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This article was written by John Crace, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 2nd July 2010 05.45 UTC

There’s an unwritten law for any new “gritty cop show”™. It states that no one should have a clue what’s going on for at least the first half hour of the opening episode. Southland (More 4) – a US “gritty cop show”™ made for the networks and then banished to the cable channels for being too, er, gritty – may not have taken this to the extremes of The Wire, whose inaudible dialogue made the whole of the first series virtually unintelligible, but it certainly did the genre proud.

So we started with a fast-cut night-time mix of police cars, blood on the streets, flashing blue lights, shouty crowd scenes, a dead teenager and a panicky young cop, before tracking back 12 hours to an equally fast-cut day-time mix of police cars, blood on the streets, shouty crowd scenes and a different dead teenager. Not to mention several shouty cops, a shouty cop wife, a missing girl and a paedophile. Obviously.

But then intelligible plot always comes second to mood and style in any “gritty cop show”™ – and Southland more than delivers on these. All you really needed to know was that we’re out with the cops among the gangs in south LA, where the streets are always mean. There’s Ben the posh rookie (played by ex OC star Benjamin McKenzie) who has to prove to his partner that he’s mean enough for the meanest of streets. He does – though he’s still a sensitive flower at heart because he reads Toni Morrison in his spare time. There’s Officer Lydia with the difficult mum; there are the cops with the troubled home life . . . oh, you get the picture, right down to the song on the credits by cult indie band The National.

Southland doesn’t exactly break new ground. If you closed your eyes you could have been watching an updated NYPD Blue transferred to LA. It’s arguable whether the world really needs another “gritty cop show”™ when there are already so many doing the rounds, but it’s summer and there isn’t too much on TV worth watching apart from the sport, so we should probably be grateful for something new that’s halfway decent.

At any rate, be thankful it isn’t Homes from Hell (ITV), a franchise that is now about as depressed as the property market it feeds off. Having rounded up a few bods who have lost money on their homes in the UK in previous series, the programme-makers have now gone to Dubai to repeat the not very difficult trick. And apart from an excuse to show sunny backgrounds of beaches, palm trees, luxury cars and tall buildings, there was no very obvious difference.

It may be breaking news to the programme-makers that there is a global recession in which property prices have slumped and some people have lost money, but it isn’t to most of us, so there’s only schadenfreude, or the inability to reach for the off switch, to keep you watching one bewildered couple after another describing how they lost their job or the developers went bust.

You also couldn’t help feeling that some of the couples had contributed to their own downfall. If you want to take advantage of the tax-free luxury of Dubai, then you have to accept some of its more repressive legal downsides. Such as debt being an imprisonable offence: yes, if you lose your job and can’t afford the rent then you are treated like a criminal. Nor would you imagine that many people could be so swept up by the Dubai dream that they would buy an unbuilt apartment from a glossy brochure without checking they had cover in case the developer went bust. Yet here they were.

Most curious of all were Steve and Artie, who had quite rightly decided Dubai was now too small for their business in personal motivation and had decided to sell up their £750,000 home. Except no one wanted to buy it, so they came up with a unique way to auction it. They were going to sell 10,000 tickets at £75 each; the ticket would entitle you to bid for the house, with the odd twist that the winner would be the person who bid the least. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Steve and Artie that anyone in their right mind would offer just 1p and the house – assuming all the tickets sold – would end up with 10,000 owners. But maybe I’m missing the point. I certainly did with the rest of the programme.

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