What to watch on TV this week: 11th - 17th October

This week sees some major dramas in the TV schedules, including both returning series and brand-new shows for viewers to mark their calendars with.

Netflix political drama The Diplomat is back for its third season, while Sally Wainwright's latest offering Riot Women and Neil Cross's new thriller The Iris Affair are both also set to debut.

There's also true crime drama Murdaugh: Death in the Family on the way to Disney Plus, and Tim Robinson's latest comedy The Chair Company coming to Sky – but it's not just scripted shows on the schedule.

Viewers can also look forward to the return of hit quiz show The 1% Club, as well as the latest batch of BBC New Comedy Awards. Plus, those getting ready for spooky season can tune into Witches of Essex on Sky History, fronted by Rylan Clark and Alice Roberts.

Here, you'll find our top picks for this week – read on for our full choice of what to watch.

The 1% Club season 5

Release date: Saturday 11th October, 8:40pm, ITV1

The beauty of The 1% Club is that you don’t need to be good at quiz shows to feel clever, which is probably one of the secrets to its success – and why it recently won best quiz show at the National Television Awards. The inclusive format has struck a chord with the public: there’s no need to be up on general knowledge; this is all about common sense and logical thinking. Although that can be a challenge for some (speaking from personal experience).

Lee Mack returns to host a new run, starting off as always with 100 contestants who are whittled down to the one person who can correctly answer a question only 1% of the nation can get right.

Johnathon Hughes

Riot Women

Release date: Sunday 12th October, 9pm, BBC One

It can be tough for women when they reach a certain age. They’re often dealing with elderly parents with failing health, their grown-up families ignoring or dismissing them, their husbands having inexplicable mid-life crises and — where once they were a force to be reckoned with — the world no longer sees them. They’re invisible, dispensable or simply a nuisance.

Sally Wainwright’s characters — including an NHS worker, a police officer and a publican — are angry for all these reasons so, in a moment of rebellion, start a punk band and enter a talent contest to raise money for refugees. “So, Putin starts a war and you’re going to sort it out by making a fanny of yourself in a talent contest?” snorts one of their daughters.

There’s a cracking cast (Joanna Scanlan, Tamsin Greig, Lorraine Ashbourne, Rosalie Craig, Amelia Bullmore, Anne Reid and Sue Johnston) while Wainwright’s writing is as sharp as ever. But be warned, the scene-setting start is mighty depressing.

Jane Rackham

The Chair Company

Release date: Monday 13th October, 9:45pm, Sky Comedy

Over three series of his offbeat Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave, comedy actor Tim Robinson has become the master of playing socially awkward oddballs. Now, he’s taking those talents further for this full-length series, which sees a petulant office worker known as Ron get sucked into a mundane yet oddly compelling conspiracy. We’re forbidden from saying more, other than it goes all the way to the top… and it involves chairs.

The first episode resembles little more than an ITYSL sketch stretched to 30 minutes, for good and for ill. On the one hand, it’s packed with just as many funny characters and gags as you’d expect from Robinson and co-writer Zach Kanin. On the other, sometimes the skin-crawling experience of watching Ron take things too far is so cringeworthy, you’ll wish it was broken up into two- or three-minute bursts.

Huw Fullerton

Witches of Essex

Release date: Tuesday 14th October, 9pm, Sky History

Witchcraft is a big theme for history docs. Lucy Worsley, Suzannah Lipscomb and Suranne Jones have all fronted recent shows about witch hunts and what lay behind them. Now Sky stirs its commissioning cauldron for a heady brew involving Rylan, Alice Roberts, and the TV equivalent of eye of newt.

The presenters start with the story of an Elizabethan witch trial in Chelmsford, but to make it more accessible, they treat it as if it were a “cold case”. They investigate it in an “incident room”, where they pin up photographs of the key people involved – or rather, the actors playing them.

The result is less daft than it sounds, because we also get sober historians offering insights on why 1560s England was ripe for moral panic, misogyny or just old-fashioned revenge. Neighbourhood feuds were behind 90 per cent of Tudor and Stuart-era witch trials, a professor tells us.

