There’s a type of TV that I’ve always called Respect-and-Avoid. I’ve done this for so long now that I can’t remember if it’s a term used by telly types, a phrase thrown around in my family, or if actually everyone says it. But even if you’re unfamiliar, you know what it means, right? It’s worthy, renowned, lauded and you should watch it, but… you just can’t be arsed. You know it would depress/scare/bore you. For me, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale, certain natural history documentaries and things like The Wire. I know it’s good, but I don’t want the risk of seeing someone get mutilated and displayed on a car bonnet. I don’t want to scar my square eyes.

What’s the opposite of Respect-and-Avoid? Mock-and-Binge, maybe - Bridgerton, Emily in Paris and Too Hot to Handle would be good examples. I’m an unrepentant mock-and-binger and a diligent respect-and-avoider. You can tell me a thousand times how good Chernobyl is, and I salute it, but the fact is, I’d rather watch Nailed It! with a side-order of Into the Night. That’s not to say I only watch froth. My favourite TV series of all time is Succession, and that just happens to be the best TV series of all time – don’t @ me; I’m 100% correct. But there’s a certain type of show – serious and earnest and noble/nobyl – that I tend to bypass. I need a dash of flippancy to draw me in.

I was pretty sure Giri/Haji was in the Respect-and-Avoid category. Loads of people told me to watch it, that it was great – there was a time when it was all over my timeline. But I resisted, because I didn’t know what the title meant and felt that it was going to be one of those indecipherable, murky, po-faced mumbling dramas where the subtitles finish because they’ve switched to English, and you wish they’d carried on, because you have no idea what’s happening.

Well, I’m here to tell you I was wrong. Hang on, I can see my husband cupping his hand to his ear to hear that again; let me briefly break off to slip a few laxatives in his tea. YES, I was wrong, and I admit it. Now I’m the one telling you it’s great and you should watch it. You probably already have, because you’re not as Judgey McJudgeFace as me. But allow me to elaborate as penance.

There’s no denying it’s initially pretty slow and complicated. Kenzo Mori, a Tokyo detective, travels to London to search for his brother Yuto, who he thought was dead, but now might be starting a Japanese gang war by murdering the nephew of a Yakuza member. It takes Kenzo quite a while to get to the Big Smoke, because there’s a lot of Japanese underworld set-up, with moody flashbacks and anime. If I’m being hypercritical, some of these back stories start to feel unnecessarily comprehensive, and are subsequently summarised more succinctly by characters in the present. But I’ll forgive them that indulgence as it’s all very atmospheric.

Kenzo’s multi-generational family members are nicely idiosyncratic – a slightly sour-faced (with good reason) wife, a seemingly-dysfunctional-but-secretly-sweet teenage daughter and dottily demanding elderly parents. But it’s mainly about Kenzo, the stoic cop, and his brother, tearaway-turned-hitman Yuto – a sort of will-they-won’t-they find each other and reconcile. The sedate pace allows you to gradually immerse yourself in this bizarre, absorbing, stylish series – not plodding, but quiet, determined narrative steps, each one pulling you deeper into the world.

Kelly Macdonald provides an off-beat, endearing foil as Sarah Weitzmann, a softly-spoken DC who’s somehow persona non grata in the Metropolitan Police, and is getting bricks through her window and a snake in her letterbox. Her try-hard exchanges with the closed-off Kenzo are toe-curling, which makes me think she’s definitely going to be playing Scully to his Mulder. Rodney, the male prostitute Kenzo hires to help him inveigle his way into a Japanese club, is disarmingly insouciant and charismatic - however, I sense a fragility in him which, along with his profession, makes me fearful he’s going to end up as Yakuza meat, probably on the bonnet of a car. Will Sharpe thoroughly deserves his BAFTA for the performance – his is a superb, scene-stealing (tragi) comic turn as the ‘coke-addicted rent boy of colour’. Crucially, he adds a welcome dose of drollery to the action – the shot of flippancy that pricks any earnestness. I can take heft, but not if it’s without humour, and thankfully Giri/Haji doesn’t take itself too seriously, retaining a healthy sense of the absurd as gangsters run riot around the capitals.

