Broadchurch

Another murder-mystery-thriller?  Yep.  This one at least doesn't throw up a gallery of weirdo suspects, like its opposite number on the BBC, and it appears to be moving faster, although it has eight episodes so there's plenty of opportunity to drop the pace.

Hope not, it's a great cast and the inevitable secrets that bubble up are at least not signposted in a size even the short-sighted can easily see.  Nonetheless, at the risk of being descended on by a posse of Tennant fans, we have to say that he didn't really look convincing in the police appeal at the end of the episode.  He doesn't look like any detective we've seen speaking on the television news, and he certainly didn't sound like one, promising the killer that they would be caught no matter what.  That's what's known as setting yourself up to fail, and even an archetypal PC Plod would surely avoid that old chestnut.

Line of Duty

Having made no effort to catch Jed Mercurio’s previous antiseptic offerings ‘Bodies’ and ‘Cardiac Arrest’, we came to this with only the hope of something less self-conscious than ‘The Shadow Line’ and less run-of-the-mill than almost every other cop show.

The first of five episodes set up some nice ambiguities.  If none of the characters are hugely sympathetic, so far, then they’re not outright bad-guy villains either, just people making choices according to circumstance.  Wonderful Lennie James is DCI Tony Gates, whose soaring crime clear-up rate brings him under suspicion of cherry-picking easy-win cases.  DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), whose moral compass points so truly to north he probably can’t sit down, is assigned to Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) to investigate.  DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) meanwhile has succeeded in joining Gates’s team undercover.  Whether guilty or innocent of the above, Gates is compromised: he has a wife (Kate Ashfield) and children, as well as a mistress (Gina McKee) who has dragged him into covering up her involvement in a hit-and-run that may have been deliberate.

Nothing to dislike so far.  (Neil Morrissey as a sleazy cop may just be inspired casting.)  The style is background to the script and action, for once, and it’s a promising premise to look at the system of modern policing as something that allows or even encourages foul play.