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!).