Let's forget that Gillian Anderson is an impossibly glamorous Met detective and Jamie Dornan was a pretty-boy model. Let's imagine that they look like your average Met detective and serial killer, say. Disbelief suspended? Good, ok, now we can get to the drama.
Detective Super (Super Detective?) Stella Gibson (Gillian Anderson) is drafted into Belfast from the Met to review the investigation of a murder which has gone nowhere. She quickly finds a link to another murder (professional women, strangled in their homes, posed, long dark hair) and we know she's not wrong. Married marriage counsellor and father of two Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) has an unhealthy obsession with smart professional brunettes and their underwear drawers.
This is nasty, nasty stuff. There is no onscreen violence until the last moments, but the whole hour drips with menace and the threat of pain. It also avoids easy distinctions - the teenaged babysitter comes onto the father of her charges, not realising of-course that she embodies his fetishistic fantasies, and Stella spots a cute colleague and casually tells him her hotel room number in front of witnesses. There could be a PhD thesis on the anti-marriage themes running through this, and while we want to see if and how the chase is concluded, and what is uncovered in the process, it's liable to cause nightmares for every one of its five weeks. Real crime is probably this cold, with flawed cops chasing disturbed criminals, but whether it is or should be stomached in the form of drama remains to be seen.
P.S. Ali must even remonstrate with her heroine Alison Graham over this. 'She Who Can Do No Wrong' said in this week's Radio Times (sceptics take note: the same issue in which Eddie Izzard said he would run for London Mayor) that 'The Fall' was nasty, and it is. She then went on to say that this was intelligent adult drama because the victims were given an onscreen life, rather than being an anonymous corpse. She cites CSI as an offender in this respect. But... often there is a backstory in CSI, albeit in a brief pre-credit scene or in flashback, and in 'The Fall'? We don't even see the woman whose murder brings Stella to Belfast, and there are a mere couple of scenes with the next victim.
A few weeks ago, SWCDNW penned a moving tribute to a school friend who had been a victim of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. In it she decried cheap drama-documentaries that sensationalised violent crime for the titillation of a voyeuristic audience. Hear hear. Programmes like 'Five Daughters' are the ones that break the mould, that humanize the horror, without diluting the devastating consequences for those close to the victim. 'The Fall' may prove to feature the latest victim's sister etc. in subsequent episodes, but the focus is clearly on the cat-and-mouse game between the cop and the killer. The investigation is bound to throw up the usual serial-killer cliches, which are more the hallmarks of Hollywood nasties or formulaic dramas than anything intelligent and truthful.
