The month's best television is all about being watched.

Scroll the new-this-month lists and a mood announces itself. The Undeclared War is back, its elite unit inside GCHQ fighting off a cyber-attack and then something worse. Legends, a tightly wound British drama, follows a man — Tom Burke, on superb form — through eleven years undercover for the taxman, slowly losing the line between the job and the self. And the true-crime shelf keeps filling: Should I Marry a Murderer?, the three-part account of a forensic pathologist who stayed engaged to a killer while quietly gathering evidence for the police. Watch a few of these back to back and the through-line is unmistakable. Everyone is watching someone.

This is what television does — it metabolises the anxieties we cannot quite say aloud. A decade ago the prestige drama was about antiheroes and family empires. This summer it is about screens, files, listening, the patient accumulation of evidence on an unsuspecting person. Our fiction has grown preoccupied with the watched life because the watched life is the one we now live, mostly without noticing.

There is something pointedly British about the settings, too. Not the FBI or the CIA, but GCHQ and His Majesty's Revenue and Customs — the agencies that loom largest in our imagination because they quietly hold our data and our money. We have made thrillers out of the cyber-room and the tax investigation: among the least dramatic institutions in the country, dramatised precisely because we sense how much they now see.

The warm exception only proves the mood. Amid all this watching, the month also offers Dear England, the dramatisation of an England manager's attempt to make a nation feel something hopeful about itself — arriving, neatly, in the very week the real team plays a real World Cup. One screen asks you to trust the institution observing you; the other asks you to believe in a shared, uncomplicated joy. That we seem to need both at once is the tell.

This paper spends its mornings on the machinery that increasingly observes and automates our working lives. It is worth noticing that our evenings — our entertainment, the thing we choose when the work is done — have started to circle the same fear. We are watching stories about being watched. The question of what we do when we no longer have to work is being answered, in part, on the sofa. And even there, someone on the screen is keeping an eye on someone else.