Meanwhile, in reconstructions of the 1566 trial we see men in ruffs interrogate the accused women, delivering ruff justice, while extras rhubarb angrily in the background. But under the TV window-dressing there are interesting themes that resonate with the present day.

David Butcher

BBC New Comedy Awards

Release date: Wednesday 15th October, 9pm, BBC Three

Thirty years ago, the winner of the inaugural BBC New Comedy Awards was crowned: Julian Barratt bested a line-up including Lee Mack and Daniel Kitson. Other winners have included Alan Carr, Lucy Beaumont and Lost Voice Guy; Sarah Millican, Joe Lycett and Peter Kay have been among the losing finalists. So it’s fair to say this contest has – in spite of an ill-considered five-year hiatus – maintained a decent track record for identifying up-and-comers with potential.

2025 will once again feature six heats of five comedians, filmed in venues around the UK. The winners will then compete in the grand final at Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre, hosted by Guz Khan (who, he may well be moved to observe, never made the final). Tonight’s first heat comes from St George’s in Bristol in an evening hosted by Josh Jones; this year’s head judge Fatiha El-Ghorri – who may or may not reference her shambolic stint on Taskmaster – will preside over the heats and final, and will be joined tonight by guest judges Priya Hall (a former finalist) and Cornish comedian Harriet Dyer.

Gabriel Tate

The Diplomat season 3

Release date: Thursday 16th October, Netflix

Having started to align itself with The West Wing last year with the signing of Allison Janney, The Diplomat now hitches its wagon more tightly by bringing Bradley Whitford along for the ride too. Though there’s a sense of stolen valour to this latest signing, as Whitford is very much a guest star rather than a main player, and his presence as First Husband to Janney’s newly installed Commander in Chief little more than a knowing wink to WingNuts.

In fact, there’s a definite feeling that, after heading down the stunt casting path, the series has forgotten about the general direction of the actual plot which, at times, now seems more concerned with the career of Hal Wyler than his wife Kate’s.

Granted, nobody does charming, hands-in-pockets acting better than Rufus Sewell. But the back half of this run, in which Kate (Keri Russell) recovers her negotiating mojo, is really when the season comes to life, despite the rules-based diplomacy on show suddenly appearing slightly retro when compared to the US political scene of 2025, which is more wild west than West Wing.

David Brown

Murdaugh: Death in the Family

Release date: Thursday 16th October, Disney Plus

You may have seen the Netflix true-crime doc Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, or listened to the popular Murdaugh Murders podcast – but if not, this plush drama will soon bring you up to speed on a well-known South Carolina family whose standing in the community began to unravel when their son was involved in a boating accident in 2019. The scandal led to other deaths among those proximate to the Murdaugh clan to be reinvestigated, but this show is more interested in the dark family dynamic. Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke – the latter in a very different role to his other current turn in The Last Frontier on Apple TV+ – are the Mom and Dad whose toxicity courses downwards through the generations. The cast, also featuring Noah Emmerich of The Americans fame and J Smith-Cameron, aka Gerry from Succession, is top-notch.

Jack Seale

The Iris Affair

Release date: Thursday 16th October, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

Niamh Algar’s rare mix of effervescent mischief and grounded relatability goes a long way in what might otherwise be a terminally silly thriller. She’s the titular Iris, who is introduced to us in one of those now-customary flash-forwards where everything has gone wrong and a bad guy is waving a gun in her face. He proves to be high-level entrepreneur Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander in the charming/malevolent mode he showed us in The Night Manager and The White Lotus); who Iris is, beyond being some sort of genius super-brain with a mass of confusing sticky notes on her bedroom wall, and why everyone from law enforcement agencies to online conspiracists is trying to track her down, becomes clear-ish during a time-hopping opener that takes in several stunning continental locations.

Suspend your disbelief as deeply as you can as we hope Algar can continue to keep The Iris Affair – which calls to mind Killing Eve and the more recent thrillers Prime Target and The Assassin, with a splash of James Bond thanks to Hollander’s villain – just about on the right side of credibility. It continues tomorrow.

Jack Seale

Visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.