Yes, This Is Us is wilfully saccharine, enough to make your fillings sing in places, and yes, it employs the time-honoured trick of undercutting all that syrupy sweetness with loads of clever, dense, hard-boiled dialogue, so that everyone ends up speaking in paragraphs.
But I witness the human cost of the push for standards, and the fact that this cost is wilfully, ritually ignored.
As they watch stupid criminals bickering over who makes the tea, cutting off a woman's finger and turning against each other, audiences will struggle to determine whether this production is wilfully ignoring or trying to parody contemporary crime movies.
This government is wilfully putting at risk our patients' safety, the tolerability of our working lives as NHS workers and the very viability of the NHS as a publicly-funded, publicly-provided service Equally novel are the levels of inter-occupational solidarity on display.
But more deplorably, it is wilfully hiding this from public scrutiny.
It is one of many erotic ironies in this picture, through which voyeurism is wilfully confused with rapture.
Once he leaves abstraction behind, he ceases to be a tasteful painter, in fact in his late work he is wilfully tasteless, but this was not a man who would do anything as obvious as setting out to shock.
It is wilfully meaningless.
Bish Bosch is wilfully obscure.
In contrast, Pushpamala N.'s work is wilfully postmodern.
