British television series that make their way to America tend to be refreshing in that each new show is incredibly different from the last. No matter how many times Americans catch the latest Brit/Irish/Scot police procedural, it’s nearly impossible to follow how each level of government polices, and manages the policing, of its citizenry. That quirk doesn’t get more pronounced than in the opener to The Salisbury Poisonings, a four-part series airing Monday evenings on AMC. The series will likely mean less to those on this side of the pond, although the real-life attempt on the lives of a Russian spy and his daughter living in Salisbury was international news in March 2018, victims of Vladimir Putin’s spy network. But the first episode has the kind of TV writing that should bring the show to the attention of anglophiles.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, and the new Hugh Laurie four-part star vehicle Roadkill may not be the Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Derry Girls, The Woman in White, Mr. Selfridge, Zen, Quirke, or Sherlock, but it’s better than most of the UK series that have made it to the small screen in the past few years. Airing in the UK on BBC One this past Fall and first in the U.S. as part of PBS’s Masterpiece series, it is now available on Amazon and DVD (still the PBS choice platform for British productions). A lucky show that finished production before the pandemic kicked into full force, Roadkill will be a must-see for Laurie fans, and its angle on politics and telling a politician’s personal story should be enough to keep other anglophiles interested.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery series like Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. The 2019 British series A Confession is streaming on BritBox in the U.S. via Amazon, and it may not be as good as any of these, but it does eclipse recent series like Dublin Murders, The Silence,The Five,The Missing,Thirteen,Broadchurch, and Collateral. It is based on the real-life story of the murders of two women in 2003 and 2011, so the drama is dark and real. And it offers up a cast of familiar genre actors that will make you want to take a look.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, after the next Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. So the pay-channel Starz releasing a late-year mystery series called Dublin Murders was going to get our attention. Filmed in Belfast and Dublin, with a noir sensibility–dark places, mysterious characters, and murder–the series has the potential to be a good detective series. Billed as an “eight-part mystery series with a taproot that drops deep down into Ireland’s past, foreshadows the present and brings insight to its future,” the story follows Sarah Greene as Cassie Maddox and Killian Scott as Rob Reilly, homicide detectives on the trail of the murderer of a school girl. The murder was similar–too similar–to a murder in the city’s past.
Maddox and Reilly appear appealing enough at first. They share a secret of the past that would get them fired had anyone found out: Reilly isn’t really Reilly, but the alter ego of the sole survivor of the crime years ago that resulted in two missing friends, never to be found. Unfortunately he’s a witness who can’t remember, and by all accounts he shouldn’t be involved with this investigation because of his clear conflict of interest. Merged with his pursuit of the person behind the missing kids and the recent murder is a story of Maddox’s history catching up with her. As a child her parents were killed in an auto accident, and to deal with it mentally she invented an imaginary friend she named Lexie. As an undercover cop, she took on the name Lexie as her alter ego. Now she and one of her former colleagues stumble upon another murder, a woman who looks just like Cassie. And surprise: her name is Lexie. Always waiting for the possibility that we’ve stumbled into an unreliable narrator series, ultimately that’s not the case, the woman was real and not something we’re seeing through Maddox’s imagination. But the series stumbles for other reasons.
Based on the first two novels of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, a key problem is combining the stories from two books to make into one season of television–stories that have little to do with each other. Both cops have these common stories involving dual personas so it’s easy to see how someone thought it might work. But it doesn’t. The first three episodes develop the characters, but suddenly they lose their personalities. The quiet, likeable, and sympathetic Reilly becomes a jerk, a supremely angry and mean protagonist pushing away Maddox and everyone else and leaving the audience with little to care about from his plot thread. Maddox has the same collision of character–once admirable and mostly by-the-book, she turns into a nasty character, bitter and horrible to those who care about her. As Reilly becomes trapped in a development of his own making, Maddox agrees to a job with her former colleague, a preposterous undercover operation impersonating the deceased Lexie in order to discover her murderer.
For fans of BBC’s four seasons of Shetland, while a fifth is in the works, a 2010 series available via Amazon and BritBox may fill in as a bit of a prequel to the Scottish crime drama. Doctor Who fans may quirk a brow at the words The Silence, but the series villains are no relation to the tense crime drama co-starring Shetland’sDouglas Henshall and deaf actress Genevieve Barr. The Silence is a four-episode series following Barr as 18-year-old Amelia. Recently fitted with a cochlear implant, she is adjusting to the device during her “gap year,” the year between high school and college. It’s a series notable for Shetland and Henshall fans because swap out the character’s DCI Jim Edwards for DI Jimmy Perez and you have basically the same British cop before he went off to Scotland.
DCI Edwards is Amelia’s uncle, and Amelia is staying with him, his wife Maggie (Doctor Who and Law & Order: UK’sDervla Kirwan), and cousins Tom (Young Dracula’s Harry Ferrier), Joel (Doctors’Tom Kane), and Sophie (Doctor Who’sRebecca Oldfield), all while Amelia is attending appointments to practice use of her new hearing device. Amelia hates it, a concept nobody quite grasps. She sees being deaf as somewhat defining, a thing everyone else should accept, but her badgering parents, played by Gina McKee (MirrorMask, Emerald City) and Hugh Bonneville(Downton Abbey, Doctor Who), are the ones who don’t hear. While staying with her cousins Amelia witnesses a murder, and soon DCI Edwards realizes the likely murderers are within his own police department.
Amelia becomes more than a tangent player to the plot when she tells her uncle she can read the lips of two cops on CCTV footage, implicating several people, and putting Amelia’s life and her uncle’s family and danger, and worse for her uncle, subjecting him to threat of imprisonment per police regulations for not disclosing his niece as an eyewitness. All of this happens in the series’ four hours, in a story probably better suited edited down into a movie-length production. And yet it’s all fresh and new–a police procedural unlike any you’ve seen before.
