It seems terribly appropriate that one of the top trending shows on Netflix UK is about the devil; after all, it's as hot as Hell out there. So if you're looking for a brilliant show to binge while you hide from the heat, Lucifer offers six whole seasons of devilishly good entertainment.
The show passed me by when it first launched, so I only noticed it when it appeared in the trending shows bit of my Netflix home page. And after several binge-watching sessions I'm absolutely hooked. Is it great art? Probably not. Great fun? Absolutely.
Featuring characters created by the legendary fantasy writer Neil Gaiman – Good Omens, American Gods, The Sandman and many more – alongside Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg, the show features Tom "Miranda" Ellis as the original fallen angel. Bored with life in Hell, Lucifer decides to go somewhere even worse: Los Angeles.
Why Lucifer is tons of fun
What makes this show great is that everybody from the writers to the actors are clearly having lots of fun. It's a bit of a mash-up: I'm getting strong Constantine vibes one minute, and the next it's a police procedural straight out of Bosch or NYPD Blue (the best cop show ever, I reckon: if you haven't seen it, all 12 seasons (opens in new tab) are on Disney+ in the UK). Ellis, who I thought must have been hilariously miscast, is a revelation: he's as smooth, twinkly-eyed and irritating as you'd expect the actual devil to be, and the chemistry between him and seen-it-all cop Chloe is wonderful.
If like me you're new to the show, the good news is that it gets even better after the first season: where that only has a 49% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes – the first few episodes feel a bit hackneyed – it jumps to a whopping 100% for Season 2 and stays there for seasons 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Shows like this are like cheeseburgers, I reckon: you want just enough cheese to be tasty, but you don't want it to be so cheesy that it's overpowering. Lucifer has got the balance just right, I think: it's big, it's silly and it's enormously entertaining. It's devilishly good fun.
