Due to his notoriously unreliable eyesight, Dominic Cummings may have had to read the shortlists for the British Academy Television awards a few times before he could be absolutely sure. But the prime minister’s chief adviser will be relieved that Benedict Cumberbatch has not been nominated for best actor for his portrayal of Cummings in Channel 4’s Brexit: The Uncivil War, which dramatised the best-known pre-Durham period in the life of the long-distance-driving No 10 fixer. There is a nomination for the drama itself, but Cummings is spared the prospect of finding out what the Bafta jurors thought of his fictional depiction. It is a measure of the coronavirus-era transformation of culture that shows about Brexit – which, until 31 January, seemed to be the country-changing event of a lifetime – now seem to belong to an ancient period of British history and TV. Weariness with the European story may explain the regrettable absence of Brook Lapping’s magnificent BBC documentary series, Inside Europe: 10 Years of Turmoil, which will be an extraordinary resource for future historians; while it sneaked into the eligibility period for the 2020 Baftas (1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019), it had the misfortune of going out almost 18 months ago. The same time restriction means it is too soon for Covid-19 to be reflected in the awards. However, the fact that voting took place at a terrifying stage of the pandemic infection curve may have given Chernobyl, a story of political incompetence and cover-up amid catastrophe, an additional resonance that helped towards its remarkable 14 nominations. It deserved to do well in any case, as one of the greatest pieces of fact-based drama ever made. Chernobyl was a co-production between Sky Atlantic and the US network HBO, a pair that also collaborated on Succession, the dark farce about a Murdoch-like media dynasty. HBO also co-produced BBC One’s Gentleman Jack, Sally Wainwright’s compelling drama starring Suranne Jones as a pioneering lesbian. The US channel – which was the first cable network in the US, starting in 1972 – has become one of the most serious Bafta players outside of the established BBC providers, also getting a factual nod for co-producing Channel 4’s The Hunt for Jihadi John. But even the cable behemoth struggles to compete with the TV fiction superpower that is Netflix. In the past, it has been perceived as the victim of resentful, traditionalist snobbery from Bafta voters, but this year it provides 50% of the drama series finalists, thanks to The Crown (despite a third series that was sketchy and even more than usually cavalier with the facts) and The End of the F***ing World. Netflix also has half of the international section, to which it was once confined, with Unbelievable and When They See Us, unrelated series that together create a provocative double-bill about groups – young women who have been raped and young black men accused of that crime – that the US legal system is prejudiced to disbelieve. In the performance categories, the most welcome and deserved inclusion is Glenda Jackson for her emotionally searing portrayal of a woman with dementia in the BBC’s Elizabeth is Missing, adapted from Emma Healey’s novel. Jackson, 84, should probably be given a special prize for the longest period between Bafta TV nominations. She was last recognised 49 years ago for Elizabeth R, the gap partly explained by a 23-year sabbatical as a Labour MP. (Yes, her second nomination in five decades has the same name in the title as the first, although Jackson’s character in Elizabeth is Missing was Maud, searching for her titular vanished best friend despite key clues and discoveries vanishing in her own mental confusion.) Because of the Covid-related two-month delay in nominations, you have only until Sunday night to catch up with Elizabeth Is Missing on BBC iPlayer – you should take the opportunity. With Bafta under internal and external scrutiny for the domination by established white talent of the organisation’s film awards this year, it will be celebrated that the quartet up for male performance in a comedy programme – Guz Khan, Jamie Demetriou, Ncuti Gatwa and Youssef Kerkour – are Britons with, respectively, Pakistani, Cypriot, Rwandan and Moroccan heritage. Nonetheless, it is sad to see Andrew Scott miss out. His performance as the character called the Priest (to which social media denizens added the adjective “hot”) in Fleabag seemed to me an exceptional piece of TV acting; the character – deeply sensual, but also profoundly spiritual – had a complexity rare in comedy or, indeed, drama. Another actor who can feel disappointed is Martin Freeman, ignored for his portrayal of the real-life DS Steve Fulcher, a detective whose career was ruined for not following the rules while achieving a crucial breakthrough in a murder case, in ITV’s A Confession. The drama itself is rightly up for best mini-series, but Freeman, stretching himself by playing a flawed and sometimes unlikable man, was its heart. These nominations also continue the perplexing relationship between Bafta and Jed Mercurio. The leading creator of popular thrillers is once again overlooked in all major categories for Line of Duty, with Adrian Dunbar ignored for his performance as Supt Ted Hastings that, in the most recent series, came the closest the police procedural has to King Lear. This means that, despite the police corruption series and another Mercurio drama, Bodyguard, being among the most watched and talked-about dramas of the past decade, the only Bafta won by a Mercurio project is the “must-see moment”, voted for by the public, for a scene from Bodyguard. A sequence from Line of Duty is up for must-see this year as well, featuring Stephen Graham. But the five nominations for Graham’s series The Virtues suggests that there may be a disconnect between voters’ and audiences’ tastes of the sort that the Oscars have often been seen to represent. I am also sad at there being nothing for Russell T Davies’s futuristic BBC drama Years and Years. Denigrated by some at the time as an anti-Brexit revenge fantasy, the series now seems, in its depiction of the temptations and limitations of political populism in a time of apocalyptic threat, chillingly prophetic of these plague times. The depiction by Emma Thompson of Vivienne Rook – a chancer who sees in chaos the route to political power – channelled Trump and Johnson without openly invoking them; it merits re-viewing after recent events in the UK and US. These are the last Bafta awards to fall in the term of the current BBC director general, Tony Hall. The challenge for his successor is shown not just by the domination of the dramatic categories by HBO and Netflix, but by the jurors’ inclusion, in the news coverage and live event categories, of the ITV/ITN coverage of the 2019 general election results, with nothing for the BBC’s first post-David Dimbleby show. This pain for the corporation is exacerbated by the inclusion in the same category of the Sky News coverage of the Hong Kong protests and of Victoria Derbyshire, for her BBC Two morning show that has been axed. The shortlisting feels like a deliberate two fingers to Broadcasting House.