ITV1’s new female-led detective series, starring Suranne Jones and Lesley Sharp as Rachel Bailey and Janet Scott, detective constables in the Manchester Metropolitan police, promises a great deal but – on the evidence of this opening hour, at least – delivers very little.
Now that it’s been firmly established that more people than you might have expected survived the events at the end of Series 1, things are settling into the routine (well, as routine as it ever gets around here) of ensuring that this time round, no-one is safe from a grisly dispatch.
The principal problem with The Shadow Line is its identity crisis. At times, it’s a fascinating noir-ish thriller; at others, it feels like an unwieldy Shakespearian melodrama that has somehow lost its way en route to the RSC and found itself on the telly instead.
As many of you will know, this is one of the episodes fandom has been awaiting with some internet-beating excitement. The very notion of a Neil Gaiman Doctor Who story seems so perfect that we wonder why it’s taken just so long for this union to happen.
After six scintillating Saturdays’ worth of murder, mayhem and malheur, French crime drama Spiral concludes with a double-bill that untangles the criss-crossing cat’s cradle of storylines and brings the series to a grim but gripping conclusion.
Appropriately, given that it begins with the discovery of a body, the opening episode of The Shadow Line moves at a pace that’s almost funereal, although that isn’t to say it’s boring.
After the tumultuous events of Series 6’s opening two-parter comes the more traditional “onesy” – and an historical episode at that! Pirates are the order of the day for Team TARDIS as they find themselves aboard a doomed ship…
BBC Two’s Psychoville returns for a second series and, judging by the first episode, it’s as smart and confident as ever.
It takes a television series of exceptional quality – and daring – to satisfy its audience without answering almost any of the questions posed in the preceding episode of a two-part story. Yet this is precisely what Doctor Who achieves in ‘Day Of The Moon’.
Created by Paul Abbott (Shameless) and written by Danny Brocklehurst (The Street, Clocking Off), BBC One’s Exile is a three-part psychological drama concerned with the impermanence of remembrance and the persistence of memory.