There are two episodes per afternoon until it ends on Wednesday. I was allowed to see seven of the eight, so if the big revelation turns it into one of the smartest police series of all time, I can only apologize for being premature. It has a winter cold so intense that I almost wore a jump, so it seems strange to get rid of it in a hot week of June. Each short episode is a two-handed game between Nesbitt and another actor, though occasionally others fall for a minute or two. It’s no different from the Netflix Criminal series, though it handled one case per episode, instead of deleting one case throughout the series. The case, then. Danny enters the morgue for a conversation with physician Jackie (Jolie Richardson) about the body of an unidentified young woman, who is presented as suicidal. Of course, he is suspicious of the circumstances, because so is copper. After some technical notes, Danny goes to leave, just to get him back on the plate. (Much of the plot proceeds based on the intuition of the characters.) Recognizes the necklace placed in a sterile plastic container. It makes a scream of pain. It’s not too spoiler to reveal that the body turns out to be that of his daughter, Christina, because the rest of the series depends on Danny tearing himself up trying to find out who killed her. But not before a morgue collapses, refusing to believe that Christina committed suicide. “Open it, or I’ll do it myself,” he roars, waving a scalpel at Jackie, who has locked it in the morgue with him. “They will throw you the fucking book about it,” he spits. Suspicion is many things, but underestimation is not one of them. Clearly Suspect targets a specific mood, a kind of Luther-lite. It is noisy, with neon lights in dark corners, with locations called Crimson Orchid, Baz’s Sauna and Gym and County Racecourse. But it is a tedious version of noir that does not land and often ends cartoonishly. During the series, Danny bounces from lead to lead, following in the footsteps of the crumb that teaches him about his daughter’s life. On the journey of his discovery, we meet friends, colleagues, Christina’s partner and the various mistakes in her orbit. As the couple becomes estranged, Danny knows nothing about Christina’s life as an adult. He kicked her out when she was 15, we believe, when he found her in bed with another girl. From his most flattering point of view, the idea that he might need to find out who his daughter is by combining the remnants of her life is interesting. The fact that her life consists of places and people with whom she has spent her career fighting offers a low buzz of tragedy. Anne-Marie Duff, who appears late in the series as Christina’s mother, offers plenty of sadness and weight, as one would expect. The opening titles, which make this look like a big-budget, big-name Cluedo game, and I guess it is, proudly parade the cast. This is a top collection of British and Irish acting talent, from Richard E Grant to Niamh Algar. The issue requires tension, and Nesbitt has to go from finger to toe with them. After all the fury, I can only imagine that he was crushed after filming. It is highly theatrical and, paradoxically, has the feeling of being turned off the television early, when it was done as much as possible with as little as possible. But this is not a lock, and I found the theatricality so high – Christina regularly appears to her father as a kind of glittering sign of the afterlife – that by the seventh episode, she had completely lost me.
