Criminal Justice
BBC1, Monday to Friday, 9pm

In a summer awash with interminable reality shows and rolling sports coverage, discerning viewers feeling the effects of the annual drama drought should embrace this new five-part legal drama. Though courtroom potboilers are commonplace, Criminal Justice is something far rarer: a riveting legal drama which genuinely critiques the judicial status quo.

Headlining an impressive cast, Ben Whishaw stars as Coulter, a naïve twenty-something whose drug-fuelled one-night stand ends in the violent death of his conquest. Damned by a wealth of circumstantial evidence but unable to recall the night's events his guilt is taken for granted, making him the silent pivot of a complex legal dance.

For Bill Paterson's charmingly pugnacious chief detective the case promises watertight certainties and a chance to pad his department's ailing crime stats. For Coulter's defence team, however, it offers ample opportunity for invention, self-promotion and intrigue. Purposefully ignoring their client's fractured recollections they begin constructing their own narrative, one more likely to sway the jury's sympathies. Coulter, meanwhile, shuttling between the dock and the inmate-run bastille where he's being held with the likes of Hooch (Pete Postlethwaite), soon finds himself fighting to preserve his sanity and wellbeing.

Scripted by Peter Moffat, a former barrister turned screenwriter, the plot deftly combines arcane legal chicanery with the grittier requirements of the modern crime drama. The legal system revealed here is driven by institutional collusion and self-serving indifference rather than deliberate malice, a distinction which makes this a far more disquieting nightmare.

BEST ARTS

Nick Cave Night
BBC4, Friday, 9.30pm onwards

For most rock stars middle age is a time of creative decline and diminished relevance. Yet even in his 50th year, Australian troubadour Nick Cave shows no signs of succumbing to either artistic inertia or midlife angst. With his latest long-player Dig, Lazarus, Dig offering reassuring proof that age might just be a state of mind after all, BBC4 has thoughtfully dedicated an evening of programming to the Black Crow King.

Also try: Michael Palin And The Mystery Of Hammershoi (BBC4, today, 8pm). Palin embarks on another odyssey, following in the footsteps of enigmatic Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi

BEST DOCUMENTARY

True Stories: Our Year Without Oil
More4, Tuesday, 10pm

Alarmed by the prospect of climate change, filmmaker John Webster convinces his family to forsake petroleum and its derivatives for a full 12 months. It's a Quixotic mission revealing, with humour and insight, both our crippling dependence on fossil fuels and our worrying lack of a back-up plan should the wells run dry.

Also try: Dispatches: The Truth About Street Weapons (Channel 4, tomorrow, 7.50pm). Dr Tunje Lasoye, of King's College Hospital, explores the medical costs of rising gang violence

BEST REALITY SHOW

Britain's Missing Top Model
BBC3, Tuesday, 9pm

Running as part of BBC3's Beauty season, this new series boasts a format which will seem eerily familiar to fans of Living TV's Next Top Model franchise. Eight wannabe models, running the personality gamut from shrinking violet to prima donna, undertake an arduous set of modelling challenges to decide which of them will be awarded with a fashion shoot for a top style magazine.

Although the formula is derivative, the show breaks ground in one crucial respect, replacing the expected gaggle of would-be Lily Coles with a gang of physically disabled aspirants. It pays off, offering us the conventional pleasures of elimination television and a provocative argument for unmooring our concept of beauty from the restrictions of bodily perfection.

Also try: Personal Services Required (Channel 4, Wednesday, 9pm). Effectively The Apprentice for au pairs, this new series sees domestics battle each other for household vacancies