ITV ran the first episode of Dexter the other night, and having heard lots of good things I decided to watch it. And it was…pretty good, if that’s a description that’s appropriate to a series whose protagonist is a serial killer who bumps off other serial killers as a public service.

It’s all done with a twist of humour: Dexter narrates the story and explains his sociopathic tendencies with a predictably pop psychological angle. Dexter’s cop father deduced his son’s nature at an early age when he killed the family dog because its barking was upsetting his mum. Dad wasn’t convinced: there were enough bones in the hole where the dog was buried to account for half the pets in the neighbourhood.

Now, I have no problem with black humour. A dark treacly current of it runs through many of my favourite films, from The Manchurian Candidate through the brilliant and overlooked Guy X. But what makes those stories work for me is that they treat their subjects with unflinching respect. And that’s where Dexter falls down, at least on the basis of what I’ve seen. It was – and I intentionally use a vile word here – ‘hip’ in its attitude to death, and hip rhymes with flip, and that’s why it just didn’t gel for me. Compare with the approach Six Feet Under takes: death is central to the series, and is treated with the respect it deserves, even if the manner of individual deaths is a cause for short-term amusement.

Will I watch Dexter again? Yes, but with diminished expectations. This is lightweight television with serious pretensions that has a disturbing undercurrent in letting viewers witness Dexter despatching serial killers in his own special way: that kind of vicarious thrill is as close as I’m likely to get to being a Republican, and I didn’t like it.

This week’s Torchwood also stepped into hallowed ground, with a rather confusing episode in which one of our heroes somehow became Death. Only since this is nominally a science fiction show (and not a sex comedy, you may be surprised to hear), there was some tenuous link between Death as seen on a Tarot card near you, all skeletal like, and a low rent deity worshipped by Weevils, which regular viewers will know as the aliens so prevalent in Cardiff that there’s a tick-box in the local census to record yourself as one.

The failure to blend mythic Death with an alien entity beloved of reptilian aliens really came across when Death was doing its level best to kill off more than a dozen people in a hospital. If the Daily Mail is to be believed, the NHS can do that with ease on a regular basis, what with MRSA and foreign nurses, but for some reason Death – suffering from performance anxiety perhaps – just wasn’t up to the task, even with a little child suffering from leukaemia in its bony hands. Anyway, despite some promising moments, my general feeling is that Torchwood still isn’t Fit For Purpose, and that’s even after a barnstorming opening to the second series.

For all that, Torchwood had some more convincing dark humour than Dexter around mortality. The story’s protagonist being unable to get it up for a woman who’d got her hand down his pants was an interesting insight into the problems of the undead brought about by lack of bloodflow. And some of what happened was visually impressive, with Captain Jack and colleague atop a multi storey car park surrounded by supine Weevils being a stand-out image. Dexter countered with some interesting blood spatter visuals, and a nicely art-directed scene in which red threads marked out the angles and distances of blood coming from its human source, but even that was all very much in the footsteps of CSI rather than being innovative.

I’ve got no issue with death being a subject of drama, on television or in other forms, for any age. I do have a problem with it being glossed over and trivialised, as in the way that death is treated in computer games and crasser action films. And if it’s to be treated with humour, let’s aim high and go for the level of William Burroughs, whose cancerous croak is playing behind me at the moment in a delicious collaboration with Material; ‘Words of Advice for Young People’:

“Some of you may encounter the Devil’s bargain if you get that far. Any old soul is worth saving, at least to a priest. But not every soul is worth buying. So you can take the offer as a compliment.”