This deliciously dark Netflix show is trending because it’s devilishly good

It's hot as Hell out there, so why not hide from the heat with some satanic silliness?

Lucifer on Netflix
(Image credit: Netflix)

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 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.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).