So farewell, Anthony Minghella. His untimely death at 54 has robbed us of one of Britain's most prestigious film-makers. It is a pity that his last work was The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (BBC1), a dramatisation of a series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith depicting a woman working as a private investigator in Botswana. The TV version (co-written by Minghella with Richard Curtis) was sad because it was so insubstantial and sentimentalised. It depicted Botswana as a heavenly place, with wide-open spaces inhabited predominantly by good-natured, smiling people, whose cheerfulness was only threatened by a few naughty criminals. No wonder the government of Botswana backed the film with a substantial sum of money and even sent a large delegation of tourism officials to the London premiere.

Jill Scott played the lady detective Precious Ramotswe with winning charm but she only managed to solve a number of crimes through an unlikely series of coincidences. Several other aspects of the story defied belief - like Ramotswe's secretary working for nothing (how did she support herself?). Apparently the BBC is going ahead with its plans to turn this into a long-running series but, on the evidence of this pilot episode, that would be a crime.

Most of the Darling family in Dirty Sexy Money (Channel 4) seem to be involved in either criminal or underhand activities. This is a new US import starring Peter Krause (the leading actor from Six Feet Under) as a lawyer forced to inherit his dead father's role of looking after the dysfunctional Darling family. The Darlings are nothing like that mob from Peter Pan: the paterfamilias (brilliantly played by Donald Sutherland) is indecently wealthy; his wife has been having a long-running affair; one of his sons is an attorney-general with a transsexual girlfriend; another son is a priest with an illegitimate child he won't acknowledge; a third son is a drunken wreck; and one of his daughters is so bad at acting that he has to bribe producers to employ her. This series follows hot on the heels of the rather similar Brothers and Sisters, with an equally confusing number of siblings, each with their own problems. Yet I shall stick with it, at least for a while, as watching the superb actor Peter Krause is sufficient reward.

Tony Shalhoub is another actor worth watching. He has the title role in Monk (BBC2) another import from the US which has returned to our screens - albeit inexplicably tucked away on Saturday afternoons. Shalhoub plays the detective Adrian Monk, who has obsessive-compulsive disorder which makes life particularly difficult when he is involved in solving grubby crimes. Each episode packs a lot into its 45 minutes (compare the longueurs of Lewis!) and its plots are salted with wit and humanity. Saturday's showed the meticulous Monk ironing his shoelaces - which he keeps in sets of three ("Right, left, backup").

Another imported US series is Desperate Housewives (Channel 4) which is back for a fourth year. I had fallen out of touch with the series but the first new episode hooked me back in. The numerous plotlines are skilfully interwoven, the acting is first-rate, and the darker elements (people plotting, lying, even killing) are balanced with ironic humour. At a terribly amateurish school play, a mother suffering from cancer says "I'm going to be sick" and the man sitting next to her says "I'm right there with you, lady!"

The Apprentice (BBC1) is also back for a fourth series, still compulsively watchable although the premiss is clearly shaky. Why should any young, ambitious person want to work for Alan Sugar, when previous winners have either resigned almost immediately or been given donkey work? However, it's fun to watch the inflated egos of the contestants being punctured as they make the most elementary mistakes and fail at various tasks. One woman calls herself the best salesperson in Europe (how does she know?), so there will be schadenfreude in seeing her failing miserably.