Reece Shearsmith and Alex Kingston lead Chasing Shadows, a 2014 crime drama that didn’t lead anywhere much
“Am I really a suspect?”
Chasing Shadows aired on ITV in September 2014 but didn’t really manage to make much of an impact. Created by Rob Williams, it was an entry into the always-overcrowded crime drama market, focusing on the work of a missing persons unit led by a police officer with a difference. In this case, it is Reece Shearsmith’s DS Sean Stone, presumably somewhere on the autism spectrum although undiagnosed by the show, who finds himself exiled from the force after rubbing the higher-ups the wrong way one too many times.
So he finds himself at the Missing Persons Bureau, where he’s ostensibly able to exercise his preference to work with data rather than people, identifying possible patterns in the large number of cold cases left unsolved. But he still has to work with others in some ways and he’s tasked with liaising with Alex Kingston’s analyst Ruth Hattersley across the two serial killer cases featured in this series. And as is so often the case with TV representations of autism, there’s a cringing sense of a ‘journey’ of learning social skills on top of solving crime.
There’s nothing particularly distinguished about those crimes though, which makes Chasing Shadows a bit of a so-so watch in the end. Missing teenagers and dodgy suicide websites, missing lawyers and dodgy psychiatric hospitals, it all just feels a little samey given the proliferation of crime thrillers on our screens. A detective being brusque with victims’ families is nothing new, nor the suspicion between different teams struggling to work together (Noel Clarke’s DCI is Sean’s new boss, Adjoa Andoh a colleague to Ruth). It all adds up to perfectly decent but average fare.
