The Guilty: is ITV's murder mystery the new Broadchurch?

[hagios]

You all in the UK got this starting Sept.5 2013. Sounds like my 'cup of tea'

[Show spoiler]

source: The Guardian

There's a congestion of vanished-juvenile plotting in cop shows right now, but Tamsin Greig brings fresh depth to the trope as a detective investigating the death of a child

The Guilty
Tamsin Greig as DCI Maggie Brand, investigates the disappearance of a child while coping with her own young son's illness. Photograph: Des Willie/Hartswood Films/ITV



There are only so many methods of killing someone and only a certain number of ways of investigating murder. And so, more than most genres, crime fiction will always struggle to achieve originality. This pressure is even greater in television, where a new cop show will be at best weeks and at worst days away from a similar series.

In this respect, ITV's new three-parter, The Guilty, has a double disadvantage. It begins with the disappearance of a child, as did The Killing, Broadchurch, Five Days, Top of the Lake and numerous others. It's easy to see why this plotline is so popular – being the major fear of parents, apart from paedophilia, which often turns up as a sub-plot as well – but the frequency on TV falsifies the social reality.

It is often claimed that American tourists became wary of visiting Oxford, convinced by Inspector Morse that the university town suffered a homicide rate similar to downtown Detroit. If so, then any traveller from the US who is a keen viewer of foreign cop shows will expect to find the nurseries empty and the cemetries full of gravestones marking young lives cut awfully short.

Another problem for the series is that the current TV schedules contain more cops than the police federation Christmas dinner. It's true that relatively few of them have been women, but Tamsin Greig, as DCI Maggie Brand, is still faced with the long shadow of Helen Mirren's DCI Jane Tennison, the recent example of Elisabeth Moss's detective Robin Griffin and, on ITV itself, the recent DS Ellie Miller of Olivia Colman in Broadchurch and, nearby on Sundays, Brenda Blethyn's DCI Stanhope in Vera. But, given such congestion of vanished-juvenile plotting and investigative characters, it's to the credit of Greig and writer Debbie O'Malley that they manage to find some distinctive imaginative space.

The key to this is a double doubling. The action moves between two interwoven time-schemes: one starting on the day that four-year-old Callum Reid vanishes without trace from the family home and the other beginning at the moment, five years later, when his body is discovered buried close to the house he left. And, in another overlap, Greig's DCI Brand, as a more junior police officer, was involved in the original missing child hunt but had to leave because of morning sickness. As a result, a mother with a young child is placed in close proximity to a mother without one.

This maternal parallel brings a fresh depth to the by now standard scenes in which a detective breaks bad news and O'Malley's scripts cleverly lengthen the shadow by making DCI Brand's relationship with her own young son complex and a source of concern and regret to her: it becomes increasingly clear that the title The Guilty may apply to more people than merely the killer of Callum.

Director Ed Bazalgette also achieves unusual smoothness in the shifts between now and then. The flashback is a problematic device in crime fiction because it is often used – most grievously in Agatha Christie dramatisations – to convey events that, it turns out later, never happened, but were simply the lying version of a suspect. This always feels a cheat to me: if Dr Arbuthnot never in fact did catch the 7.50 to Didcot, then how were viewers able to see it so vividly as he described his actions to David Suchet? In The Guilty, though, the two past and present strains of narrative seem to be reliable and exist simultaneously – without any of the visual or musical clues that sometimes signal flashbacks – as they must surely do in the minds of bereaved parents.

Tamsin Greig also succeeds in bringing much to a path deeply pitted by the heels of distinguished Equity members. Greig is rather similar to Olivia Colman in having suddenly moved to a new rank of recognition as an actor after years of work in TV comedy. Among her particular qualities are an acerbic edge in the voice and the capacity to suggest deep disappointment and hurt. In The Guilty, the latter aspect underlines the mother-mother storyline, while the former brings an unease to the routine police scenes through the suggestion that soft-voiced compassion or encouragement of colleagues is something at which DCI Brand has to work. It would be almost impossible to create an original police series, but The Guilty impressively manages to leave some new fingerprints on a much-handled form.

• The Guilty begins 9pm, ITV, 5 September

For those of you who saw the 1st episode, was it good(is it like & as good as Broadchurch , which is my favorite show right now!).

& when can we(that appreciate great drama) in the US expect to see The Guilty?

Longing for dramas like these over here in this empty, parched, dry desert of US shows('they' cancel good ones, The Killing just got cancelled again )!

We(US) need more classy dramas like You(UK) put out(well done!).

