The last time we saw James Nesbitt he was dashing around Greater Belfast trying to outrun the incomprehensible plot of Jed Mercurio’s Bloodlands. Happily, his new series, Suspect (Channel 4, Sunday), takes a break from Troubles noir and instead finds the veteran actor starring in a high-concept remake of Cluedo.
Suspect starts with Nesbitt’s grumpy cop, Danny Frater, arriving at a mortuary where the body of a young woman has turned up. Danny is grumpy to begin with — but his world is spun head over heels as the victim is revealed to be his daughter. Such a grizzly discovery would leave most people devastated and barely able to function. Danny gear-shifts immediately into ace sleuth and is quickly off on the trail of the killer. That’s despite all the evidence pointing to suicide — and Danny having taken it upon himself to solve the crime without the permission of his higher-ups.
It’s one of many eye-rolling moments in a lacklustre thriller that fails to make you care about the victim or the hunt for the murderer. It’s hard not to think the morgue is an appropriate starting point for a drama that feels dead on arrival. If Channel 4 is hoping that, by showing two episodes a night for four nights, it can help the series build momentum, it had better not hold its breath.
Danny is convinced his daughter would never kill herself, but his knowledge of her internal life is surely suspect, as he didn’t even know she was married. Could Christina’s wife, Nicola — introduced in the second instalment, and played by Niamh Algar, who gets to chill slightly and use her Mullingar accent — be the culprit? Or might it be Jackie, the pathologist played by Joely Richardson, with whom Danny gets very angry, to the point of waving a scalpel in her face? Other suspects include Danny’s boss, portrayed by Death in Paradise’s Ben Miller, and characters to be played by Richard E Grant and Anne-Marie Duff in later instalments.
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Suspect is adapted from a Danish series, Forhøret (The Interrogation), yet there is little of the melancholic chic that we associate with Nordic thrillers. Instead, this is a ridiculous caper that involves Danny travelling from location to location and looking for clues like a character from a point-and-click computer game from the 1990s. The saving grace is that each episode clocks in at just 23 minutes — although even that can feel overly long. With Nesbitt never deviating from a sort of high-octane grumpiness, the true mystery of Suspect is whether anyone will want to stay with it all the way to the end.
