Although erring towards arch and overstylised, [the first episode] was an audacious, risk-taking opener that bodes well for what's to come.

This is as heartbreaking as it is harrowing, and so richly layered that if you rewatch episode one after episode two you'll find it's even better than the first time round.

I watched the first episode twice and both times it blew my socks off.

[Patrick Melrose] is tremendous. Benedict Cumberbatch flounders around in the title role as a 1980s toff junky heading for rock bottom, sort of like a cross between Richard E Grant in Withnail & I and Jacob Rees-Mogg in every interview, ever.

It is a feat of sheer executive wheedling and ingenuity.

It was as if [Benedict Cumberbatch] were meant for this part, as if he had been storing up a special tank of energy for years to play it.

Everything is opulent, and everything is desperate: just right, in other words.

The actor's calculatedness, known to fans of Sherlock, looks radically different as he counts the minutes, and even the seconds, until his next hit, or whiles away the hours after giving drugs up.

Watching Showtime's Patrick Melrose, the five-part miniseries adapted from the mostly autobiographical novels of Edward St. Aubyn, it soon becomes clear that Benedict Cumberbatch is delivering one of the best performances of his career.

With harrowing bravado and lacerating wit, Benedict Cumberbatch instills an achingly vulnerable core to the tortured hero.

Obviously this adaptation of an Edward St Aubyn novel adds far too much glamour to the squalid reality of controlled substances, but it's got Cumberbatch in it, so I suppose that's all right then.

[Patrick Melrose] is a series that's beautifully acted by an exceptional cast, and yet which won't be for everyone given its unrelentingly dour nature.

But it's Cumberbatch's performance that will grab you from the start.

A limited series can't only be about one man's performance, even if the actor does his part to earn the responsibility.

Lucky the first episode of Patrick Melrose, based on the book Bad News, which aired on Sky Atlantic last night, renders all fears misplaced.