The Catch is less a detective show, more an erotic game

The Catch (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday, 10pm) is a diaphanous show about a tenacious private investigator and a charming conman, told with zest, endlessly splitting or swooshing screens and – this cannot be stressed enough – really, really great hair.

When the latest in TV producer Shonda Rhimes’s stable of light-heeled romantic comedies began last year, it put its protagonist Alice Vaughan in a telling predicament: her marriage was a sham. More humiliatingly, though, it had been a long con. Private investigator Alice, who in Mireille Enos’s performance wears a beaming smile like a shield, discovered that her fiancé, Christopher, was actually the man her agency had been targeting for years, Mr X.

Played by Peter Krause, whose fixed smirk is the only facial expression still available to him, both men are thought to be quite the catch. But with the con artist’s flight, the show is more joyfully aware of something that Alice, long indifferent to marriage, never quite admits – nothing compares to the thrill of the chase.

“Are you ready to play?” asks Mr X, early on, and if Alice might have enjoyed being Mrs X, it’s because, yes, she always was. This is less a detective show than an erotic game, played out with clues, codes, disguises, accents, and a suspiciously high number of black-tie balls per episode. Call it what you want – caper, heist, con job – it’s really the sly, smiling fantasy of what date-night could be.

The question facing its second series is something similar: will they settle into dull routine or can they keep the magic alive?

When we last left The Catch the detective agency was in tatters and Krause's con-man Ben (he's Ben now) was facing hard time in jail, a set back so severe it takes the show nearly three zippy minutes to reverse it. Now Krause will run cons for the FBI with his comedic sidekick, played by John Simms, while Enos briskly regrows her business, beginning with a mystery involving her shiftless brother.

Comfortably middle-aged

Nobody was ever going to confuse The Catch with The Wire, but even under its LA sunshine there was at least a wisp of realism about it. Its cast is unfussily diverse, its main characters are comfortably middle-aged and everyone is allowed to have ergonomic desk supports, laughter lines and brows that occasionally crease. (The hair, of course, is nothing short of perfection.)

The second series, though, has already begun to loosen its relationship with gravity. Even violence has no consequence. Krause is stabbed in a prison shower, guns are pulled at the slightest provocation, dead bodies seems only a slight inconvenience. To keep this formula going, and supposedly to preserve their cover, Ben and Alice also have to keep running around. Nothing is allowed to settle.

Maybe that’s what the lovers want – their sex scenes, usually glimpsed in elliptical flashback, preserve the passion of a torrid encounter. In a rare moment together in bed, Alice briefly fantasises about married life, dreamily wondering about grocery shopping. “That would be fun,” agrees Ben. “For a day.”

Instead, we are promised, a relationship of ceaseless flirtation that can go on indefinitely. It’s a nice idea, but as episodic capers begin to stack up, it doesn’t seem so easy to keep things fresh. All chases eventually become exhausting.