iven sure occasions over the previous few years, it’s not a good time to be a police officer. Public belief is at an all-time low because of a conveyor belt of bombshell revelations and failures.
However regardless of actual world sentiment, it’s a distinct story in the case of fictional bobbies on the small display. Give us a sniff of a excessive octane cop drama, and also you’ll discover us prepared and ready with loads of provisions in place.
Take smash hit Line of Obligation and white knuckle thriller Bodyguard. Each pulled in document viewers, and now ITV is again with Karen Pirie, from World Productions, the identical workforce that introduced the earlier two to our screens. For sure, hopes have been excessive.
Based mostly on Val McDermid’s The Distant Echo, which offered over 17 million copies worldwide, it begins with a real crime podcast digging up an unsolved homicide from 1996 within the college city of St Andrews, Scotland.
The sufferer: 19 12 months previous Rosie Duff. Reason behind demise: a slightly ugly stab wound. The three college students who discovered her have been all prime suspects, however have been freed resulting from a scarcity of forensic proof. After which, it appears, detectives didn’t trouble making an attempt additional, and as an alternative hoped the case would fade into the mists of time. And it did – all till “some woke millennial discovered a microphone” 25 years later, that’s.
The provocative podcaster is riling her listeners with recent theories and particulars, in flip piling stress on the largely previous, white, male St Andrews police for solutions. Who to get on the case? Who to undergo the motions? Crucially, who would assist the optics? Ah, sure! A girl.
And so titular character DS Karen Pirie (Lauren Lyle) will get her step up from breaking apart home disturbances to severe crime. It’s not the very best of introductions; our heroine will get the decision after an Echo Falls-fuelled night time of ardour with a co-worker. However she fits up, swallows her imposter syndrome, and strides in, able to look into an incident that befell when she was three years-old.
She has to battle ageism, sexism and class-ism, flying at her from all instructions: bosses, friends, witnesses. Her techniques aren’t conventional (she appears to do a big portion of investigating on the couch, glass of wine in hand – a slightly too reasonable portrayal of WFH in case you ask me) and it’s inflicting ire amongst her superiors. They appointed her to fail – to not do any precise detecting. Pirie’s poking can be triggering recent ache for Duff’s household – two thuggish brothers – and the unique three suspects, who’ve grown right into a nervous, shifty bunch with one thing to cover.
She’s routinely hauled again in entrance of her bosses for a telling off, however Pirie pushes on, staggered by the mountain of errors and mishandling on an investigation for a sufferer who had the audacity to have a intercourse life, and exit late at night time, by herself. In brief, “a girl doing every thing in her energy to get murdered”.
It’s an honest sufficient plot however the execution is as bungled because the police work Pirie finds herself uncovering. There’s a component of finesse that’s lacking, a disgrace contemplating the manufacturing workforce’s CV. Weighty topics are being tackled – societal misogyny and victim-blaming, small city racism, trial by social media, vigilantism and the biggie, systematic police abuse and failures – however none hit house.
Earlier than something significant can develop, a wedge of comedian aid is inexplicably manhandled in, which is ok, however it solely actually works if the scenes in query are tense sufficient. Regardless of rooting for Pirie, the present has all of the polish and dialogue of a live-action Scottish Scooby Doo.
Essentially the most dramatic photographs are these of the Forth Street Bridge, which appears to look in each different scene. Pretty bridge, that.
Karen Pirie runs for 3 feature-length episodes each Sunday night time at 8pm from September 25 to October 9, with every episode out there to stream on ITV Hub afterwards
