Sunday
From Darkness
9pm, BBC One
Unforgotten
Thursday, 9pm, STV
I’m not certain whether we’ve reached tipping point with this, but it really feels like it this week: that there are now more cop shows being made in the UK with female leads than male. The programmes have been of variable quality, and have displayed varying interest in making gender a theme, but the most interesting British police dramas of recent years – Happy Valley, Line Of Duty, The Fall, Scott & Bailey, No Offence – have dwelt on the sisters. What Jack Reagan would make of it, I don’t know, but you can’t argue with the evidence, guv.
The simultaneous arrival of From Darkness, starring the great Anne-Marie Duff, and Unforgotten, with the terrific Nicola Walker, highlights that what was a rising trend has now become the norm. But both also illustrate how, as much as positive shifts in society, it has been the success of Nordic imports – I’m looking at you, Sarah Lund – that has given our TV commissioners the feminist push. Listen to the theme tunes of each, and you’ll come down with an instant attack of the Scandis.
But watching the opening episodes of the two is also to realise that, however much things change, they remain the same. From Darkness and Unforgotten both begin with the same cop-show standard: at a building site, workers uncover the remains of a body. It’s the differences in how they move from here that makes it worth watching both; although one is more worth watching than the other.
In From Darkness, Duff plays Claire Church, a former WPC with the Manchester force, who quit 20 years ago and bolted for a new life in a pointedly remote spot of the Western Isles. But that body ties in with work she was doing before she left – prostitutes were going missing, and nobody wanted to listen to her about it. So, for motives both professional and highly unprofessional, her former superior seeks her out.
There are good things here. Claire’s old boss is nicely, slightly shiftily, played by This Is England’s arch-bogeyfiend Johnny Harris. However, there’s also a lot that’s over-familiar, and the show seeks to disguise how well worn it is by amplifying the Swedish doom to histrionic levels. For some reason, 2015 has seen the breakout of a terrible disease in British TV drama – Significant Slow-Motion Syndrome – and From Darkness suffers a bad case. Duff is as watchable as ever; few actors do consumed like her. But it needs careful handling: here she’s already so consumed from the first that it practically consumes the entire thing. At this rate, by episode four, she’ll be inside out.
Unforgotten, however, has a welcome lightness of touch. There’s a hint of The Killing here too, but more in underlying structure than noisy decoration: the case ripples through various levels of society in a way that recalls the first, best series of the Danish hit. The opening episode introduces the disparate characters who will be involved: it’s a fantastic cast, and among them is Tom Courtenay, which alone makes this the best thing on TV this week.
But the pace is set by Walker, a woman with the magnetic eyes of Bob Dylan, finally given a lead after years of always being the best thing in whatever she’s in. As DCI Cassie Stuart, she – brilliantly – just gets on with it, and the programme does likewise, confident it has a story to spin. Whether this will be another Broadchurch, only time will tell. But let’s hope not.
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