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Just two episodes in and we already love The Returned.
Like a master vintner blending the best grape varieties to make a great bottle of Bordeaux, so The Returned mixes the ripe genres of Scandinavian crime, American mystery, and French drama, into a multinational melange that appeals to the taste buds of those of us who like to get telly drunk on a Sunday night.
Remember that awful anti-piracy ad from a few years ago? The one The IT Crowd mercilessly parodied, and which still blares at you when you set any 2006-era DVD a-whirring…
So now we know why the BBC was so quick to announce a second series. It was a warning shot, to prepare us for the idea that the momentum of The Fall would carry on past 5 episodes, and that we’d all be left craving some more of that sweet sweet darkness like the Monday night drama masochists we are.
Regret resonates across the fourth episode of The Fall like the sound of a gunshot down the corridors of Belfast’s police station.
A terrified dame, like a wide-eyed escapee from a 1950s B-movie poster, stares out from the evocative vintage cover that adorns Stephen King’s Joyland.
French zombie drama. The words trip off the tongue like Gauloises smoke. Go on, say it again and try to resist a Parisian inflection and a nonchalant shrug. It’s alright.
So dark is The Fall that – at the show’s halfway point – we’re now fairly certain that its creator Allan Cubitt wrote it in a mixture of kitten blood and the tears of toddlers who’d dropped their ice cream.
The Fall seems dead set on setting itself apart from other crime shows. Not because we know who the murderer is – Columbo hung its raincoat on that particular chair 44 years ago – but because it’s so desperately grim that it makes its Danish contemporaries look as light-hearted as Murder, She Wrote. It’s a show so darned dark that it forces you to adjust the brightness settings in your own mind, as well as your telly.
It’s almost cruelly emblematic really. That the most closely-guarded Doctor Who finale ever, one which concerns a great secret being discovered, should have its own secrets compromised. And by the ‘Great Intelligence’ that is the collective mind of the Internet no less, rather than the breathy malevolence of Richard E. Grant.
We’ll make this quick. Faster than a speeding bullet, even. DK’s Superman: The Ultimate Guide to the Man of Steel doesn’t pull its punches in covering the 75 years of heroics by arguably the most famous superhero on and above the Earth. The result is a gorgeous and thoroughly comprehensive history of the Big Blue Boy Scout.