In Suspect (Channel 4), James Nesbitt plays a silly detective caught in a slap … oh, Dad, of course he doesn’t. Nesbitt is Danny, a grumpy and troubled cop, married at work, away from his family, who ends up unofficially investigating the murder of a close relative. This is a remake of a popular Danish black series Forhøret, so it would never be a fun game, but you have to focus on the dark side so that Nesbitt’s latest outing as a troubled cop, Bloodlands, seems optimistic.
There are two episodes in the evening until it ends on Wednesday. I was allowed to see seven of the eight, so if the big revelation makes it one of the smartest crime series of all time, I can only apologize for being premature. It’s such a pronounced winter cold that I almost put on a sweater, so it seems weird to undress it during a warm week in June. Each short episode is a two-way conversation between Nesbitt and another actor, although occasionally others intervene for a minute or two. It’s no different than the Netflix Criminal series, though one case was analyzed per episode, rather than placing one case throughout the race.
The case, then. Danny enters the morgue to talk to pathologist Jackie (Joely Richardson) about the body of an unidentified young woman, who presents herself as a suicide. Naturally, he is wary of the circumstances, because that is the kind of copper he is. After some technical notes, Danny leaves, just to get something back on the slab. (Much of the plot progresses by the intuition of the characters.) He recognizes the necklace that has been placed in a sterile plastic pot. Let out a howl of pain.
It’s not too spoiler to reveal that the body turns out to be that of his daughter, Christina, because the rest of the series depends on Danny moving around trying to figure out who killed her. But not before she had a seizure at the morgue, refusing to believe that Christina had committed suicide. “Open it, or I’ll do it myself,” he roars, waving a scalpel at Jackie, who has locked him in the funeral home with him. “They’re going to throw the fucking book at you for that,” she spat. The suspect is many things, but the underestimated is not one of them.
It is clear that Suspect is aimed at a certain mood, a kind of Luther-lite. It’s black, all neon lighting in dark corners, with locations called Crimson Orchid (a strip club), Baz’s Sauna and Gym (a boxing club) and, eh, County Racecourse. But it’s a tense version of noir that doesn’t land, and often ends up as a cartoon. Throughout the series, Danny goes from lead to lead, following in the footsteps of bread crumbs that teach him about his daughter’s life. On her journey of discovery, we meet Christina’s friends, colleagues, partner and various mistakes in her orbit.
As the couple has moved away, Danny knows nothing about Christina’s life as an adult. He kicked her out when she was 15, we are led to believe, when he found her in bed with another girl. From the most flattering point of view, the idea that she might have to learn who her daughter is by gathering the remnants of her life is intriguing. The fact that his life was made up of the parties and people against whom he has spent his fighting career offers a low whisper of tragedy. Anne-Marie Duff, who appears at the end of the series as Christina’s mother, provides a lot of grief and gravity, as expected.
The opening credits, which make this look like a big-budget game and Cluedo’s name, and I guess it is, proudly parade the cast. This is a first-class collection of British and Irish acting talent, from Richard E Grant to Niamh Algar. The subject demands intensity, and Nesbitt has to go face to face with them; after all the fury, I can only imagine that he was shattered after filming it. It’s very theatrical and, strangely, it has the feel of early blocking television, when so much was done with as little as possible. But that’s not confinement, and I found the theater to be so intense (Christina regularly appears to her father as a kind of bright track from beyond) that in episode seven I was completely lost.