The TV shows to watch this week: From Watchmen to Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o

Prepare to be swept along on a journey into unfamiliar worlds, warns Sean O’Grady, whether it be the alternate history of comic-book vigilantes or the true story of kick-ass female fighters

Regina King as Detective Angela Abar of Tulsa Police Force, whose alter-ego is Sister Night, in ‘Watchmen’ (HBO)

You may recall the disturbing and brilliantly rendered movie Watchmen from a few years ago, itself based on an equally cultish DC Comics strip from the 1980s. It was an ingenious, enthralling mix of the usual superheroes stuff (superpowers, super-warped personalities, super-nonsenses), some wonderful re-invention of history plus a vision of the future – America in the fourth term of a Richard Nixon presidency, evolving into an authoritarian proto-fascistic state. Yes, it does sound familiar, doesn’t it?

Sky Atlantic screens a promising HBO-produced variation on the Watchmen theme, easily reconciled to the various originals, which smartly plants it in an “alternative present”, which you might think is beyond sci-fi treatment and parody, but we still have some way to go before all norms of civilised political life have been trashed. There’s a prologue set in the 1920s, before we are catapulted a century on, to a word of vigilantism, secret societies and raining squid, apparently.

Rorschach (named after the famous psychological “ink blot” test) is a lead character this time, alongside Don Johnson (yes, him off Miami Vice) as a beleaguered police chief and Jeremy Irons as a spoilt aristocrat who favours naked typewriting (him, not the typewriter so much) as a favoured form of relaxation, and Regina King as something very wicked indeed. I cannot wait. I might even dig the DVD out (relic that I am) in the meantime. Such is the rich, intricate nature of the cinematography and the attention to detail it easily bears re-watching. There’ll be nine episodes.

Hollywood star Nyong’o travels to Benin to uncover the story of an all-female army (Channel 4)

History has been far too Eurocentric for far too long, and those who moan about the teaching of, say, African history in schools and colleges fail to understand that the stories of the past from that continent are every bit as majestic, as cruel, as tragic and as portentous as anything from Europe’s long and often troubled past. Even now African history is underrated and overlooked, but Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o is one of the few television documentaries to redress the balance a little, and is all the more welcome for that.

Plunging into African history is, really like exploring a new fascinating continent, with new personalities and new tales, all the more intriguing here for the fact that it is women who are running the shows. Hollywood actress and Oscar winner Nyong’o is a fine choice as guide and presenter, because it was the empire of the extraordinary Agoji women of Benin which inspired the film in which she starred in the lead, Black Panther. For around two centuries they defied and defeated every imperial enemy seeking to usurp their west African realms, including the Europeans, using a mix of military and diplomatic skills, until the French eventually overwhelmed them in 1894. An outstanding and novel contribution to Black History Month from Channel 4, and excellent in its own right.

Celtic noir with Killian Scott as Rob Reilly (BBC)

Dublin Murders is something of an identikit crime psycho-drama, where the viewer finds themselves semi-distracted by what they think the scriptwriters are up to as much as what the cops and killer(s) on-screen are doing. If you think of it as a sort of Celtic noir take on the contemporary detective genre, you’d be about right, and the usual layers of mysterious back stories relayed via flashback, troubled personal lives, odd families, creepy woods, trampy types, and, of course, grisly ritualistic murders.

The unusual feature – revealed in the first episode but look away now if you’ve not caught it – is that the lead detective is also a surviving victim from a previous case that may be connected to the one he is now investigating. It does his head in, of course, as you’d expect. Killian Scott and Sarah Greene make a good job of the two ’tecs (Rob Reilly and Cassie Maddox).

Whatever floats your boat, give this RNLI documentary a watch on Tuesday (BBC)

Though I have given a few quid to the lifeboats in the past, the recent tabloid hate campaign angst the RNLI’s overseas work prompted me to make a more substantial donation, and I think many others too will have been scandalised by the demonisation of such a decent charity that they felt obliged to make sure that the RNLI didn’t suffer the same fate as the overseas charities did from careless and callous journalism. In the same spirit, I commend Saving Lives at Sea, which returns for another series showing us that the RNLI does not spend its time and money, here and abroad, on politically correct frivolities but on the grim business of stopping death by drowning. Simple as that really. Please give generously

Pop goes the... (BBC)

There is an obvious and irresistible link from talk about gutter journalists to the title of the BBC’s latest nature show – Weasels: Feisty and Fearless. Well, something like that. If I had a better grasp of taxonomy I would be able to draw elegant analogies between the various types of journalists and the various members of the genus Mustelidae, being weasels, otters, stoats, pine martens, badgers, honey badgers and wolverines (the four-legged ones not the bloke off of X-Men). But I don’t, so I won’t, and I’ll just weasel out of it, thanks.

Watchmen (Sky Atlantic, Monday 9pm); Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o (Channel 4, Wednesday 10pm); Dublin Murders (BBC1, Monday 9pm); Saving Lives at Sea (BBC2, Tuesday 8pm); Weasels: Feisty and Fearless (BBC2, Friday 8pm)