Suspects: Episode 1 Review

SUSPECTS: EPISODE 1 REVIEW

The concept of anything original from Channel 5 is as novel as Ant and Dec swapping sides. Remember, this is the station full of American shows and lightweight reality dross. Suspects then is their first original drama in nine years (as to what that was, answers on a postcard please) and they have certainly been pushing the promotion hard. The premise being that this a new take on the cop show, shot documentary style and heavily improvised. The actors given pointers of what the scenes need to achieve but with no script and no prior knowledge of how the others will play their parts.

There is no character backstory or insight into their private lives. D.I Martha Bellamy (Fay Ripley) doesn’t have family troubles at home, D.S Jack Weston (Damien Molony) isn’t an alcoholic and D.C Charlie Steele (Clare-Hope Ashitety) didn’t forget to lock her front door this morning. They are 100% focused on the crime. It’s a brave move and one that might not pay off over time if the audience isn’t emotionally invested in the main cast. Presumably the viewers affections are asked to be placed with the supporting cast but that has its own difficulties if we don’t know who the innocent party are until the end. Time will tell if we learn more about our main protagonists. Curiously, all the other police officers are essentially resigned to being extras.

From the off there’s no messing about and the pacing is Suspects’ greatest strength. We are straight in to the crime scene where a two year old girl has been reported missing and we see a quick fire no nonsense against the clock approach to solving a crime without all the personal politics which feels refreshing on first viewing. We never see forensics at work or eye witnesses accounts. We just get their findings in the form of fingerprints, CCTV and photofit, although these all seemed to arrive very quickly assuming this was all taking place in a twenty four hour period.

In a time when dramas are so slick and polished the style as a whole is a revelation. There are moments they disappear off screen or into the dark and all you hear are voices and then there are moments that take you so close it’s akin to intrusion of personal space. When they’re in interrogation rooms they actually sound like they’re in interrogation rooms, the acoustics helping with the realistic atmosphere. The fly on the wall nature works best when following them around streets or pacing the office but the rocky camera work is a little overdone during static slow paced scenes.

The unrehearsed element is an interesting one but Fay Ripley seemed to struggle, you can see her mind whirring and the result was a lot of undramatic pauses punctuated with many “ums and ers”. It was a good impression of a police officer out of her deph (unless that was the intention). Ashitey is quick and on the ball but was given too little to work with so on this episode’s evidence (sorry) Molony is the main character – a quietly spoken but determined individual who gets the fun bits of chasing people and shouting at them. While to a lesser extent you can see his thinking process as well, he comes out with convincing dialogue and only a couple of lines seemed out of place. On that, it’d be fascinating to watch this without the hindsight of knowing about the lack of script and how different would our opinions be?

Gripping? Not necessarily but there was enough well executed twists to keep up the intrigue. Reportedly filmed in episode order, it’s a good solid start and should improve further once the actors have adapted more to the hurried ad lib nature of filming. 7/10