The Sympathizer: Robert Downey Jr totally steals the show in

Downey Jr dons bald caps and gnaws cigars to have the most fun imaginable in Park Chan-wook’s inspired espionage show. Believe the hype!

The problem with a hype show, of course, is the “getting excited about it” part. Oh, a big-budget HBO series based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen? A cleverly blank spy-with-a-brain-not-just-a-small-gun performance from Hoa Xuande and a knowing I’m-the-cheekiest-person-at-this-party turn from Sandra Oh? Robert Downey Jr, fresh from that impeccable Oscar acceptance speech, having the most fun possible with a host of increasingly extravagant characters? Directed with glee and style by Park Chan-wook? If life has taught me anything it is this: when something sounds too good to be true, it normally is. There is no way The Sympathizer can live up to that.

Except, well, hmm. I’m starting to suspect this might be one of those cosmic occurrences where TV just gets everything right. The Sympathizer (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) starts in Vietnam, and dips back there regularly – we follow Xuande’s anonymous Captain, both as he attempts to flee a collapsing Saigon and as he settles into a refugee community in Los Angeles (and as he tries to tell the story of what happened by scrawling it down in a prison cell), and the timeline jumps around a lot, and satisfyingly. There are a lot of little fold-out cameras in interior pockets, a lot of people on quiet car journeys revealing a dark long-held secret and looking into eyes for clues of disloyalty, a lot of coded messages daubed in invisible ink.