Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip TV3, Monday, 9.00 pm

Superstorm BBC1, Sunday, 9.00pm

The Science Of Superstorms BBC2, Sunday, 10:00 pm

Future Shock RTE1, Monday, 9.30pm

I learned a new word this week: pedeconferencing. It means the kind of scene in which the camera follows the characters through various corridors as they walk and talk.

If you've ever seen The West Wing, you'll recognise the type of scene it describes (after all, how much dialogue did Josh and Toby chew through while ambling through the hall?), and in fact the word was apparently coined for that show.

Last week, while dodging ads, I came across a scene of walking and talking so similar to the West Wing that I instantly thought the makers must be fans of Aaron Sorkin, the West Wing's creator.

And they were talking in a similarly articulate, rapid-fire pattern too. Wait a minute, isn't that the same actor who played Josh?

There's Matthew Perry too, the most irritating Friend, and didn't he sully an episode or two of The West Wing? What's going on?

Of course, as I know now, what was going on was Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, Aaron Sorkin's new series, which features not only his familiarly wordy style but also many of his old acting friends.

In fact, in many ways all Sorkin has done is transfer the features of The West Wing into a different setting: rather than being set behind the scenes of international politics, it's set behind the scenes of a live sketch comedy show (the Studio 60 of the title) obviously based on the format of Saturday Night Live.

Perry plays Matt Albie, the chief writer, and Bradley Whitford (best known as Josh) is the producer Danny Tripp; but while many of the scenes consist simply of them planning, scheduling and arguing (and, indeed, pedeconferencing), there are various other smart speaking characters coming and going around them.

For all the other similarities to The West Wing, it's the whipsmart dialogue that really marks it out as a Sorkin creation; that may even be a good reason why he hangs on to actors he trusts, since there can't be many with Whitford's scary ability to spit out long, complex lines with such aplomb.

Also, while it pains me to admit this, if Perry can stamp out his mugging and twitching, he's well enough cast here to suggest there's a decent TV actor behind the mugging.

But something's not right with the show; it's interesting enough to dip into for a few minutes at a time, but it's never compelling, and since the premise, writing, acting, and direction are all fine, it took me a while to guess why.

Partly, it's because it doesn't show us the sketches that we've just watched them debate for 20 minutes, so it feels somewhat incomplete.

Mainly, though, I think it might actually be too clever: the polished words and the moral complexities Sorkin likes to deal in are absolutely appropriate for a West Wing setting, but don't convince coming from a group of joke writers and program schedulers, who, I imagine, are more interested in just getting audiences to laugh.

In any case, even if the debates are exactly the kind of things that go on behind comedy shows, the worst that might happen is an unfunny gag; it's hard to care that much, considering that in Sorkin's old, vastly superior show, a misplaced word could mean war.

Any decent channel should of course try to keep the public informed of matters that affect them, and in the medium to long term there's little that looks like affecting us more than climate change.

Naturally, and laudably enough, BBC have chosen to try to inform as many people as possible by dramatising the issue with Superstorm, a three-part series in which a team of scientists get together to see if it's possible to divert, disable, or otherwise disarm the kinds of hurricanes that, in recent years, we've seen growing in power and frequency.

You'd think that seeing the most powerful force on Earth (as the exposition-heavy dialogue was at constant pains to remind us) unleashed over cowering cities would be dramatic enough, but it seems a little bit of soap drama is always better.

So we had Tom Sizemore, the closest thing to a famous face in the show, heading a variously damaged, insecure, and arrogant group of people who either hated or loved each other (it was debatable whether the undeclared love or the obvious rancour was the hardest to work with).

The science of fighting hurricanes was hammered home repeatedly, and is really quite interesting, but was still somewhat lost behind the bitching.

In fact, though, the actors bitching and preening did so quite well, and their efforts prevented the whole thing feeling like those bland "infotainments" you sometimes see on American TV

It's biggest problem, and for me an insurmountable one, was the whizzing, whooshing edits and graphical gewgaws.

In fact the style reminded me of another less convincing show, one which features not an irresistible force but an immovable object by the name of Horatio: Superstorm is nothing less than CSI:Twister.

Meanwhile, The Science Of Superstorms was the accompanying documentary, rather more directly informative than the drama even though it naturally covered many of the same ideas and suffered from an oddly morose voiceover.

Scientists have been theorising for years about ways to defuse hurricanes; mostly they involve somehow "seeding" the air in or around the storm with various tiny particles so that the rain falls early or the winds diminish before major damage is done.

The ideas are so far unproven against major storms but have at least theoretical evidence to support them.

There's a vast and complicated moral issue at the heart of some of them, though, which will have to be debated internationally in the next few years: if and when a country develops the technology to deflect a major hurricane, does that give it the right to do so?

Is it acceptable to protect your own citizens by bouncing a storm off in another, more defenceless, country's direction?

If, on the other hand, you're more concerned about short-term threats to society, you might have been mildly unsettled by Future Shock, in which Richard Curran looked at the looming crisis in the housing market in Ireland, and its likely effects on the rest of the economy.

Despite some aimless camerawork, it was good to see a more complete analysis than the news can normally give us.

Unfortunately, its outlook was rather gloomy, even frightening for many: quoting various normally invisible statistics, and pointing out the uncertain and, from an Irish perspective, uncontrollable nature of many of the things influencing our housing market (dollar exchange rate, interest rate hikes, simple consumer hesitance), Curran suggested the market, and therefore the whole economy, is close to some kind of collapse.

But what about the "soft landing" we keep hearing about?

Well, there was another alarming statistic for that: there have been, since World War II, 49 other comparable property booms across the world.

They all ultimately crashed; not a single one had a "soft landing".