[hagios]

'The Guilty'

[Show spoiler]

The Guilty, set visit
Tamsin Greig stars as DCI Maggie Brand in ITV's gritty new murder drama The Guilty. Lucinda Everett visits the set to find a pretty suburban location where all is not what it seems.

Tamsin Greig as DS Maggie Brand in The Guilty Photo: ITV/HARTSWOOD FILMS


By Lucinda Everett
6:55AM BST 05 Sep 2013

It’s a bright spring morning and I’m standing in a picture-perfect square in suburban Surrey. Chocolate-box houses nestle behind pristine picket fences, and in the square’s central shared garden, paper lanterns bob cheerfully between cedar trees. But something isn’t right. There’s a sadness to the place, an eeriness. Then I spot them: tributes of flowers tied to the garden’s fence, a young magnolia tree planted as a memorial, and a broken child’s swing hanging limply from a tree.

Thankfully, nothing tragic has befallen the square’s residents. For the past fortnight their home has become the set of ITV’s new three-part drama, The Guilty, which centres on a community devastated by the disappearance of four-year-old Callum Reid and the discovery of his body five years later, only metres from his house. Overseeing the case is DCI Maggie Brand (Tamsin Grieg) who, like any modern detective worth her psychological salt, comes with her own casebook of personal problems.

The tragedy itself may not be real yet the unsettling atmosphere in the square certainly is, and producer Elaine Cameron - the creative mind behind Sherlock and Jekyll - puts much of that down to her lengthy search for the perfect location. “We wanted it to feel either European or North American, with all the houses looking the same and the white picket fences … slightly creepy. We’d been looking since before Christmas but this place just felt absolutely right.”

Four of the houses are also being used to film interior scenes and in the Reid’s kitchen, the mood is equally oppressive. Katherine Kelly (last seen in Eighties-based crime drama The Field of Blood) and Darren Boyd (Case Sensitive, Spy), who play Callum’s parents Daniel and Claire, are in the thick of an intensely emotional scene. Eyes hollow and brimming with tears, Kelly runs through possible suspects while a grey-faced Boyd distractedly washes and rewashes the same plate, pleading with his wife to stop the agonising rehashing of events. As the scene ends, with Kelly bleating an exhausted ‘why do I always feel like I’m on my own?’, there is a palpable moment of enthralled silence from the crew before preparations begin for the next take. Kelly and Boyd, their backs to one another, mutter lines to themselves, deep in thought.

This is fairly typical of the shoot so far, Boyd tells me later, as he sits with Kelly in their characters’ marital bedroom. “Mine and Kate’s characters are on the receiving end of this constant barrage of information and news and it is shattering them,” he says. “At times like [the scene in the kitchen] the energy is charged and buzzing with focus. It’s tiring and quite laden but, at the same time, you’re energised. You lean on each other. My first support has been Kate for a lot of it and we’ve had a lot of conversations about who these people were before any of this awful stuff happened.”

Although the pair allow themselves a chuckle during our chat, when Kelly nabs the bedroom’s only armchair and Boyd, who is 6’4”, is forced to perch on a pink plastic seat meant for a child, the gaiety is fleeting. For the most part they look as if they’ve been through the emotional wringer. What made them sign up?

“I did two series of a procedural drama [Case Sensitive],” says Boyd, and I was part of the procedural element. My character [DC Simon Waterhouse] was incredibly removed, so I thought the chance to play the other side of it, the emotional journey, would be interesting. I’m also always looking for things that stamp on any assumptions of what I may do next.”

Boyd says that he was drawn to The Guilty’s complex psychological issues. “I think it’s a study of what it is to be responsible for another human being, to try to possibly fail to create an environment that is safe,” he tells me earnestly. “What do you have to find in yourself to get it right and what happens when you don’t?”

For Kelly, the hook was Debbie O’Malley’s “irresistible script’. As she put it: ‘There are no goodies and baddies [in it], it’s just people trying to do the best they can. It has a sort of Scandinavian feel; you get to know what happened but it’s in a non-preaching, non-commenting way and it doesn’t really change anything. Every time I describe it, it sounds like something we’ve seen before, but to me it feels very new and fresh.”

Darren Boyd (as Daniel Reid) and Katherine Kelly (Claire Reid) star in a new three-part ITV drama The Guilty. PHOTO: ITV/HARTSWOOD FILMS

Indeed, a gritty Scandi-style procedural drama that shatters a small community’s idyll certainly does sound familiar (Broadchurch? Southcliffe?). But for Greig, these TV forerunners only made her more keen to be involved.

