Who wants to think about murdered children on a weekday evening? A fair few of us, if the ratings are anything to go by. This week BBC1 and ITV have gone head to head with new crime dramas Mayday and Broadchurch: both with decorated casts and nuanced scripts that lift them above the standard police procedural; both previewed as the kind of event television that can seem antediluvian in an age of download and bargain box sets.

Mayday, which tracks the disappearance of 14-year-old Hattie as she is about to take the part of May Queen in her village's annual parade, stars Sophie Okonedo, Aidan Gillen and a fabulously overwrought Lesley Manville. It launched on Sunday – the first of five consecutive nights – with 6.2 million viewers and a 25% audience share; but lost out the following evening to the first of eight weekly instalments of Broadchurch, which began with 6.8 million and a concurrent gush-in on social media. Coincidentally, both series are made by Kudos, the production company behind Spooks and, most recently, the bizarrely brilliant Utopia.

It has already been suggested that Broadchurch detectives David Tennant and Olivia Colman, investigating the death of a local boy in the eponymous seaside town, owe a debt to the Nordic noir plotlines that have dominated quality crime drama of late – although the scenery of Dorset's Jurassic coast, where the series was filmed, could give any fjord a run for its money, and, as Tennant proved on Monday night, it is difficult to be entirely sombre when you're eating a 99 ice cream.

More pertinent, perhaps, is that what these new series share with, for example, The Killing, is the protracted examination of a single crime rather than the stock-in-trade one incident per episode of, say, Silent Witness or Lewis. It was the writer-director Stephen Poliakoff who famously declared his intention to slow television down, deliberately filming long scenes and extended narratives against the contemporary grain of jump shots and chases. Maybe this change of pace reflects an acceptance by executives that not all viewers require their television viewing to fit a video game-shortened attention span, or at least that those viewers who do are perfectly capable of downloading something suitable from the internet.

But slowing down can refer to consumption as much as production. Viewers of Broadchurch, and to a much lesser extent followers of the five-nighter splurge Mayday, will find themselves doing exactly what the trend analysts predicted would go the way of the dinosaur: making an appointment to view, and doing so on a weekly rather than hourly basis. Self-scheduling, after all, has been the holy grail of the medium for decades, and fuss-free replay, record and catch-up functions, as well as the ubiquitous box set and an occasional bit of illegal streaming, have made this a reality for the majority of viewers with a basic grasp of technology.

As the director David Fincher said in a recent interview with the Directors Guild of America: "The world of 7:30 on Tuesday nights, that's dead … The captive audience is gone. If you give people this opportunity to mainline all in one day, there's reason to believe they will do it." Fincher's re-make of House of Cards was premiered online last month by the subscription-only site Netflix, which leapfrogged traditional networks and offered the entire series for streaming at once. Some commentators doomily echoed his eulogy for scheduled television.

But, while binge-viewing is certainly a phenomenon – ask anyone who has mysteriously found themselves square-eyed at 2.30am after "just one more" episode of a box set – it's interesting that Netflix is still refusing to release figures for House of Cards, and that the series itself was first popularised on the BBC. It would seem that we like our television to be both convivial (live) and controllable (on demand), and that the two may well coexist more cheerfully than expected.

While I'd be happy to spin an argument that lays the blame for the decline of western civilisation firmly at the feet of reality television, what this genre has done over the past 10 years is to remind us about the delight of collective participation in popular culture via their flickering friend in the corner.

With the advent of play-on-demand and Sky Plus, the fantasy bonding of soap operas and regular dramas evaporated, as we became atomised even in our television viewing, used to the instant gratification and individuation that technology affords us. But the Saturday night talent shows, whether of the civilian or celebrity variety, live-blogged and debated on Twitter and Facebook, rehabilitated the social adhesive of event television.

Whether a tidy 7 million will commit to two month's worth of appointments with the Broadchurch detectives remains to be seen. But it is little wonder that our viewing of both linear and on demand continues to rise when the preponderance of murder mysteries on the schedules reinforces the message that nowhere is safer than your sofa.

Twitter: @libby_brooks