Broadchurch

I used to love Columbo. I think it’s because even by the age of ten or so I had watched so many episodes of Morse, Poirot and whatnot that I was acutely sensitised to the mechanics of a whodunnit. Subsequently such shows were no longer much of a whodunnit for me. Watching Columbo, however, there was never any pretence of a whodunnit and, instead, the pleasure was in watching a sentient raincoat catch a killer like a cat plays with its food, if cats dissembled and smoked cigars.

Broadchurch borrows liberally, and consciously, from The Killing. A drawn-out, season-long murder investigation. The willingness to dwell on the grief of the family drew much comment from the reviewers at the time. But it has also nabbed its predecessor’s wily structural innovation: suspicion moves sequentially over the course of an episode from one suspect to the next, but with a viewer-detective asymmetry. Just as the police cotton on to who we’ve been suspecting for the past hour, we’ve been given new information that draws us elsewhere. Just like The Killing, Chibnall likes to implicate the audience by chucking in heart-rending details about our former suspect that scolds us for judging before understanding. It’s a compelling trick, well-suited for serial television.

Broadchurch, probably due to the shorter length of the series, deploys this tactic more successful – and more thoughtfully – than The Killing, which ended up making the police force goonish and its principle protagonist, Lund, come across as borderline, at best. In Broadchurch the story emerges as the stitching of the “close knit” community comes loose, it all feels much more premeditated than the Nord noir's ad hoc plotting.

(Like its Danish cousin, it is littered with red herrings that, with hindsight, are just a load of plotholes: What of the angry postman? Danny the secret poacher? The drug dealing boyfriend? Why does the cuckolding hotelier get to light the bonfire? Speaking of which, the bonfire vigil is so uncomfortably close to The Wicker Man – and so cackhanded – it undoes much of the good work before it.)

But. Well. The mechanics of a whodunnit meant that the killer becomes obvious from about halfway through. (Spoiler alert). Some clumsy (and uncharacteristic) dialogue about two-thirds of the way through seals the deal. Unfortunately this makes for an unconvincing killer: the final explanation needs some swallowing and the consequence of keeping it secret until the final episode means that no groundwork is laid to make it even remotely plausible despite being narratively satisfying.

So Broadchurch isn’t really much of a whodunnit. Yet, like The Killing, like Columbo in its own way, it doesn’t really care about this. Instead the interest comes from the quiet dissection of the knotty sinew of its characters’ lives. It even leaves substantial room in the final episode to work through some of the dramatic results of the revelation.

It is also artfully shot. It was uncanny (in the technical, Freudian sense) to have my childhood world (near enough) presented to me as so unfamiliarly beautiful: all ochre cliff faces and wine-dark sea. Even the weird triangular houses with ordinarily misguided cladding took on an expressionist, stylised quality.

It’s just such a shame that, I hope against everyone’s better judgement, there’s going to be a second series.

Oh. And I’m glad they didn’t kill the dog.

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