A year after the ninth season kicked in gear for what has become the most engaging British police procedural of the past decade, Shetland is returning soon to BBC One and BritBox. Proving that the show works even without adapting actual Ann Cleeves novels, the third season not based on the exploits of Ann Cleeves’ hero Jimmy Perez has been filmed. Season 10 (“Series 10” in the UK) sees the return of stars Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder and Alison O’Donnell’s DI Alison “Tosh” MacIntosh, Perez’s former Number One. UK viewers can find Season 10 Wednesday, November 5 at 9 p.m. GMT on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. All of Season 9 is streaming now on BritBox via Prime Video, and a final premiere date for U.S viewers is expected soon.
The season finds the return of the expected supporting cast, including Steven Robertson as DC Sandy Wilson, Lewis Howden as Sgt. Billy McCabe, Anne Kidd as pathologist Cora McLean, Angus Miller as Tosh’s beau Donnie, Conor McCarry as PC Alex Grant, and more recent arrival Eubha Akilade as PC Lorna Burns. A slew of familiar regional actors will be joining the cast, including Sherlock’s Louise Brealey, Guilt’s Greg McHugh, The Lost King’s Leigh Biagi, Traces’ Lila Rose, and Karen Pirie’s Saskia Ashdown, plus Gabriel Akuwudike, Samuel Anderson, Frances Gray, Ellie Haddington, Niall MacGregor, Clive Russell, Joanne Thomson, and Stuart Townsend. An eleventh season was hinted at last year, but has yet to be confirmed.
Check out this new first trailer for Season 10 of Shetland:
Last season was the second story to depart from Ann Cleeves’ novels (see my review of the last Shetland novel here). Cleeves is bringing back Perez in a new novel, The Killing Stones (available here at Amazon). Readers can rejoin Jimmy and wife Willow who are now living in the Orkney islands. But it seems unlikely we’ll see Perez again in the show. Paul Logue returned in the lead writing role last season, and he knows the characters and the territory, but the next case finds our leds pursuing the murderer of a retired social worker in the tint hamlet of Lunniswick.
Shetland continues to succeed at the detective mystery genre like those classics of the 1970s and 1980s when syndication was the big deal. Catch all nine seasons of Shetland now exclusively on iPlayer in the UK and BritBox in the U.S. via Prime Video.
C.J. Bunce / Editor / borg
