BBC
Broadchurch The murder mystery, with Jodie Whittaker, being held by police officers, is shown on BBC America, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
“Broadchurch” comes to BBC America on Wednesday, riding a wave of good tidings. The ratings in Britain this spring were very strong — just shy of what “Downton Abbey” earned in its first season — and the reviews were rhapsodic. Fox announced last week that it would develop a version of the show, even though the original is getting its own highly publicized American run.
All of those positive vibes are in sharp contrast to the content and tone of the eight-episode series, a murder mystery set and filmed on the rugged coast of southern England. It’s a pre-eminent example of what could be called the new International Style in television drama: a moody, slow-moving, complicated crime story with damaged heroes and not much redemption to go around. It joins a roster of morbid whodunnits like “Top of the Lake” and “The Killing” — which, like “Broadchurch,” center on dead or missing children — as well as “The Bridge,” “The Fall,” “Rectify” and “Hannibal.” Murder, we moaned.
“Broadchurch” stands out among this crowd for a couple of reasons. One is that it manages to supply the fashionable existential dread while also providing a solid, Agatha Christie- or Dorothy Sayers-like mystery plot that proceeds at a deliberate pace through a cloud of plausible suspects with a minimum of confusion. The show’s writer, Chris Chibnall, has worked on densely plotted series like “Doctor Who” and “Law & Order: UK,” and that craftsmanship is probably responsible for a large measure of its popularity.
More important, though, is the lift provided by the performers playing the odd-couple lead detectives. David Tennant, a former Doctor Who, portrays Alec Hardy, newly arrived in the seaside town of Broadchurch and carrying the usual baggage: a botched case that derailed his career and a serious health problem (which entails a lot of needlessly distracting point-of-view camerawork). Hardy is both preemptory and tentative, a hard boss and a wounded bird, and while there’s not a lot of depth to the character, the accomplished Mr. Tennant is typically fun to watch, casting dark stares and anxious glances with equal dexterity.
While Mr. Tennant is the marquee name, “Broadchurch” really belongs to Olivia Colman, an actress known for her roles in British comedies like “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” “Rev.” and “Twenty-Twelve.” She plays Ellie Miller, the local detective for whom the story is a series of reversals and crises: pushed into secondary status by the arrival of Hardy, she then discovers that the child found dead on the Broadchurch beach is a good friend of her son’s.
Miller, who is sunny by nature, spends the eight episodes in an almost constant state of exasperated defensiveness, caught between Hardy’s foul moods and the town’s anger and panic (and not noticing right away that her son knows more than he’s telling). Ms. Colman gives her an appealing, good-natured doggedness and common sense that bind us closely to her, building toward a real depth of feeling when things get even worse for her later in the series.
The byplay between Hardy and Miller is both diverting and familiar, and the same can be said of the series. We’ve seen everything here before — the local reporter compromising himself to get a big story, the family members with embarrassing secrets and the parade of quirky or creepy suspects (including a priest, a grumpy news agent and a telephone repairman who presents himself as a psychic).
We’ve also seen a single mystery stretched out over 6 or 8 or 12 hours, with the resulting strains in credulity and exposures of thin characterization. It takes a particularly inventive writer or showrunner to flesh out this kind of extended arc, and Mr. Chibnall’s savvy and skill aren’t necessarily matched by the fertility of his imagination.
That a superior entertainment like “Broadchurch” can generate the kind of ballyhoo it has is no surprise in our hype-saturated culture; it makes you wonder what would happen if a really good crime show or thriller, like “Prime Suspect” or “State of Play,” were to come around today.
What “Broadchurch” has to offer, beyond its central performances and its intelligent but not particularly original plot, is mood: a tasty icing of gloom and foreboding that leans heavily on the music of Olafur Arnalds and the cinematography of Matt Gray, whose shots from every possible angle of the dramatic cliffs behind the Broadchurch beach are essential to the show’s ambience. In this, and its use of episode-ending montages of the main characters, it shows a clear debt to “The Killing.” That series, in turn, was adapted from the Danish “Forbrydelsen,” whose extreme popularity in Britain helped start the trend for fashionably bleak police procedurals.
Which is not a complaint, exactly. Quality varies among these shows, and some, like “Top of the Lake” and “Hannibal,” sink under their own pretensions, but “Forbrydelsen,” “The Killing” and “Broadchurch” are all well made and worthwhile, if you accept them for what they are. It will be nice, though, when something other than the kind of grim heaviness that runs through them — as well as “Mad Men,” “Homeland,” “Game of Thrones” and nearly every other esteemed drama of the moment — is once again accepted as a legitimate tone for a TV drama.
Broadchurch
BBC America, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
Produced by Kudos and Imaginary Friends. Created and written by Chris Chibnall; Mr. Chibnall and Jane Featherstone, executive producers.
WITH: David Tennant (Detective Inspector Alec Hardy), Olivia Colman (Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller), Jodie Whittaker (Beth Latimer), Andrew Buchan (Mark Latimer), Matthew Gravelle (Joe Miller), Adam Wilson (Tom Miller), Vicky McClure (Karen White), Arthur Darvill (Reverend Paul Coates), Will Mellor (Steve Connelly), Carolyn Pickles (Maggie Radcliffe), Jonathan Bailey (Olly Stevens), Pauline Quirke (Susan Wright), David Bradley (Jack Marshall), Joe Sims (Nige Carter) and Simone McAullay (Becca Fisher).
