What courtrooms need - and any amount of television from Rumpole to Kavanagh QC will back me up on this - are good actors. All the law's a stage and all the lawyers merely players.

It should not, then, have surprised me that of the four students hoping for pupillages on the new Friday night documentary series The Barristers, only Jo, who had previously worked in the theatre, had found a job by the end of the episode. In the “moot” at Middle Temple, a sort of Observer-Mace Debating Competition on which your whole career might depend, her confident RADA-quality delivery easily trumped poor, stuttering Iqbal. He struggled not only with the distinction between “Mr Justice Buxom” and “Lord Justice Buxton” but with the bill for the 12 Inns of Court dinners you have to attend before you are admitted to the “Utter Bar”.

This was one of those series where the cameras are invited in to demystify an old institution and emerge a year later blinking in disbelief that it is as arcane and anachronistic as rumour had it all along. The director Duncan Staff managed to find a QC who did not know the word “bling”. Wrong-footed in a trial, he was filled in by his junior, only for the “silk” the next day to refer to “a bling” (laughter in court). For services to the vernacular, the QC in question gave his No. 2, Dickie Bond, the sack, a red robing sack to be precise. It was inscribed with what in legal jargon is called as a “joke”: “A BLING 4 U”. A red sack for your robes is a very special thing. A QC very occasionally gives a junior barrister one for services rendered, whereupon he needs no longer use his blue sack.

All this was explained with sardonic but gentle wit by Dickie Bond, who was as close as The Barristers found to a decent character. In fact, for a programme that dealt with a profession that relies on star performances, it had very few. The team obviously had high hopes of Paul Darling, a successful construction barrister described by eyewitnesses as a cross between a rottweiler and the Andrex puppy, but we saw only his puppyish side.

Of the tyros out to get a job only Iqbal had potential for culthood, resembling one of those Apprentice hopefuls whose high self-belief is matched only by his inability to do the job. And I felt for Anna, who ended up in tears, having failed her exams, despite a brilliant attempt to impress her examiners with a meticulously argued case for their bathing in baked beans for charity. It is as well to remember that next time you need a barrister, he or she probably got the job by advocating baked bean baths to a panel of sadists.

Saturday's returning sitcom Outnumbered makes the best case against the innocence of children since Voltaire took on Rousseau. Most sitcoms don't know what to do with young children. The adverts for Everybody Loves Raymond used to have Ray Romano promising: “It's not really about the kid.” But here the kiddiewinks are the stars and although Claire Skinner plays Sue and Hugh Dennis is Pete, in Radio Times's credits they are known simply as Mum and Dad.

This week they attended a family wedding, where the children behaved inappropriately to the several-times-round-the-circuit bride (“Who is Ulrika?” asked the curlylocked Karen, clearly reporting a parental conversation), a vicar (“why didn't baby Jesus just zap Herod?”), and one another. There is malice even in these children's ignorance. How long the writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin can sustain this single joke I don't know but who could dislike a show that opens with the command: “Step away from your sister”?

If there ever were a community of innocence surely it would be the Californian surfing scene. Obviously, I was worried when David Milch, who nightmared up the scatological western Deadwood, decided to turn next to Beach Boy territory. But last night's debut of John from Cincinnati showed the surf's barnacled, polluted underside. It concentrated on three dysfunctional generations of the Jost family headed, incredibly, by Rebecca De Mornay as a grandmother. Things are amiss in so many ways, among them that De Mornay's husband has started to float six inches above the ground. Naturally, he suspects a brain tumour but it is much worse than that: he really is levitating.

This and other weirdnesses are connected to the arrival of “John”, an alien disguised as a teenager, who learns Human by copying the last thing he heard and fulfilling other losers' wishes. As John (who is clearly not from Cincinnati), Austin Nichols is hilarious. And even if the set-up owes something to John Carpenter's film Starman, the whole thing is a dark delight.

Sadly the series was cancelled by HBO after ten episodes, but that, I like to think, just gives it the kind of precious, fleeting charm that makes life itself so special.

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