“You could just say ‘there’s loads of these dramas out there’ but I think we are really good at them,” she tells me, tucking into a banana on the sofa of her trailer. “Broadchurch was brilliant, I loved it. I feel like ITV are really on a roll, supporting a lot of great writers, unpicking prejudices. [Procedural dramas] are a sort of fingers up to the whole age of immediacy. Everything in our lives is saying ‘go faster, be funnier, be more instant… get a quick soundbite that you can understand’ but these dramas say no, we want to go really deep.”

Greig’s casting may come as a surprise; to many she will always be the single-minded Debbie Aldridge in Radio 4’s The Archers. On TV, her most memorable roles (Green Wing, Black Books, Episodes, Friday Night Dinner) have established her in the public’s imagination as an adept comic actress, at once oddball and acerbic. But in person she is soft and serious – her words are chosen carefully and delivered quietly – and when I ask how it feels to be going straight, a shadow of frustration crosses her face

“I’m always very bemused by being described as a comedic actress because I’ve also done a lot of straight stuff,” she says. “My approach to all work is about trying to find the truth of the character. With Green Wing, I met doctors and visited hospitals. To play Maggie, I met female DCIs. I do the same thing with a contained and inexpressive character [like Maggie] as I would with, you know, somebody who falls over.”

Unsurprisingly then, it was the show’s complexities that held the biggest attraction for her. “I was really drawn to this story because it’s not just about the disappearance of a child,” she says. “It’s beautifully interwoven with Maggie’s own story – the fact that the child went missing when she was pregnant and that the case re-emerges when her child is the same age as Callum was, and how do you then do your job? How do you separate the two?

“Her own child is also going from nursery to school and is starting to have problems. But because Maggie’s not there so much, she hasn’t learned to deal with them in the same way that her husband has. That makes the title of the show then very interesting.”


Jamie Sives, Tommy Potten (centre) and Tamsin Greig in The Guilty

Cameron believes that Grieg’s performance alone could bring about the recommissioning of the show (much as Olivia Colman’s acting did with Broadchurch). “She could be an incredibly iconic detective,” she tells me over tea in the catering van. “She’s just got something that you’ve never seen before.”

Back on set I watch Kelly and Boyd stand side by side at their bedroom window, silhouetted as they stare down at the garden where Callum was buried and the neighbours who could be to blame. It may be becoming a familiar image on our TV screens, but I’m not inclined to quibble. If The Guilty can deliver another stylish drama to add to our catalogue of triumphs, then I for one can’t wait to watch.


source

The Guilty, ITV, review

Benjamin Secher reviews ITV's new crime drama The Guilty, starring Tamsin Greig.


Tamsin Greig stars in The Guilty Photo: ITV

By Benjamin Secher
7:00AM BST 06 Sep 2013

The moment we see the white picket fence, we know something’s wrong. In The Guilty, a new three-part drama from the producers of Sherlock, the characters’ bland homes overlook a garden ringed by the pristine fencing that in real life denotes the sanitised satisfactions of suburbia and in fiction invariably points to something grubbier.

Sure enough, barely minutes into last night’s opening episode, a group of workmen digging in the garden had unearthed a make-shift casket containing the corpse of a child. The body was sent to the pathologist for tests, but nobody seemed in any doubt as to the boy’s identity: he was Callum Reid, the four-year-old from No 4, who had vanished exactly five years earlier.

It’s hard not to feel, so soon after Broadchurch and Top of the Lake – not to mention the BBC’s inferior Mayday – that we’ve had our fill of missing child dramas. Certainly, as the action here pendulummed between the present day and the events of 2008, very little felt original. The soon-to-be vanished child, seen gambolling around in slow motion; the child’s mother hollowed-out by grief (Katherine Kelly); the suspiciously taciturn father with a dirty secret (Darren Boyd) – all passed before us like so many whodunit clichés.

Thank goodness, then, for Tamsin Greig, who as DC Maggie Brand, a no-nonsense policewoman determined to solve the case while also juggling domestic problems of her own (a role which is itself a trope of the TV crime drama) lent the otherwise workmanlike proceedings a spark of life. Greig is one of the few British actresses on the small screen today – along with Olivia Colman and Sheridan Smith – who instantly appear not as characters, but as fully fleshed humans. Her presence, above all, is the reason to give this series your time. And besides, the real test of a whodunit is not in the set-up but in the resolution.

source

[Michael1989]

We've been following it and it's pretty good, last episode is tonight

Not seen Broadchurch so I can't compare