Suspect, series 2, review: a crime drama so bad it feels like a hallucination
The makers of Suspect (Channel 4) must offer a very generous remuneration package, because how else to explain why good actors have agreed to appear in a show as terrible as this? The script, the plot and the locations of this abject crime thriller appear to have been produced by AI. Cast members recite their lines in a haunted manner, as if their agent is standing behind the camera holding up a bag of cash and saying: “Think how much of your mortgage this will clear!”
The one exception is Anne-Marie Duff, who plays it with absolute conviction. Duff is the central figure in this second series. You may remember that the first series starred James Nesbitt, looking oddly like Christopher Lee playing Fu Manchu, as a detective investigating the suspicious death of his daughter.
Well, Nesbitt is now in a mental institution after stabbing a hospital pathologist played by Joely Richardson, whom he identified as the killer because of the way she folded up crisp packets. Just thinking about that makes me giggle, so Lord knows how Nesbitt and Richardson kept a straight face when they played it.
Duff plays Nesbitt’s ex-wife, Dr Susannah Newman, who picks up where he left off. The USP of this drama is that each episode features an encounter with a potential suspect, played here by Dominic Cooper, Ben Miller, Tamsin Greig, Vinette Robinson, Eddie Marsan, Céline Buckens, Nicholas Pinnock and Gina McKee.
Cooper is a mysterious new client who turns up to Dr Newman’s practice one day and asks for help to stop smoking. Under hypnosis, he makes a disturbing confession, which links back to her daughter’s death. This episode is the high point, thanks to Cooper’s charisma, but I’ve watched it all and it rapidly goes downhill.
The atmosphere is one of nightmarish paranoia. Newman approaches people for help, and they try to convince her that grief has driven her mad. Everyone in this under-populated city – supposedly London, but with a deliberately generic, Northern European feel to help the show sell in multiple territories – appears to be in on a giant conspiracy. Pinnock manages to project an air of normality, but the others ham it up as cartoonish villains. And some of the casting is way off: Ben Miller might make a fun detective in Death in Paradise, but he’s all wrong as a police chief in a supposedly serious drama.
It has a hallucinatory quality. The film-makers might say that’s deliberate, but it feels more like a side-effect of how badly this thing has been put together.
All episodes of Suspect are on Channel4.com now
