Streaming writer NICK OVERALL starts his column with dinner and finishes with cake, There’s plenty in between. 

AN alarm blares at five o’clock, ordering a dishevelled police officer to get up for work.

It’s not five o’clock in the morning, we find out as he draws his curtains aside. 

He eats “breakfast” with his family as they eat dinner. Night sets in. He brushes his teeth, puts on his uniform and reads his daughter a bedtime story.

Soon after he’s roadside at a traffic incident, picking up body parts left in the wake of a brutal crash. 

During the same shift he attends the scene of a natural death, attempts to track down a heroin addict and gets in the middle of violent neighborly disputes.

This is his job, and just one night among an endless barrage of them. In “The Responder”, a British series set on the beat in Liverpool, we follow this police officer over the course of a few of these nights.

He is played to stunning effect by Martin Freeman. The unassuming hero we’re used to seeing Freeman cast as is manipulated into something far more bleak here.

In Chris, the police officer at the centre of the show, we see a man who was once good, who wanted to be that hero, but whose morals have been whittled down by the crushing reality he lives through each night.

We see glimpses of the more cheerful charm Freeman brings to the screen in his much lighter roles, but here it’s contorted into that of a haunted man. We haven’t seen the actor like this before. It makes it all the more powerful.

In one scene he tells his therapist: “I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole, except the moles wear trackies. Every night, there’s spit on my face and blood on my boots and it never stops.”

While “fictional”, the series was created and written by a former police officer, a revealing insight into its authenticity. It’s confronting television, but television worthy of being confronted by.

Catch it for free on SBS On Demand. It looks to be one of 2022’s best.

APPLE TV+ may also have an early contender for best show of the year with its Korean melodrama epic “Pachinko”.

Based on a book of the same name, “Pachinko” splits itself into three parts, spanning three generations of a Korean family who live through and feel the aftermath of Japan’s occupation of their country.

It’s a chunk of history that’s rarely been examined in mainstream media, especially western, and while the scope of “Pachinko” is massive indeed, it does a remarkable job of always feeling intimate.

The Japanese occupation of Korea itself lasted from 1910 to 1945, but together the show’s eight episodes span the better part of the 20th century. They piece together a puzzle that offers an intricate look at family through a genre mix of romance, drama and thriller.

For those who don’t know, a pachinko machine is like a Japanese poker machine.

Like pinball, players watch as a small steel ball is cast around a board – its unpredictable fate hangs in the balance, somewhere between luck and the desperate whims of the one trying to control it. It’s a deeply fitting title for this series.

WHAT’S Netflix cooking up at the moment? Well in between season two of the raunchy hit “Bridgerton” and the upcoming final installment of crime thriller “Ozark”, viewers can watch “Is It Cake?” 

In it, skilled cake artists attempt to make everything from handbags to sewing machines out of, well, cake. So life-like are these creations that it becomes hard to figure out the difference between the dessert and the real thing.

In other words, what it says on the tin, really.

This has to rank among the most pointless television put to screen but, hey, sometimes after harrowing police procedurals and historical melodrama, a bit of pointlessness isn’t too bad. I’ll take a slice.