In this first episode, a number of balls are chucked gleefully into the air – and we may all need notebooks to keep track. Plus, The Art of Japanese Life

If I didn’t know Fearless (ITV) was written by one of the writers and producers of the likes of Homeland, 24, and Person of Interest – Patrick Harbinson – I would be slightly worried about the number of balls that had been chucked gleefully into the air by the end of the first episode in its six-part run. To wit:

1. A human rights lawyer (Emma Banville, played with characteristic passion, intelligence and assiduity by Helen McCrory), whose speciality is uncovering miscarriages of justice, is being persecuted by the tabloids, who claim she is hellbent on setting “paedos” free.

2. Whose latest case involves investigating the possibly unsafe conviction of Kevin Russell, a man who has been in prison for 14 years for the murder of schoolgirl Linda Simms. He says his confession was coerced, and Emma – by the remarkably simple means of getting the autopsy report looked at by a scientist not in the police’s pocket and finding therein a whole lot of stuff that simply Does Not Add Up – quickly secures a retrial.

3. Who is also in the process of trying to adopt a child with her partner, an unfriendly witness from a former case. He is an erstwhile newspaper photographer and is played by John Bishop, who has an honest face but a thick Liverpudlian accent so we don’t know what to think.

4. And who is sheltering the wife and child of a refugee doctor who has returned to Syria to treat patients there.

5. Thus causing her to be surveilled and suspected by counter-terrorism agencies at every turn.

6. And who appears in the last 10 minutes or so to have unwittingly waded even deeper into the mire with Kevin. For lo! A set of photographs of Linda semi-clad and posing in his workshop turn up for the retrial, closely followed by Michael Gambon. He rings an American woman on a secure line and they talk cryptically about how much these photos might reveal if they did not “own” the man who took them.

7. Oh, and she is beset by nightmares connected to her father (in a hospital bed and, in his delirium, urgently apologetic to her), so a layer of dark family secrets are neatly added to the thriller millefeuille. The thrillefeuille.

It is all fabulously confident and classy stuff. Lots is clearly going to happen and we may all need notebooks to keep track but after a barrage of psychological dramas, it feels quite refreshing to be watching something that acknowledges a wider world and works with a broader palette than one baffled/grieving/terrified/secretly pathological man/woman/unassuming middle manager/parent plunging down a mental rabbit hole.

The Art of Japanese Life (BBC4), a three-part documentary exploring the complexities of Japanese culture, presented by Dr James Fox, promises to be utterly gorgeous in every way. Last night’s opening episode concentrated on the influence of nature, via Shinto and Buddhism, on Japanese art and an aesthetic that runs counter to ours by prizing simplicity, transience and uncertainty, and privileging questions over the hunting and spearing of facts. Emblematic of it all – after a brief summary of the history of brush painting in Japan and its place in Buddhist meditation – was Sesshu Toyo’s Haboku-sansui. An impossible variety of shades from a single colour in this 1495 splashed-ink masterpiece, applied in 50 or 60 strokes to create crags, trees, mountains, a tavern, a boat, a lake and an eternal beauty.

The rest of the programme explored various formative myths, Zen gardens, bonsai art, Japan’s reverence for the cherry blossom and its painfully fleeting beauty, the effect of modernisation on the country’s traditional harmony with nature, along with so much else in an hour and in so unhurried a fashion that you felt you must have entered some kind of meditative Zen-like state yourself.

Primarily, this was thanks to Fox himself and his spare and effective commentary – 50 or 60 strokes of his pen on a script and you have a landscape of knowledge. He is the ideal art presenter – expert and engagingly enthusiastic, but self-effacing; keen to explain only as much as the viewer needs to let appreciation grow and imagination bloom before moving, never too swiftly, on. The next two programmes will look at Japan’s relationship with the city and with the home. I can’t wait.