Aidan Turner looks hot in a beard but that’s about as good as it gets for The Suspect
“First rule of psychology – shut up and listen”
Just a quickie for this as The Suspect really tried my patience. Based on Michael Robotham’s 2004 novel of the same name, Peter Berry’s adaptation goes for five episodes which were stripped over a week, probably highly conscious that if they’d gone for weekly release, the show would have sunk without trace. A conspiracy thriller that has some potential in its concept – a clinical psychologist becomes implicated in the death of a woman who was a former patient, something he neglected to tell anyone about – it falls back far too often on lazy cliché and genre tropes.
Investigating police officers who adamantly only pursue one line of enquiry until it is too late, check. A murder suspect free to roam the country and interview multiple persons of interest in the case, check. Painful contrivances, outlandish plot twists, scarcely credible developments every ten minutes, check check check. With a cheeky wink and a dose of camp, some shows can pull this kind of thing off, preposterousness as entertainment, but The Suspect is too dour to make it work. What it does do well is deploy Adam James as a multi-fangled red herring right to the end but that’s not enough for a five-parter.
