The Offer is one of the best TV series I've seen for years.

It's a dramatisation of how The Godfather (1972) got made, told from Albery Ruddy's point of view. Ruddy starts out as a bored employee of Rand Corp and somehow gets himself a job as a producer after a pitching a highly successful TV show (Hogan's Heroes) and then through sheer cheek turns this into a shot as a film producer on a prospective book - The Godfather.

It grabbed me from the first few moments and held my attention through the entire 10 episode run. By episode 5 I was genuinely beginning to feel sad because I was now on the last half of the show - and it was coming to end. Not kidding.

It manages to be enthralling, scary and touching while dealing with gangsters, and even worse - Hollywood people. Outstanding moments include the odd couple bond between Coppola and Puzo. Puzo wrote the novel and worked with Coppola to turn it into a script. Ruddy putting them up in a house to work intensively on the script together is a source of genuine laugh-out-loud moments. It's no spoiler to say the film gets made, but all the twists and turns along the way might be.

It's a fabulous series and seems to have slipped under many people's radar too.

If you haven't seen it yet, I can highly recommend it.