In The Fall, a police officer was shot dead in the back of the head in front of his son. In Coronation Street, Karl threw Sunita down the Rovers Return cellar steps and left her to burn to death while he escaped and then tried to pin the blame for the the fire on her, the monster. In Broadchurch, unacceptably, lovely Olivia Colman as DS Miller discovered during the murder investigation that that her dull, new-mannish husband was a homicidal paedophile. In The Village, set in Derbyshire circa 1914, John Simm wore a flat cap and a frown for hours, while Maxine Peake's pursed lips said: "Tripe me no skrikings, ain't our lives miserable?" Or however downtrodden rustics talked in Derbyshire circa 1914.

In every TV drama, something dismal is happening. Why? Don't we deserve cheering up? Hold that thought. What's happened, you might think, is that evil chancellor George Osborne has taken over the TV schedules to continue the government's austerity policies by other means. That's why Sue Perkins' lesbian vet sitcom Heading Out was insufficiently – oh, how it pains me to write the next word – funny. That's why glum TV newsreader Huw Edwards rather than stirringly hot former boxer-shorts model Jamie Dornan – you heard it here first – will be the next Doctor.

That's why the next series of Downton Abbey will be directed by Aki Kaurismäki. That's why The Great British Bake Off has been replaced by The Great British Badger Cull, in which Ant and Dec will impassively watch celebrities eat badgers that have been shot, butchered and flambéed by Marco Pierre White, Vinnie Jones, Bear Grylls, Badger Grills (no relation) and other hatchet-faced brutes with testosterone issues. Mary Berry will never masticate on telly again.

The Fall. Photograph: Steffan Hill/BBC

British drama has always had its bleak moments. In fact, Mike Leigh's 1971 debut film Bleak Moments typified that tendency. But here's the big difference between 1971 and another recession-hit Britain, 42 years on: in the early 70s, the TV schedules were devised with the commanding idea that they should cheer us up while government ministers delivered the economy to Beelzebub. Hence the decade-long diet of cross-dressing bruisers (Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough, the Two Ronnies, Slade) and weekly doses of Benny Hill's sexual harassment. It was all good, clean, innocent, mood-altering fun that only retrospectively turns out to have been wrong in so many varied ways (in the new series of Life on Mars, by the way, John Simm plays a time-travelling vice squad cop who goes back to 1973 to impose 21st-century sexual correctness on British telly. He has his work cut out).

But in 2013, bleak moments are all we have. The schedules are so unremittingly dismal and my viewing spirits so crushed that I didn't even chuckle when a wronged viola player egged Simon Cowell, though hitherto that would have kept me in tears of joy till payday. There is a book by the architecture writer Owen Hatherley, called A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain, in which he indulges in melancholic miserablism. TV drama is singing, like an inescapable, drunk, intolerably male karaoke singer massacring Like a Virgin, from the same hymn sheet.

Utopia. Photograph: Channel 4

Feel-bad telly began its stranglehold on our minds last autumn with Utopia, which, paradoxically, restored Channel 4's reputation for making viewable drama. In it, a wheezy, shellsuited henchman (Neil Maskell, superb) impassively offed, in quite offensive ways, lots of nice people on behalf of the evil Network, which sought to ruin humanity in unspeakable ways we needn't get into right now, but surely prefigured a Boris Johnson-led administration. Meanwhile, our trio of heroes fleeing the zombie killer's implacable, if risibly slow, advance were bossed by po-faced Jessica Hyde (Fiona O'Shaughnessy, excellent at annoying), one of those characters who have spent their lives honing survival skills and martial arts moves for the looming apocalypse, while people like me, confronted by such unremitting futuristic misery, would sit crying by the roadside waiting for the wolves to carry them off if the shops ran out of Hobnobs. I have seen the future and, brother, it is murder.

The Village. Photograph: Brian Sweeney

But the past is no consolation either, at least on telly. Initial reviews of The Village championed the ability of British telly to make a cross between Heimat and Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. Finally, critics wrote, an authentic pre-first world war Britain rather than the one that spooled from Julian Fellowes' laptop. We might dream of transcending our present woes by time-travelling to a more wholesome past in which we aspire to more than posting "likes" for strangers' rubbish cakes on Instagram and waiting for the next teen vampire franchise to fry our grey matter, but The Village was so grim it annulled that escapist impulse.

Game of Thrones.

How about fantasy past? Also no consolation. There is negligible hey nonny nonnying in Game of Thrones, just breathtaking ruthlessness with regard to terminating its stars. Spoiler alert: on Sunday night, Robb Stark and his pregnant wife Talisa were done in as they plotted to overthrow House Lannister and, by extension, all-frowning Charles Dance. Serves them right for being so unbearably good-looking and improbably well-adjusted with anachronistically conditioned hair, you rightly point out, but the grimness was unremitting: there was no Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister to lighten the mood, and Mackenzie Crook had his face torn off by flying wolves in the rain and mud.

The only consoling possibility is that TV is not run by George Osborne but by reverse psychologists who believe, probably wrongly, that watching other people suffer in TV dramas makes it easier to endure our real-life suffering. Feel-bad makes us feel good. A nation of TV viewers is on the receiving end of a questionable experiment. We will only find out whether the experiment works in 2040, by which time we will be, or wish we were, dead.

Coronation Street. Photograph: Joseph Scanlon/ITV

When will it end? Like the recession, probably never. On Coronation Street, Tina, who decided to have a surrogate baby to pay off a loan shark (a policy that not even debt-consolidating website frontwoman Carol Vorderman recommends), now refuses to hand over the baby to Gary and Izzy after getting attached to the little charmer in ICU – the resultant dismal tug of love will doubtless go on for months. (What, serious face, is the legal status of a surrogate mum's claims in such circumstances? Let Coronation Street, like a modern King Solomon, decide).

Broadchurch. Photograph: ITV

A second series of Broadchurch has been commissioned, even though the glum, serial-killer storyline seemed to have been resolved at the end of series one. Similarly, a second series of The Fall was greenlit before the first one finished, with commissioning editors the BBC no doubt buoyed by BBC2's best viewing figures for ages and by that spike in sales of sexy silk shirts like the one Gillian Anderson wears as she plays 2013's answer to DCI Jane Tennison. Incidentally, can it really be true that women are moving on from Sofie Gråbøl's no-makeup, wellies and sweater look as they seek inspiration from another feminist homicide cop?

And then there is Run, Channel 4's new four-part portmanteau drama series that starts next month, about south Londoners at the ends of their various ropes. It's so grim it makes all the foregoing shows look like a particularly jaunty episode of Miranda. It's so unremitting that it makes Accused look like Lark Rise to Candleford. I defy you not to watch it with your hands over your ears like Miranda's posh mum intoning "Such fun! Such fun! Such fun!" so you can't hear the harrowing dialogue.

It recalls the south London-set 2002 Mike Leigh film All or Nothing, only much bleaker. Remember that scene in the film in which an obese teen (a young James Corden) had a heart attack and his pinched-faced, mousy mum (Lesley Manville) made us cry with her maternal tears as she tended his prone form? That was sunshine and lollipops next to 2013's miseryvision.