Are You Watching the Summer's Best Sunday Night Show Yet?

It’s the first of July, which means the summer television doldrums have officially arrived. There are still plenty of options for binge-watchers — Squid Game, The Bear, The Waterfront — but for those of us who rely on weekly installments, the well is running dry. There’s the mediocre And Just Like That, the very mid Duster, the terrible Countdown, and the dreadfully boring Nine Perfect Strangers. Unless you’re into the costumes and pettiness of the much-improved The Gilded Age, however, our Sunday night prestige fix is nearly impossible to find.

Except over on PBS, where arguably the best weekly series currently airing — Patience — fills the void rather nicely. This is the third week in a row I’ve beat this drum, but only because the show deserves it, and because it somehow keeps getting better.

The first two episodes introduced Patience Evans (Ella Maisy Purvis), an autistic woman who works in criminal records and is eventually looped in by DI Bea Metcalfe (Laura Fraser) to help solve a case involving a serial killer. That case established the dynamic between Patience and Bea — a mentor who also learns from Patience how to examine cases differently, as well as the skepticism of Bea’s partner, DS Jake Hunter (Nathan Welsh).

In its third episode, the series shifts into more of a case-of-the-week format, as Metcalfe and Patience continue to build their relationship. The episode introduces Bea’s young son, Alfie (Maxwell Whitelock), into the mix. Alfie may have undiagnosed ADHD, and in Patience, he finally finds someone who gets him — a connection that also helps mend the strained relationship between Alfie and his mom.

What I really appreciate about Patience is that, unlike a few other popular procedurals (High Potential, Matlock, Elsbeth, all of which I enjoy to varying degrees), it hasn’t devolved into formula. There’s no blueprint for each episode because the characters’ relationships keep evolving, and the cases themselves are more complex. They require someone with Patience’s pattern-recognition skills and obsessive problem-solving instincts. The result is a series that delivers genuinely satisfying payoffs.

Look: There’s still Peacock’s Poker Face for at least one more week, and Patience can’t quite match that show’s playful genre-bending or the way its second season has broken from formula. But Patience scratches a different itch — one that’s getting very little attention on the television landscape right now.

‘Patience’ airs on linear PBS channels and by subscription to PBS Masterpiece.