There’s three issues currently which will get you cancelled, banished to the moon, sacked, pilloried, or paraded through the streets naked and showered in effluent, depending on the mood of the crowd you’ve riled.

And they are, in no particular order: talking about trans rights from either side of the debate, putting jam on your scone before clotted cream or vice versa, and not being part of the Happy Valley glee club.

Let’s forgo the well-trodden gender and scones rows, and instead ponder the state of modern British television. If the paroxysms of praise showered on Happy Valley are anything to go by then the medium isn’t in fine fettle.

Happy Valley is distinctly average. It’s not awful or embarrassing TV. It’s simply well made, but run of the mill, Sunday night fodder. It hasn’t reshaped the crime genre, that’s for sure. It hasn’t reimagined the female lead. It hasn’t broken the mould for writing or directing. It’s just ‘okay’.

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Reviewers, however, have been hurling plaudits as if this was the new Shakespeare. It’s bewildering, until you consider just how mediocre most British television is, and how most reviewers are prepared to settle for the average. In a field of poor quality candidates, where critics set the bar so low Richard Osman could limbo under it, the laurels falling on Happy Valley make sense.

So why is Happy Valley average? Well, we’ve been here endless times before. Line of Duty and Bodyguard were pretty much the same in terms of style and theme. They too, sadly, are distinctly average.

The plots are ropey; you can feel producers straining to be edgy, but unfortunately ending up merely attention-seeking. Consider the end of Happy Valley – or any Line of Duty series. I’ll offer no spoilers, but will say the finales were slightly daft and over the top, a needy attempt for Hollywood-style thrills and fiery set pieces.

When it comes to Happy Valley there’s this notion prevailing that it somehow excels because of the seam of family drama. The family drama is indeed the best part of the show, but it hardly breaks boundaries. There’s also much buzz over the cast being led by women. That’s great – more female leads please, more female stories. But having a female lead in a cop show isn’t new.

The Danes perfected this in 2007 with The Killing – and there were plenty of female-led gritty dramas before that. Do we have to be reminded of Prime Suspect? Or go all the way back to something like Within These Walls or Bouquet of Barbed Wire in the 1970s. Has Tenko been forgotten? Women-centred drama isn’t new. So nothing has been reinvented with Happy Valley.

Now, none of this is to diss the actors involved. Sarah Lancashire is excellent in Happy Valley, as an actor she’s a class act. The three leads in Line of Duty – Martin Compston, Vicky McClure and Adrian Dunbar – are also superb. Keeley Hawes was stand-out in Bodyguard.

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Yet these big talents all must work with limited material in these cop dramas. The scripts render characters one note. All the above talents put on remarkable performances with that one note they’re given, but the writing remains distinctly insipid. Sarah Lancashire’s Sergeant Catherine Cawood is basically in a permanent state of bluff yet brooding Yorkshire angst.

Now, let me throw in a little nuance here. The writer of Happy Valley, Sally Wainwright, is also one hell of a talent. It’s just that Happy Valley isn’t where her talents show most. Her series Last Tango in Halifax was a gem of television drama; a brilliant anatomisation of the modern British family, darkly comic, ruthlessly honest, a wonderful exploration of our nation’s culture, our loves and hates, our fears and triumphs.

And therein lies the problem with the British cop drama: it tells us nothing about Britain. It’s stagey, predictable, obvious and without depth. Now, you may well say, ‘so what, it’s just a cop show?’. And that’s fine – but again I’d say, ‘then why are these dramas being held up by critics as spectacular unmissable telly?’.

Cop shows don’t have to be like this. The Scandinavians certainly put more into their crime dramas than car chases, doors getting kicked in, hard-boiled cops, and two-dimensional bad guys. Look at the great American crime dramas. They tell us truths about America’s soul – something British crime dramas seldom do anymore.

The Wire took us right into the lives of petty gangsters in the schemes of Baltimore and we learned that a crook could have poetry in their heart; that a drug dealer could be a brilliant business mind who just never had the chance to make it legitimately. Breaking Bad told us that a teacher could be so financially ground down in the great United States that they had to turn to selling crystal meth to pay for their cancer treatment.

The Herald: The Wire showed us 'that a crook could have poetry in their heart; that a drug dealer could be a brilliant business mind who just never had the chance to make it legitimately'The Wire showed us 'that a crook could have poetry in their heart; that a drug dealer could be a brilliant business mind who just never had the chance to make it legitimately' (Image: HBO)

Don’t get me wrong: some British TV still gets inside this nation’s psyche. Just not cop shows. If you want a beautiful exploration of what makes Britain British then watch the comedy series Ghosts. Still Game – and I mean this genuinely – says more about British lives than Happy Valley or Line of Duty. Sex Education, the British Netflix series, navigates the geography of modern morality from both the perspective of youth and age. It is, in truth, one of the few good shows on a streaming service that’s created a grey global goop culturally.

Foolishly, UK crime dramas desperately compete against this Netflix paradigm – which mostly just chases the lowest common denominator – rather than playing to the strengths of British writers. Producers try too hard to be whizz bang rather than concentrating on character. It’s all surface, no depth. Characters become cardboard cut-outs, not messy complicated humans.

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Worst of all, we’re now in Hollywood rinse-and-repeat mode. Like the endless, derivative, mind-numbing, culturally pointless and intellectually dead superhero franchises, British crime dramas are now just unlimited iterations of each other.

Reviewers really do readers a disservice by praising dramas like Happy Valley way beyond their merits. Praise it for what it is: an okay Sunday night cop show. A towering, game-changing work of art it is not.