Constant disappointment with crime
drama on TV of late has led me to wonder what has gone wrong and I
think I figured it out. Its all too long.
Not sure when it happened but some time
in the last decade or two the writers of crime drama got delusions of
grandeur it seems. A series of hour long whodunnits (aka Morse,
Midsomer mayhem, Rebus et al) was not enough any more. So we got
Prime Suspect and it was not half bad. But then along came the likes
of Broadcrunch and many, many more.
Now what the writers seem to miss is
that their plots are not essentially much different to those solved
by John Thaw, Ken Stott and others. And they did it in an hour or, at
worst, a two-parter. In the end a murder is a murder. OK a serial
killer can be strung out longer but the best of those have long been
done and dusted – the Ripper, old and new, for starters.
And police procedurals can be
fascinating in their attention to detail – hence NCIS and CSI and
Silent Witness et al. But they are all mercifully brief. I say
mercifully because the devil for a plot is actually in the detail.
The longer we linger on the longuers of
victims and perpetrators the more time there is for us the viewer to
spot the holes in the writer's narrative. And we do. Most of the time
each individual error, break in logic or chronology or whatever
amounts to little. But accumulated over the weeks the issue builds.
And finally, these days, nothing has a
decent ending – or if it does (like From Darkness recently) it
lurches wildly into melodrama and seals its own fate anyway.
Credibility dies, in this case in a blaze of inevitability. The
alternative is the Broadchurch let down – repeated of course in the
dismal Broadchurch 2 – Bloodyunlikely-on-sea AGAIN!
Worse too is the tendency to go back
for another view but different. So the brilliant Life on Mars is not
allowed to rest after its third (was it) run but re-appears dusted
off (not) as River – a Scandinavian recruit to the genre as a
daffy, over the hill cop creating a fantastic version of his murdered
partner with whom he has an on-screen obsession. It is saved from
farce by the genius of Nicola Walker who manages to play the part as
he see her and NOT as she actually was – so she is OTT but without
any ham; a wonder to watch.
And especially since in currently also
running The Unforgotten she is seen as a more down-to-earth copper
equally obsessed but this time with getting to the bottom of a grimly
credible set of crimes.
But even so these are not a series of
one-hour crimebusters but are occupying hours of our time, week by
week. And now we await the endings. Will River sink beneath the waves
of its own mawkish sentimentality? Will anything be unforgotten
minutes after the end of The Unforgotten? Will we care?
Does it matter? Well it does to me –
I love crime dramas and police procedurals. I just wish they'd get
back to making some.
