Last week, ITV's Fred West reconstruction Appropriate Adult swept the board at the Baftas, which was nice, although in a shocking oversight, not one of the actors thanked the Wests themselves during their acceptance speeches. I mean, come on guys: if it wasn't for their pioneering character development, you wouldn't be there. Dominic West (no relation) even expressed a wish that hopefully the film – which was very sensitive and restrained, without a single musical number – might somehow lead to a reduction in the number of real-life Fred Wests out there in the future. Hear, hear. Don't know about you, but until I saw Appropriate Adult, I was ambivalent about murder. Now I realise it is wrong. When will the authorities see the light and do something to stop it? Have they even seen this show? Someone send them a DVD. Open their sodding eyes.

ITV was praised for taking a "risk" by tackling "difficult subject matter", which seems odd. The biggest risk for them is that Fred West is dead, thereby scuppering any realistic chance of a sequel. Unless I'm mistaken, apart from Cold Feet, virtually every successful drama they've broadcast for the past two decades has been primarily concerned with murder, either real or imaginary (or in the case of Whitechapel, both). You can't go three weekends without stumbling headlong into yet another bleak and unflinching two-part exploration of the crushing banality of evil, tinged with a heavy green-grey filter that conveys seriousness and is only ever so slightly undermined by the need to cut to a brightly coloured yoghurt commercial every 15 minutes to keep the show on the road. The British viewing public loves killing and killers, the killier the better. Fred West could've comfortably held down his own Saturday night gameshow if he hadn't hanged himself before executives could commission a pilot. How else do you think Vernon Kay ended up fronting All Star Family Fortunes? Three words: last-minute vacancy.

Not that the British (and I count myself among them, because I am one) are the only nationality with an innate lust for murdertainment. Whoever said "crime does not pay" clearly didn't work for a Scandinavian television production company, because a) it does and b) they said it in English, not Danish or Swedish or Norwegian or any of those other zany snowblown languages that make the speaker sound vaguely as if their vocal cords can only emit vowels in reverse.

I love a bleak foreign detective thriller, me. BBC4 has enjoyed great success with its ice-and-blood slot recently, what with The Killing, The Bridge, and now the almost parodic-sounding Sebastian Bergman, which as far as I can tell from what I've seen thus far (two-thirds of the first episode) is about a depressed Cracker type with an erection. Seriously: Sebastian Bergman is a hard-drinking criminal profiler whose wife and child died in tragic circumstances, thereby leaving him with a fun character flaw: to blot out his constant grief, he's perpetually leching after women. And not just any old women, but … Actually no, come to think of it, it is just any old women. Picture any old woman in your mind's eye and three seconds later Sebastian Bergman's there, jamming his dick in your ear in an attempt to have sex with her.

It's a pretty good gimmick, which is a must for any detective worth their salt. Sebastian Bergman comes on the back of Saga Noren from The Bridge, if you'll pardon the expression. Her party trick was an unspecified Asperger-style condition that left her unable to process basic human emotions. Whenever people broke down and wept in front of her, she'd just stand there staring at their misery with a glib, uncomprehending blankness, as if she was Michael Gove or something.

The Bridge, like The Killing, was pretty good, but only about 50% as good as everyone seems to be pretending it is – a percentage that's fitting since both series could've done with approximately half the number of episodes. (In case you're wondering, the best crime drama ever made is Breaking Bad, which isn't even broadcast in the UK, isn't a detective serial, and isn't even a crime drama really. In fact, I only mention it in the vague hope you'll go out and buy the DVD in such numbers that some enterprising UK network will consider broadcasting the fifth season, thereby saving me the trouble of illegally downloading it.)

Maybe it's time TV detectives took a brief sabbatical anyway. There surely aren't many interesting defects left for them to struggle with. We've had alcoholism, depression, OCD ... What's next? Spontaneous human combustion? Some friends and I once had an idea for a series about a detective who could only tell if people were guilty by having passionate, tender, drawn-out sex with them, a skill that backfires when his own father becomes the prime suspect. Put that on ITV starring Neil Morrissey and there'd be an outcry. Slap on some subtitles and broadcast it on BBC4 and you're Guardian Pick of the Day. Criminal.