ER writer, a West Wing director and Christina Ricci in a blue stewardess's uniform.

6 Home Cooking Made Easy (BBC2, September)
Having done home baking, likeable Lorraine Pascale shows she's more than a cupcake with her new series which, if nothing else, proves you can make tasty food wearing a white top. This time it's all about tips, cheats and shortcuts to culinary nirvana, which means Pascale is encroaching on Delia territory big style.

7 The Comic Strip: The Hunt for Tony Blair (C4, October)
A jewel in Channel 4's crown when it launched in 1982, The Comic Strip returns with a one-off noir spoof starring Stephen Mangan as a fugitive Tony Blair, while Rik Mayall, Robbie Coltrane, Nigel Planer and Jennifer Saunders (as Margaret Thatcher) aim for old glory. Scheduled to run just as the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war reports, it's been described as "grossly offensive" by one MP, much to the joy of C4's publicity department.

8 The Fades (BBC3, September)
A 17-year-old is caught in a fight between the living and the dead in this new six-part series by Skins man Jack Thorne. A homage to some extent to fantasy writers such as Susan Cooper, read by Thorne as a kid, The Fades sits snugly between Being Human or Game of Thrones and the streetwise, Misfits style of TV which Skins helped pioneer.

9 Romanzo Criminale
(Sky Arts, October)
Pitched as this year's The Killing, Romanzo Criminale was described by authoritative newspaper (one not owned by Signor Berlusconi) La Stampa as "the best television series ever produced in Italy". The violent yet glamorous tale of a crime family in the Seventies, it runs for 22 episodes, allowing the story to unfold at its own pace, something the movie of the same name never quite managed. Expect beautiful damned women, brutally handsome men and moustaches.

10 Frozen Planet
(BBC1, November)
David Attenborough's latest "xx years in the making" series does for the planet's polar regions what Blue Planet did for the sea - delivering animals and their habitats up close and pin sharp (this one's shot in HD).

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

Downton Abbey
(ITV, September 18)
Series two of Julian Fellowes's drama series, with Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham and Jessica Brown Findlay, right, as Sybil, jumps back in as the First World War lays waste to British manhood and the Countess mounts a
one-woman war against change.

Boardwalk Empire
(Sky Atlantic, September)
HBO's Prohibition-era drama series suffered from "new Sopranos" comparisons. Season two, which started last night, should see it take flight.
Rev (BBC2, October)
Tom Hollander's Rev Adam Smallbone returns for more CofE in the inner- city in series two of the hit comedy, now with Peep Show co-creator Sam Bain on the creative team.

Misfits (E4, October)
Kids with superpowers is hardly new but the Asbo twist to E4's series has kept it popular with its target audience, alongside Skins and The Inbetweeners.

The Big Bang Theory
(E4, tonight)
A "beauty and the geeks" gloss on the old Friends undercoat has made this an award-winning US comedy series, which even briefly spawned its own illegal Belarusian clone.

PhoneShop (E4, November)
Ricky Gervais script-edited the pilot but the cult comedy series about the huge awfulness of working in a mobile phone outlet has done very well without him, thank you.

Breaking Bad
(5USA, November)
Fourth great season of the Emmy-encrusted black comedy about a teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer who decides to go into crystal meth production. Imagine pitching that to UK commissioners.

Made in Chelsea
(E4, September)
Is it as good as The Only Way Is Essex? Course not, but the West End boys and girls prove themselves to be dab hands at one thing - car crash TV, week in, week out.

The Killing II (BBC4, November)
A new crime, a new partner and a new jumper for Sarah Lund as last year's Danish word-of-mouth hit returns with a 10-parter that's kept viewers on tenterhooks in every country it's been shown in so far.

BEST OF THE REST

The Slap (BBC4, October)
A man slaps a child who is not his own and all hell breaks loose. An impressive eight-part adaptation, featuring Melissa George and Sophie Okonedo, of the hot-button novel about the tensions of multiculturalism.

The Body Farm (BBC1, September 13)
Keith Allen hooks up with Tara Fitzgerald for an eight-part Waking the Dead spin-off with a strand of CSI in its DNA.

Public Enemies (BBC1, November)
An urgent three-parter written by Tony Marchant, with Anna Friel returning to UK television to play a probation officer falling for a dodgy client.

Charlie's Angels (E4, November)
Glam babes go action in a revamp of the cheesy Seventies series. This year's trashy guilty secret, maybe?