Post-9/11 American TV drama has tended to focus on the enemies within. Series such as Invasion and Surface have expressed the fear of infiltration of the United States through unknown forces. The Agency and 24 have featured can-do agents stopping fiendishly efficient terrorists that has perhaps reflected an almost childlike hunger for American indomitability at a time when news reports suggest otherwise.

What’s intriguing about the US series Sleeper Cell (Channel 4) is that it shows the FBI riddled with bureaucracy and incompetent agents who screw up surveillance work. They are threatening the cover of Darwyn (Michael Ealy), a Muslim African-American agent who has infiltrated an Islamic terrorist cell that’s plotting potential strikes on LA targets. Unfortunately the rest of the series shows that complex topical issues and formulaic drama don’t mix well.

So far Darwyn is a standard-issue action-adventure hero. He’s a loner who emanates the kind of cool self-possession that is catnip to crime bosses and pretty women, although Ealy’s performance is low- key to the point of near-invisibility. Darwin’s religion seems only a convenient device to establish that not all Muslims are bad, while his race is even less of an issue. His involvement with a single mother is an excuse for gauzy sex and to show that plotting mass murder can get in the way of a relationship.

The series plays on the paranoia that anyone can be a terrorist by having the cell as a model of diversity. As well as Darwyn, there is an all-American Koran scholar who runs a bowling alley, a hip- hop-loving Bosnian teacher and a French former skinhead (unshaven in a GQ-model way) who has found the true path. As if that wasn’t enough, their Saudi leader, Farik, is posing as a Jewish community leader who coaches a synagogue’s junior baseball team. Despite Oded Fehr’s commanding presence as Farik, the character remains the kind of shadowy, super-smooth bad guy who has an almost supernatural knowledge about his men except, of course, the mole within his grasp.

For all its putative complexity, its passing examination of fundamentalist Islam versus peaceable Islam, its allusions to Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq insurgency, Sleeper Cell really wants to be another Sopranos with some 24-style thrills. Here’s another closed world of bad guys with strict codes and ideologies but capable of chilling violence.

As the cell members schemed in the back of the bowling alley, it was hard not to think of Tony Soprano and the boys in the back of his strip club. Even the stoning of a loose-lipped accomplice had a distinctly Sopranos-like tone, with Farik fiercely testing his crew’s loyalty.

In the end Sleeper Cell is no more a serious look at contemporary affairs than Heartbeat is a realistic portrayal of 1960s policing.

There were more driven individuals in Admission Impossible (Channel 4), which revealed the pressure on parents as well as their children when trying to secure preferred secondary-school places. Mahmood Shah, a Surrey businessman, had made his son engage in intensive extra study before sitting five entrance exams that had included hiring the best local tutor (“I wouldn’t give any other parent her number,” he said, such was the competition). In Bradford, when the sought-after Dixons City Academy rejected her sparky daughter Hannah, Ruth Weston looked to a Roman Catholic school and started going to Mass. “We’re supposed to be choosing the schools but they’re choosing us,” she sighed.

The alternatives sounded grim. As another Bradford parent put it regarding his daughter: “If we get it wrong, Helen could spend the next 60 years of her life regretting it.” But it was the sight of children being forced into months of extra homework, writing begging letters, and even contemplating changing religion to get a place that most forcefully brought home what it takes to get a decent education nowadays. And one grew anxious as lively six-year-old Alex, whose single mum Eileen was determined to get him a prep-school scholarship in Norfolk, was being interviewed by a headmaster.

What, he asked, would Alex like if he had all the money in the world? “I want a big house so I can smash it up,” Alex declared. That surely meant a one-way ticket to graffiti-covered classrooms with cracked windows. But no, he got the scholarship and you wanted to give a little cheer.

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