The Weekend's Television: The Unloved, Sunday, Channel 4Pulling, Sunday, BBC3

"Set to draw critical acclaim when it airs this month" was what one Nottingham paper wrote about The Unloved, a bit of journalistic soothsaying that I initially put down to local loyalties.

This was the directorial debut of "Nottingham's Samantha Morton", after all, and so the paper wasn't likely to annoy its readers with a pre-emptive claim of triumph. But the prediction was safe in another sense too, because The Unloved is the kind of drama that nearly always gets critical praise. It takes a serious and sombre subject and deals with it in a way (low on plot, high on bleak plangency) that virtually guarantees respect. More than that it draws on its creator's own painful experience of growing up in care.

Weighing in to a drama like this would be tantamount to saying that you don't give a damn about abandoned children or that you'd prefer it if Channel 4 had run a repeat of A Place in the Sun. It's one of those dramas that allow commissioning editors to hold their heads up when people start muttering about the public-service remit; one of those dramas that is invariably described as "powerful", which is often simply another way of saying "it depressed me".

All of which is not the preamble to dissent, but a way of saying that although The Unloved was pretty much guaranteed a good review anyway, it really, really deserved it on this occasion. It wasn't just its purity of motive that made it an admirable piece of television but the solid assurance of Morton's direction and a remarkable central performance from Molly Windsor as Lucy, the young girl whose parents' inadequacies led to her being taken into care. Morton began with a horribly painful scene – a confrontation in an ordinary sitting room between Lucy and her father (Robert Carlyle), which escalated from interrogation (she's lost the money he sent her to buy cigarettes with and has put off her return as long as she can) to violence. And what made it so difficult to watch was the way in which it was filmed without nudging close-ups, and the utterly convincing crack of fear in Windsor's voice as things went bad.

Morton paced her film slowly. It was full of suspended moments with Lucy either lying on the hallway carpet (ambiguously poised between casualty and daydreamer) or staring at a kitsch painting of a deer in a sunlit glade, as if it's a place of safety she can't quite reach. There was other artfulness too that potently conveyed the inner confusion of the character's experience. In a scene that showed her being driven to the care home, Morton had cut out all the naturalistic sound except for the dialogue, so that Lucy's plaintive questions sounded in a void. When she got to the home, naturalistic sound returns, noisy, babbling chaos suddenly crowding in on you as it must have crowded in on her.

The Unloved wasn't perfect. I could have done without the scene in which Lucy came across a fawn in the local cemetery. Whether it happened or not, it read as too neatly symbolic on the screen. And I wondered whether the script had flinched a little from showing you how a child who begins as an unequivocal object of sympathy can slowly be converted into the kind of child people feel entitled to despise. Lucy wasn't recognisably hardened by her experience, and you had to read how troubled and damaged she might become in Lauren, an older room-mate who was abused by one of the care-home workers and ended up turning tricks in the local park. But again and again, Morton created sequences that seemed to contain far more than their visible components. They felt like intense private memories put on screen, without self-pity and with a proper trust that an attentive audience would get the point. Realistically, her fame and her childhood experience got her this first film. The Unloved has more than earned her the right to make another one.

Not that talent is always rewarded. Not a few people were puzzled that Pulling should have been shown the door while lesser comedies thrived, but BBC3 obviously felt bad enough about it to give Sharon Horgan's comedy a farewell special. It was funny and – for fans wishing to clutch at straws – ended with a scene that screamed To Be Continued.