The action really ramps up in later episodes, with Line of Duty levels of corruption and gun-pulling, and then after that, It’s a Sin degrees of LGBT camaraderie. The pivoting could make the series a hotch-potch but it’s more a rich melting pot of ideas, with ambition, wit and nuance. Giri/Haji lurks in the shadows of televisual limbo – not quite a thriller, not quite police procedural, not quite mob drama; not quite family saga; not like anything else I’ve seen, really. Well, maybe a bit like Collateral, the David Hare thing, but tbh I thought that was pretty up itself and kind of wish I’d avoided it.

I’ve always loathed the expression ‘guilty pleasure’ – for me, there’s no shame in indulging in whatever you want to consume. But equally, sometimes you have a duty to step outside that comfort zone, seek out your demons and discover how diverting they really are. It’s disappointing to learn that the BBC cancelled this show after one series, so snort it up while you still can before it’s rubbed out.

There’s a new TV term in town: Respect-and-Binge!

*Vinyl scratch*

WAIT just one goddamn second. I wrote the blog above after I’d watched the first five episodes and was really into it, but then I watched the last three and WTAF? There are spoilers aplenty coming now, but let me reassure you that if you haven’t watched it, then I’m actually saving you a bit of time because this series ends up being completely NUTS and not worth it. Remember when I said it wasn’t a hotch-potch? It’s a total hotch-potch. After the big gunfight and Taki, Kenzo’s daughter, coming out, Episode 6 is basically day trip to the seaside. ‘Let us bring light to the provinces!’ declares Rodney, gaily. They all have a jolly time on the beach in a dose of quirk that I found harder to stomach than bullet-riddled bodies. But I’d invested in the characters by that point, so we limped on with it as, in Tokyo, the females of the Mori family steal Yuto’s baby son, who also happens to be the Yakuza boss’s grandson, and go on the run with him. Pursued across Japan by henchmen, they don’t really try that hard to keep a low profile – it’s like they want to be found in their rust-coloured car and turned into human colanders.

But then a supposedly bumbling British cop on placement in Japan suddenly erupts into the farmhouse they’re hiding in and shoots the bad guys. It turns out he was working for a London gangster called Abbott all along, and we have another back story explaining that. Oh, what a tangled web writer Joe Barton weaves. I was losing the will to live, as the women struggle with their secret saviour as he drives them away, and the car overturns, and the baby’s not even in a car seat, but they all escape without a scratch. Then every Yakuza member in Tokyo gathers in some sort of conference room and after some digit-lopping atonement, they all slit each other’s throats in a big bloodbath to sort out the gang war. Meanwhile, Kenzo, Yuto, Sarah, Abbott the jocular cockney gangster, Taki and three Yakuza mobsters are on the roof of a London building pointing guns at each other. Tense, right? What will happen next, at this, the climax of the series?

They dance.

Yeah, you read that right. We jump into a parallel universe where it’s somehow acceptable to have a slow-motion dance interpretation of the knotty relationships in play here. In black & white, all choreographed like some frigging Sadler’s Wells show. One minute, Abbott’s wisecracking and waving his Beretta, the next he’s squirming arse over tit in a modern ballet. I was utterly appalled. My husband, who’d needed a wee for a while, went to do the deed without even pausing the action. Yuto the hitman gets away scot-free to Paris, redeemed by the love of a good woman. Kenzo’s going to jail for various misdeeds, leaving lovelorn Sarah bereft. We didn’t care anymore. They’d pissed it up the wall.

Throughout the series, there’d been a bit of editing and scripting poncery that sometimes verged on silly – Dallas-style split screens, grandiose cannabis-inspired monologues etc, but this really took the biscuit. It was just ridiculous, spit-out-your-tea garbage, and I felt embarrassed for the actors that they had to go through these absurd motions. We never even found out who put that snake in Sarah’s letterbox. It’s still slithering around London, in mid-winter, FFS.

As you may have gleaned, I’m really quite angry about this. I devoted time and emotion in this show; in pre-judging it, revising my opinion, and then doing a complete volte-face and realising it was crap after all. I could convey that process to you in a complex dance routine, but I’m not a twat. I’ll just say that it’s a shame, and my duty to tell you there’s another TV term in town: Fuck-This-Shit.

I’m going back to Grand Designs.

• Giri/Haji – 8 episodes, Netflix (originally BBC Two)