Counterpart is probably the most underrated sci-fi show of last year and it is so pleasing to see it back for a second series on Starz (you’ll have to work out where else you can find it).

Justin Marks has created a taut action thriller all set in a mundane yet bizarre world where we live, side by side, with a near identical world to our own, whose history day by day gradually drags it further from our version.

J. K. Simmons plays both a down trodden, lonely minor bureaucrat with little in his life except his unrequited love for his coma ridden wife and his counterpart, a dangerous spy who moves at ease through violence and deceit.

As we begin to understand how the two worlds diverged we layer by layer reveal the people and organisations who have come to hate their other selves, the people they would have been if things had worked out differently.

I won’t say more for risk of spoiling the plot but this show combines the tautness of the best cold war spy thrillers with the subtle and original philosophical questioning that sci-fi is so adapt at.