Television does some interesting things with reality in its pursuit of audience. In drama, it claims – as all vehicles for drama do – to portray a deeper-than-surface reality through fiction. In documentary, it selects scenes from life to illuminate a state of affairs, so that we might understand our societies better. And in “reality” television, it creates cages of differing kinds in which humans voluntarily are shown associating, courting, mating and scrapping, as character is revealed through pressure.

Drama this week included Defying Gravity (BBC2 Wednesday), a programme that defies more than merely the laws of Newton in its relentless drive to make a bad soap of a promising situation. American astronauts of both sexes embark on a six-year tour of planets closest to earth; with them they take not just laboratories, probes and data banks but, rendering these negligible, a network of relationships that have already developed on earth or that promise to bloom in the hothouse of space travel.

The pursuit of what now seems a TV writers’ credo – that humankind can bear any amount of relationship narratives – renders the mission hostage to the love interests of the crew. The underlying reality of human life, in this rendering, is emotion; the job, whose imperatives are held in the hands of an emotionally arid director at mission control, is only the setting in which the tangled webs ravel and unravel. The heart needs the head only as a kind of satnav instrument on the dashboard. (See reruns of Star Trek for how to do science-fiction that keeps character focused on the mission.)

Murderland (ITV1 Wednesday) is a cloudy cop three-parter from which emerge two performances of such apparently unforced dramatic finesse that you come to believe the cloudiness is produced for their sake, as the swirls of a Turner painting frame the activity at its centre. Carrie (Bel Powley) is a teenager who returns home to a murdered mother, with the presumed killer still lurking (she escapes). DI Hain (Robbie Coltrane), from whose bulk a face of battered, handsome watchfulness protrudes like that of a turtle, is the case detective.

The plot is needlessly languorous but its stimulating vision of reality is that we have little idea of the others about us, including the significant others. Carrie did not know that her beloved mother, a single parent, was working as a prostitute; her trust in DI Hain seems misplaced – though perhaps others’ mistrust of him is unjust. Told in flashback, the series is a quest for the reality of the defining event in a young woman’s life; the power of the two main characters, and the actors’ ability to sketch in a relationship of complexity and some fascination should keep an audience.

Fly-on-the-wall documentary is realism dependent on what is probably a fiction: that those filmed living their real lives become so accustomed to the camera’s presence that it sinks to trivial levels of consciousness. Still, it may happen: busy people – in The Force (Channel 4 Tuesday), Hampshire police officers – have to get on with it, and cannot disguise their characters. Thus the inspector who leads an investigation into a murder in episode one is oddly chirpy, out of sync with the horror of the crime. The woman detective who is part of the rape unit in episode two is determined to take seriously a rape charge that seems, from an early stage, to be false (and is).

The series is finely done, the stories shaped out of weeks of investigations clearly told. Yet it engenders despair, because the rapes investigated are either a lie, or are real but teeter along a borderline between consent and coercion, or are real and brutal but a devil to prove – not least because the victims shy away from full disclosure, or are too shocked and shamed to remember, or to wish to. That someone – as in episode one – would have enthusiastic sex after a night of excess, then claim rape, devalues years of struggle to establish the crime as serious: binge culture has many costs. Another sign of the reality of our times – the rape unit, an experiment by Hampshire which seems to have produced both a rapid response and a culture of respect for the victim, was almost disbanded, ultimately spared but deeply cut.

The Force revealed the most real television of all: CCTV. I’ve long been in the majority who believe in its largely benign effect, and in the two main cases that the programme illustrated, it was critical in establishing innocence in the first place, guilt in the other. To see, at the end of the first episode, the murderer carry in a huge and obviously empty suitcase to his squalid flat, then stagger out, dragging it behind him with the body of his victim inside, bound for incineration, was to share the exultation of the Hampshire team, and to say inwardly, “Gotcha!”

The images which showed that A was in location B at time C set the seal on a two-month investigation. They meant that the murderer of a hard-working young Polish woman called Sylwia faced judgment (though he cheated that by hanging himself in his cell). And the chirpy inspector, refusing to indulge in the weltschmerz so beloved of fictional detectives, smiled and said “On to the next case” – which, in his real world, is always coming down the track.

And “reality” television itself? That’s the next case for this column.

john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd