A starry cast can’t save the structural faults at the heart of bleak Channel 4 crime drama Suspect
“You’ll never prove it”
Adapted from the Danish crime drama Forhøret, Channel 4’s Suspect has all the ingredients that should make it work. A killer of an opening gambit and an all-star cast to deliver its concept of a series of essentially one-to-one episodes that edge us ever closer to an uncomfortable truth. Matt Baker’s English language adaptation fails to hit the mark that leaving Suspect feeling very suspect.
We open with James Nesbitt’s Detective Danny Frater taking on a late night case of death by suicide, only to be floored to discover that the body in the mortuary (spoiler alert…) is his estranged daughter Christina. Determined to find out what happened, Danny visits a range of people from her life and in following the format, manages to do one per episode, from lover to mother, pseudo father figure to boss.
It’s a painfully contrived journey in the end, requiring Danny to abandon pretty much everything about being a police officer to make the necessary leaps, even as it turns out that the dark world he has lived and worked in is far closer to the world his daughter operated in despite their differences. But the would-be noir tone falls way flat as the show finds itself hamstrung by this storytelling structure.
Even with the likes of Sacha Dhawan, Richard E Grant, Joely Richardson and Sam Heughan onboard, Dries Vos’ direction is more constrained than it needs to be, the overbearing staginess of the two-handers proving a curious choice. Anne-Marie Duff as Christina’s mother and Danny’s ex-wife does the best at raising the level but Nesbitt proves perilously close to hammy as he has to go again and again.
