Aidan Smith's TV week: We Own This City (Sky Atlantic), Everything I Know About Love (BBC1), Scotland's Home of the Year (BBC1)

What’s your favourite drama of the boxset era? Everyone nominating The Sopranos, The West Wing and Mad Men, I hear you, but it’s The Wire for me.

Sgt. Wayne Jenkins gives a lecture to cadets, while investigators Erika Jensen and John Sieracki question Momodu Gondo about his connection to a known drug dealer. Attorney Nicole Steele looks into complaints against notorious cop Daniel Hersl. Then, after an overdose death in Hartford County, David McDougall tracks the source of the drugs to Baltimore.

I’m always urging the uninitiated to watch it, and to stick with it. Penty give up after the first season where they struggle with street-corner patois of downtown Baltimore. Keep going, I say, the action moves to the docks, then city hall, then the schools and finally the newspaper office. Spoiler alert: the drugs scourge never goes away.

This is confirmed by We Own This City (Sky Atlantic), a new drama set in the same city, around 2017 and thereabouts, based on “true events” and penned by the same genius, David Simon, with help from George Pelecanos.

There’s similar early confusion - what the hell is going on? - but this time I’m ready. Drugs are rife and so’s police corruption. In the wake of the death of a black man in custody, problem cops keep the badge even with 50 complaints to their name because they “get out of the car and make arrests”.

Emma Appleton as Maggie in Everything I Know About Love.

Colleagues give up on apprehending a suspect and tell the crowd filming them: “Police yourselves.” In the civil rights office, the boss is chatted up: “What do you do for dinner?” “I drink it,” is her reply. Everyone on the right side of the law is super-stressed and the mayor is quitting. Who owns this city? No idea, but this is gripping.

It’s 2012 and a young woman with bouncing hair skips onto a train and is willing herself to have a Sliding Doors moment. Sure enough, when she can’t pay for the masses of booze she buys for the journey as her card is declined, a musician in a hat and cat-just-died trousers which weren’t in vogue ten years ago comes to her rescue.

Something tells me I’m not the target audience for Everything I Know About Love (BBC1). Quite a few things, in fact, including the hair and the hat and the breeks, oh, and the casual way the muso quotes Larkin as their train passes Slough (shouldn’t it be Betjeman?) and the incessant use of lists. Our heroine, for instance, is described as someone who likes “skinnydipping, wearing a bandana, playing snooker at the pub and putting hot sauce on everything”.

But then the drama, adapted from Dolly Alderton’s memoir of twentysomething life and love, introduces us to the London housemates of Maggie (Emma Appleton), she of the hair, and the Scottish one, Nell, fires off a few funnies.

Kate Spiers, Michael Angus and Anna Campbell-Jones judge Scotland's Home of the Year.

For instance, there’s sweet, innocent Birdy who’s persuaded by the others to try cocaine. Thrilled at not dying right away, she says she feels like she’s in Trainspotting and Nell, who’s played by Marli Siu from Forres, groans: “You are literally wearing a dress from Karen Millen.”

I’m not pretending I wholly understand this gag but am guessing it’s something to do with Millen exuding only marginally more danger than Boden (or, er, Zara?). Hey, maybe I’m not excluded. Maybe I could get into this. I like Nell’s strict policing of the misuse, and overuse, of the word “literally” and also Maggie’s Nico impersonation. I haven’t got a downer on her - far from it when she dances in her pants on her own in the empty flat, just before running into the Big Smoke night to bang on the door of her troubadour. I’m sure Carrie Bradshaw did something similar. This isn’t Sex and the City, though it might like to be, but it’s fun. Literally.

I’m certainly not the target audience for property shows. I mean, is Barry Bucknall still on TV? Surely Colin and Justin are. I can vaguely remember the Scottish home-improvement heroes struggling to shift a sofa up a flight of stairs like it was a giant Biblical boulder (“Push, Colin, push!”) and have often wondered if they succeeded in their mission.

Anyway, Scotland’s Home of the Year (BBC1) is the only one I watch now. By its nature - these are happy dwellers, they’ve got the house they want and the way they want it - there’s none of the acquisitiveness, obsessiveness and smugness of the other programmes. A lot of the “drama” elsewhere revolves round unhappiness - not achieving the dreamhome, that ridiculously expensive glass from Germany getting lost in transit, over-reaching, going mad.

We only properly meet the contestants in the final. A lot of the drama in SHOTY revolves round the sizeable frame of judge Michael Angus. Will he turn up for judging in dayglo colours or be the man in black as usual - a Johnny Cash tribute act, Lee Van Cleef doppelganger and body-double for Narcos’ Amado, the “Lord of the Heavens” who spirited drugs across the skies, all rolled into one? No, it’s black.

Will the houses have, for him, the correct “glass-to-wall ratio”? Will they even be big enough for this Gulliver to get through the front door? In a tiny cottage in Fort William, Angus was worried that when he stood up he’d lift the walls clean off their foundations.

This is a charming show. Angus has good banter with the other judges, Anna Campbell-Jones and Kate Spiers, which isn’t forced. The finalists are thrilled to have been chosen but modest, and typically remark: “We’re really proud which is not something you say often, being Scottish.” You may already know who wins this year. It’s a house which makes the big man cry.