Cruelty and horror increasingly fill the small screen. It is as if the refusal to show the effects of conflict in the news seeks compensation in a higher court of fiction.

Waking the Dead (BBC1 Sunday and Monday) began its eighth series two weeks ago with a middle-aged woman running naked through a forest, having been raped by three Turkish mafiosi; later, the team headed by Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve) discovers a tortured body hanging naked and upside down from a ceiling, his face half-eaten by maggots. In the following two-parter this past week, a young woman has been raped by two men, her 10-year-old thrown to his death over a bridge, she following – though not to her death; she lives to revenge.

The camera and the scripts dwell on the sadism and moral emptiness of the perpetrators, the prolonged psychic anguish of the victims – the latter dramatically possible because Boyd’s unit, complete with psychologist and forensic expert, does “cold crimes”, unsolved from a decade or more before, now yielding their mysteries to DNA-matching and ultra-sophisticated databases.

Boyd operates from a basement pulsing with technology, its apparent isolation from all other police (or any) departments underlining his role as a kind of Jove in a subterranean Olympus, responding to cases that rouse his interest or conscience so that he and his team descend on perpetrators who have “moved on”. A strength of this grim and absorbing programme is that it concludes that lives carry their past embedded in their present: thus Boyd and his colleagues appear as the enlarged embodiment of the regrets of a sleepless night or the stab of remorse on a bright day.

A new series of the French-made Spiral (BBC4 Sunday) shares the lingering on horror: the first episode had a cindered corpse, burned alive in a car boot by a banlieu punishment squad, break off in brittle pieces as police lifted it. But where Waking the Dead lives in a bubble, Spiral’s detective team fights for autonomous life in an atmosphere of corruption and political games. The moral centre, occupied by prosecutor François Roban and Chief Inspector Laure Berthaud (pictured), is surrounded by creeps, bribe-takers and toadies – and that’s just the lawyers. Berthaud’s team is unillusioned and casually violent, but in its stressed and nervy comradeship lies the only antidote to elite corrupt self-aggrandisement and burgeoning – largely immigrant – criminality.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking to curtail the sweeping powers of the unique French system of investigating judges, who both direct police enquiries and give judgments. They protest that this would destroy their forays into political and business criminality. Here, they appear as both saint (Roban) and more often sinner, surrounding honest police work with sinuous manoeuvres.

Casualty (BBC1 Saturday), in its 23rd year, is back too, cutting between the rows, romance and occasional medicine of Holby General and the stunningly dystopian world of a shopping mall, emptied by the recession, tended by an Afghan veteran security guard, its basement peopled by vagrants. The ruthless but near-ruined capitalist bastard owner secretly organises its burning to collect insurance – in the process killing or maiming many of the (literal) underclass, together with a visiting medical team led by hunky consultant Adam Trueman.

The clumsiness of the programme’s spatchcocking of contemporary events on to the soapiness of the action, and the operatic exaggeration of all emotions, behaviour and reactions have contributed to its long-living popularity. To be sure, it’s easy enough on the eye and – after the rigours of Waking the Dead and Spiral – on the nerves.

The three-part series The Last Nazis (BBC2 Saturday) shows Efraim Zuroff, inheritor of the mantle of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, looking for Aribert Heim, whose experiments on inmates of Mauthausen Camp included injections of poison into the heart and amputation of un-anaesthetised limbs. If living, Heim would be 93; Zuroff thinks he is in Chile, and pursues him there, waving a €315,000 reward. Thwarted, he learns Heim has been living in Egypt, and allegedly died there at least 15 years before. There is no proof, no closure. Zuroff will not give up his hope of finding him and having him judged, but the film ends on a note of hopelessness, as Zuroff, in the Mauthausen laboratory, reads the names of victims whom Heim meticulously listed in a diary.

No charred corpses or lingering on mutilations here. The horror came from shots of Heim’s mansion in Baden Baden, bought with the wealth he earned as a fashionable doctor; from the revelation that his family, had concealed and aided him; and from a furious man on a Chile street, roaring at Zuroff to “get out of my country! We don’t want you here”.

In his Berlin, the historian Anthony Beevor reflects that almost no Nazis thought they had committed atrocities – only mistakes. Zuroff, in a parallel reflection, says almost none had expressed regret. They carried their pasts, not as guilt, but as an episode: something you did, when that was what was on offer. That, undemonstratively, is the horror at the heart of darkness.

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