A great guest keeps Series 3 of Dalgliesh interesting but it is almost too relentlessly grim
“You’re hard to read”
I want to love Dalgliesh, I really do. But as with Series 1 and Series 2, the newly released third series has such a dourness to it that is unremittingly grim and increasingly hard to watch. Life as a British detective in the mid-1970s might not necessarily have been a laugh-a-minute but Bertie Carvel’s Adam Dalgliesh is as unsmiling and unvarying as ever, creating a bit of a tonal issue for the series.
Once again, there’s three of PD James’ original novels adapted here into 2-part stories – Death in Holy Orders, Cover Her Face and Device and Desires. And once again there’s a cracking level of guest cast members joining in, making each episode a treat. Phoebe Nicholls and Anton Lesser, Sam Swainsbury and Ellora Torchia, Adam James and Nancy Carroll and Liz White and more in the last of them.
From chilly theological colleges to upper class family homes to a nuclear plant and the protestors around it, there’s a wide range of criminality and cleverness to deduct the crimes. Oddly there’s a rolling cast of supporting officers to help Dalgliesh – Alastair Brammer’s DS Tarrant only hangs around for one story, Swainsbury’s DI Roscoe subs in for one and Carlyss Peer’s Kate Miskin, now a DCI, pops up for the final case.
This isn’t a problem in and of itself, but it further reduces the opportunities to show our title character as a human being, to see him lower his defences just a touch to make us care – even just a little – about him. There’s a touch of it at the death, a hint that he might finally get it on (to be fair, he is a widower) but overall, this is just too cold a show for me.
