Kiri, episode four review - this series was a brave gamble that didn’t quite pay off
When all was said and done (or left undone), what was Kiri (Channel 4) finally about? At its most compellingly honest, it portrayed the impossible demands placed on social workers who stick plasters on the wounds of broken Britain. Whenever Sarah Lancashire’s embattled Miriam was on screen – lambasting her superiors, making peace with her mother, even at the vet’s – the focus sharpened, the stakes were higher, and all was well.
Miriam’s story had a beginning, a middle and an end. She alone was granted redemption, notwithstanding the irony that she had sent Kiri to the wrong home after all. Everyone else was left to battle for ownership of Kiri’s memory. The Akindeles were boxed into playing race politics in pursuit of justice, while the Warners were trapped in a dilemma from which there was no egress without mutually assured destruction.
It was a brave moment to drop the curtain, withholding the balm of a pat resolution. The gamble didn’t quite pay off. Take that police investigation. Kiri made scant pretence to be a procedural, but if this had been Line of Duty the absence of Kiri’s biological father Nate’s gold car from the vicinity of her home would have been discovered on CCTV before the next commercial break.
The underwritten D I Mercer (Wunmi Mosaku) might have helped Nate more by doing her job rather than covertly lecturing his father Tobi (Lucian Msamati). Their face-off – “I know men like you.” “Do you want to role-play a better relationship with your dead relative?” – sounded typed in pay-attention-to-this-bit capital letters.
The murder made no sense either. Jim (Steven Mackintosh) killed Kiri with a frictionless sangfroid that coldly served the plot but felt disingenuous. And then there was Si (Finn Bennett), a relentlessly articulate teen sleuth whose on-off behavioural problems were bizarrely calmed by the discovery that his dad had dispatched his soon-to-be adopted sister.
Kiri admirably strained to broach a big subject in transracial adoption. Like the working out of a maths problem, you could see the thinking. But where was the feeling? Thorne cashed in all his chips with Miriam, an earthy saint whose moving encounter with her adult charges stuck out for its gauche emotionalism.