All the jealousy and heartache you’d expect

There is no such thing as good and evil, just endless gradients of misfortune. As one of the quietly dismayed detectives in American Justice sighed, “People make terrible mistakes.”

This new documentary series, sculpted in the shade of Netflix’s highly acclaimed Making a Murderer, sheds light on Florida’s notoriously harsh justice system.

A Republican stronghold, Jacksonville has the dubious honour of being known as the state’s murder capital. Controversial state attorney Angela Corey practically revels in her notorious record for sending so many convicts to death row.

Like a real-life version of The Wire, the cameras focused on various levels of the hierarchy, from Corey in her all-powerful

seat of government all the way down to the alleged criminals fighting for their lives.

The two crimes in question were a double-homicide involving a man and his niece, and the killing of a young black man, whose cousin, Trey Wright, had been accused of committing the murder.

A creeping sense of dread permeated proceedings, as we followed grieving loved ones, patient detectives, conflicted prosecutors and the petrified accused.

In the end, Trey was cleared of all charges. He didn’t murder anyone. A lucky escape.

The programme’s message was gravely apparent throughout: the death penalty is abhorrent.

An eye for an eye? Fine, why don’t you physically and literally pluck out that eye? Or just let prisoners rot in jail. Isn’t that punishment enough?

Here’s a thought, America. Your second amendment? Scrap it. It was written by people more than 200 years ago who lived in fear of being mauled by bears. That fear no longer exists.

There is no justification for keeping guns at home. If you ban guns, then gun crime will recede. It’s that simple.

Then again, this is the country that elected a brazenly stupid, petulant child-man as president so there’s probably no hope for it at all.

And if you think I’m using this TV column to express my own political views, then you’re right.

But that’s because television is a window into the soul of our sick, rotten society. It’s your own reflection, whether you like it or not. More jokes next week, folks! Meanwhile, if you needed further proof that human beings are ridiculous creatures, then your deepest fears would have been confirmed by the new documentary series Three Wives, One Husband.

In the programme the polygamous lives of a Utah desert Mormon sect are presented as a sad microcosm of our never-ending ability to delude ourselves for no logical reason whatsoever.

According to their fundamentalist religious beliefs, this enclosed community regard men as earthly manifestations of God Himself, here to sire as many children as possible.

This necessitates the taking of several wives, which naturally leads to all the jealousy, insecurity and heartache you’d expect.

Enoch, our protagonist, definitely has a type. His two wives and potential third look practically identical.

The women spoke candidly about their fears while desperately struggling to justify the pain they’ve pointlessly endured.

One of them argued that polygamy keeps their marriage fresh, as the periods her husband spends with his other families makes her lonely heart grow fonder. She was fooling no one. Despite the potentially lurid subject matter, the programme doesn’t mock these essentially nice, harmless people. It merely shakes its head in sympathy and despair.