It is a peculiarity of modern broadcasting that everyone now makes drama. Once upon a time scripted series were the purview of free-to-air channels and cable broadcasters such as Showcase, HBO and SoHo.
Things have plainly changed. Every channel now has a flagship drama, even if their flagship drama is their only drama.
It's a wrinkle of programming economics and perhaps the final proof (as if we needed it) that reality shows with names such as Thong Island don't have the long-term shelf life that everyone hoped they would.
The net effect is that when you switch on A+E, instead of people fossicking in their attics looking for bits of tat that might be worth something, you have instead soldiers heading off to war in a brutal battlefield drama.
And when you switch over to National Geographic, where once you might have spent the evening watching monkeys pick nits off each other set to an Attenborough-esque soundtrack of sotto voce narration, now you have an Oscar-winner dramatising the life of Albert Einstein.
Genius (Mondays, 8.30pm, National Geographic), an adaptation of Walter Isaacson's book Einstein: His Life and Universe, and starring Australian actor Geoffrey Rush in the central role, is that drama. On the basis of his hair alone, it's a role that no one but Rush could surely play.
What immediately surprises about Genius is how good it is. Not that you'd ever doubt Rush, whose acting chops are par excellence. Rather there is a sort of innate scepticism about a high-end scripted drama which is off-piste from the kind of channel on which you'd expect to find it.
The series gently intertwines two narratives of the younger and older lives of Einstein, with Rush sharing the role with Johnny Flynn as the younger man.
The earlier narrative kicks off in 1894, in Munich, where Einstein is tackling university life, consumed with giant questions about life and the cosmos. Flynn is charming, super charging his performance with a sort of wired brilliance that perfectly suits the character.
The later narrative picks up the story in the 1920s, after Einstein has made his name in the scientific world, and is caught between his wife (Elsa, played by Emily Watson) and his mistress (Betty, played by Charity Wakefield) and seemingly not tuned into the great upheaval that is coming to the world.
While the series stops short of playing fast and loose with the details, as many biopics tend to do these days, it does cast its Einstein in a certain fashion. He's bookish, but it doesn't come at the cost of his love life.
The Einstein of screenwriters Noah Pink and Ken Biller is a seriously fast-moving romantic. And it helps bring a human dimension to a man who might otherwise have withered on the proverbial storyline vine as a sort of fusty old scientist.
The series also makes interesting use of graphics and visual imagery, perhaps in a way that only the National Geographic channel could. It's a delicate line trying to bring a robust sense of action to some of the bigger moments that are, by their nature, very internalised, but Genius kind of pulls it off.
There are moments in Genius where the narrative gets a little twisted up in itself and where some of the choices don't feel right. But Ron Howard's skilled direction delivers a solid opening and, ultimately, the illumination of a more human side to Einstein that is rarely discussed and barely seen - makes this compelling viewing.
