Ripley on Netflix is very very good. Partly because it looks so good. The black and white cinematographic love letter to Rome and New York gets what makes old photos so compelling. I'm not sure what they've done but it gets right what a lot of periodic pieces get wrong. Partly it's the locations chosen. Has humankind ever scaled higher than the aesthetic peak that is Rome circa 1960?  My parents have slides from a trip to Rome from that era and they have a cinematic quality to them. The brightly couloured little Fiat cinqucentos caught mid-journey against the backdrop of beautifully crumbling ruins -  all captured in the golden hues of Kodachrome. My God. But beyond its photographic charms the show succeeds (so far) because of the taut tension wire it walks across. A lot of similar stories fail for me because the tension is contrived in an attempt to emulate Hitchcock and his successors, but the show works because every character acts with unfailing logic and makes choices that are consistent with who they are. It's probably a good bet that this is because the creators have stuck close to Patricia Highsmith's source material. She was a proper novelist not the writer of potboilers, so the care she invested in her characters reaps its rewards now decades later as I sit on the edge of my couch upstate, wracked with tension.