Guilt
****
BBC Scotland, Tuesday, 10pm; BBC2, Thursday, 9pm; all episodes on iPlayer
IT has been a very good year so far for final series, with Succession setting the bar high for bombshell reveals, and Happy Valley leaving behind legions of devoted admirers and calls for Sarah Lancashire to be awarded every prize going (another couple of episodes and it might have been her having a coronation in May).
No pressure, then, on Guilt creator Neil Forsyth to come up with the goods, even if the Scottish writer is sitting pretty with viewers and BBC commissioning editors after his recent triumph with The Gold.
But still, this is Guilt. The coolest blast of Caledonian comedy noir since Trainspotting. The thriller that invited comparisons with the Coen brothers no less. The national and international hit.
So none of your Brink’s-Mat, BBC1 primetime, Hugh Bonneville, Cockney wide boys caper here - Guilt brings Forsyth back to Scotland, back in front of the home crowd. And you know what we are like.
Fittingly enough, the final series started with a Trainspotting-style helter-skelter run through Edinburgh. After the neon red title filled the screen we cut to Chicago where Max (Mark Bonnar) was lying in a single bed. Never a good look on any middle-aged man, a single bed.
Sure enough, a year on from his arrival in the States to join Jake (Jamie Sives), the brother he set out to diddle, their pub is on its last legs and the visas are running out.
They would go back to Leith, scene of the original hit and run crime, but they had been lucky to get out alive last time. Fortunately, or not, Max has a plan, one that will bring the brothers home to Scotland to face the ghosts of the past and maybe, just maybe, set matters right.
READ MORE: Jamie Sives on working with his old classmate
It is not just the brothers McCall who have decisions to make. Series three finds the baton being passed to a new generation of young Scots who, like Max and Jake of old, have to decide what they want from life and what they are prepared to do to get it.
Guilt’s cast has grown as the story has progressed, with some characters having more staying power than others. Among them are two without whom no run of Guilt would be complete - the hapless private detective/paralegal/lucky white heather recipient Kenny (Emun Elliott), and gangster’s wife Maggie (Phyllis Logan), who bills herself as “just a poor widow looking for a wee bit of light in the darkness”. Aye right, as they say in the western half of the country.
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Where the second series lacked the breakneck pace of the first (property development plots will do that to a show), the new four-part run finds Guilt back on form and ready to suck diesel. Nothing has essentially changed for Max and Jake, they are still at heart two lost boys from Leith. Easy-osey nice guy Jake once told Max his trouble was he had no soul. “You’ve got too much,” countered the big brother who had clawed his way up to become a solicitor and owner of his own tuxedo.
READ MORE: 'Succession was shock and awe tv for the ages'
Guilt has become less stylish since the first series with its artfully disguised locations and retro interiors, but that’s fine because it fits the story. By the end of the first hour the boys are in the brown stuff in every sense. They’ve been here before, of course. But now the two are older, certainty no wiser, and desperate.
Desperate, for a dramatist, is good. In the end everything must come back to the brothers. Though still more Tom and Jerry than Butch and Sundance, the two give every sign of going out with all guns blazing. The ever-dazzling Guilt, like Succession, is not going quietly into anyone’s good night.
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