Shows to stream this week: Patriot and Atlantis

Just as a secret agent might do amazing things behind a boring cover story, Patriot conceals its many marvels beneath a deceptively bland synopsis: "To prevent Iran from going nuclear, intelligence officer John Tavner must forgo all safety nets and assume a perilous 'non-official cover' – that of a mid-level employee at a midwestern industrial piping firm."

The precis screams "hackneyed potboiler" but Patriot is anything but.

It's bone-dry, tar-black and steeped in absurdity, and it slips out from under the mantle of comedy-drama by keeping its more bizarre and satirical moments resolutely dark.

The cast is brilliant, beginning with Australian-based Kiwi Michael Dorman (Serangoon Road) as American spook Tavner. As well as being an intelligence operative, Tavner is a folk musician, and his dangerously confessional songs provide a neat way of supplying exposition and explaining how he has come to be so psychically wounded.

But while Tavner really needs healing, his father, intelligence-agency type Tom (Terry O'Quinn), sends him on another deadly assignment – one that requires him to bluff his way into a job as an engineer in Milwaukee so he can sabotage Iranian activities in Luxembourg.

His only support in this transatlantic endeavour will be his brother, Edward (Michael Chernus), a strange, childlike man who has inherited their father's seat in the US Congress.

Complications arise and quickly multiply, melancholy violence is done, and Tavner finds himself beset by and beholden to a press of unusual characters brilliantly cast. Created by Steve Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty), it's all very artfully constructed and shot.

It also instils the viewer with a kind of subcutaneous existential unease – a feeling that this is how civilisation might in fact come to an end, through the actions of well-intentioned men who have no oversight and nothing under control. You don't see this sort of thing every day.

Patriot streams on Amazon Prime Video.

Atlantis

Stan

An uneven but enjoyable romp of a fantasy series from the folks who brought us Merlin and Misfits. It begins with modern-day Brit Jason (Jack Donnelly) having a bit of a submarine accident and washing up naked on some strange shore.

Yes, it's the lost island of Atlantis. Jason quickly falls in with a young geek named Pythagoras (Robert Emms) and a rum cove called Hercules (Game of Thrones' Mark Addy), learns about the cruel King Minos (Alexander Siddig), and the adventures begin.