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How anti-whodunit Unforgotten became the year's most addictive thriller

As ITV’s crime drama concludes its third series, Ed Power explains what makes it so gripping

Ed Power
Friday 26 October 2018 12:37 BST
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Unforgotten - Series 3 trailer

The summer’s most essential small screen drama was a wintry meditation on loss, ageing and the lies we tell ourselves – all bound up in a whodunit that unfolded like a game of Cluedo scripted by Ingmar Bergman.

As post-World Cup pick-me-ups go, it was a highly unlikely formula. Yet as the third series of Chris Lang’s Unforgotten (ITV) concluded its six-episode run with the unmasking of ghastly GP Tim Finch as the killer of missing schoolgirl Hayley Reid 18 years earlier, it had already handed the BBC’s Poldark its three-cornered hat in the Sunday night ratings wars.

More than that, Unforgotten has confirmed that there’s still space in the schedules for thoughtful, slow-burning entertainment. That is rather a novelty in this imperial phase of the blockbuster costume romp (see also Troy: Fall of a City, The Woman in White etc). For Aidan Turner’s pecs of power to be trounced by Nicola Walker’s reserved turn as troubled cold-case investigating officer DCI Cassie Stuart felt like a triumph for quiet and reflective telly.

It was a measure of Lang’s skills as a dramatist that he could sign off with a muted finale without leaving the viewer feeling cheated. There was no big twist, Finch’s guilt having already been broadly confirmed with his arrest for Hayley’s killing the previous week. But by this point the show had successfully pleaded its case that big twists are an insult to the audience’s intelligence.

“I’m pretty much a textbook psychopath,” Finch (Alex Jennings) had confessed to Stuart and her partner DCI “Sunny” Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar), not so much chewing the scenery as licking it lasciviously. “Above average intelligence, superficially charming, zero empathy,” he went on, a Poundland Hannibal Lecter enjoying his closeup.

No bombshells were detonated as Finch was confronted with damning evidence locating him at the scene of Hayley’s death. He admitted not only to raping and murdering the teenager (and then burying her in the central reservation of the M1 as a dare to himself) but to killing several other young women in similar circumstances.

Among the foursome of sad, damaged middle-aged men presented as possible culprits he was from the outset the most unnerving – a reptile in Alan Partridge leisurewear. How daring of Lang to give us an ending that Jennings – ratcheting up his oily turn as the Duke of Windsor in The Crown – had communicated from the start with his waxy, dehumanised body language.

Psychopath: Alex Jennings as Dr Tim Finch in ITV’s ‘Unforgotten’

Here, Unforgotten confirmed it was indeed the anti-Poldark – a masterclass in dodging cliches and locating the pain behind the sensationalism. Forget bared torsos – the only thing exposed was the suffering the innocent must endure when evil parachutes into their lives.

There was a lot of suffering to go around. Hayley’s mother and sister (Brid Brennan and Bronagh Waugh) had never recovered from her disappearance after her New Year’s Eve shift at a Hampshire holiday rental in 1999. But far from bringing closure, it was implied that learning the truth about the missing girl had merely opened old wounds. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

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Also staring into a precipice was DCI Stuart, who subverted the caricature of the hard-boiled lady cop with which TV has been enamoured all the way back to Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. She was a bruiser with a marshmallow centre: flinty on the outside but, estranged from her father and with her son off living in the life in New York, quietly spiralling into a midlife crisis.

What ultimately made Unforgotten so compelling is that it insisted you invest in the characters, not the storyline. Perhaps that’s why the closest Lang came to a misstep was prematurely offing Neil Morrissey’s loser salesman Peter Carr.

Carr was one of the quartet of possible killers who gathered at the Spinney on New Year’s Eve 18 years ago for a debauched knees-up. All four were men with secrets and had been dangled deliciously before us as in some way involved in the killing.

But fraudster Carr was bundled off early when fatally stabbed by a vigilante after a sleep-deprived Cassie mislaid his file. His details were leaked by a sensationalist blogger – thus depriving us of the pleasure of imagining all the way until the end that this hapless striver might be a wolf in schlub’s clothing.

If there was a shock in the final episode, it was that Hayley was among several of Finch’s victims. DNA tests of underwear and jewellery at his house linked him to the disappearance of another girl. And then buried car parts confirmed the theory that he’d emptied the boot of his Audi and driven Hayley’s body to the M1 to lay her to her final rest.

He folded when presented with the evidence. Or at least dropped the guise of the wrongly accused small town doctor. Viewers who had bet on the storyline delivering one last jackknife may have deemed this twist wasn’t quite bendy enough to merit all the buildup.

Everyone else will have been gripped by the sheer inhumanity. There was no sense that Finch had been foiled or that justice done. So hardwired was his psychopathy he was able to wave away the killings with the logic that that’s what psychopaths do.

Seasons one and two of Unforgotten had pulled off the same feat of making one empathise with victim rather than psychologically ogle the murderer. It’s hard not to read this as a riposte to the True Detective school of thrillers, with their fetishising of serial killers (and the depredations inflicted upon their invariably female victims). To do so without it feeling as if the script was scolding the audience for its prurience may be Lang’s most impressive feat.

Unforgotten is also evidence that British crime is at last getting past its Nordic noir obsession. Granted, the stylishly washed-out opening credits – soundtracked by pop depressives Oh Wonder – felt like a slightly warmed up version of the intro to The Bridge (the mopey theme songs are cousins once removed).

Yet, once the action got underway, depressing woolly jumpers were happily absent. Nor was there any attempt by director Andy Wilson to make London and its hinterland look like rural Jutland on a bad day. As the chipper Khan, Bhaskar was a beacon of blokey cheer. And even at her most miserable, Stuart was never far from a steely put down. Both actors let their facial expressions, rather than bleak knitwear, communicate their feelings.

The police-procedural answer to slow TV, Unforgotten had taken its time every step of the way. The other suspects – Morrissey’s striving Carr, suspiciously beardy ex-vagrant Chris Lowe (James Fleet) and predatory television presenter James Hollis (Kevin McNally) – weren’t just red herrings, to be removed from the board as soon as they outlived their usefulness.

All were drawn with tremendous sensitivity, so that even when it seemed they might have something to do with Hayley’s vanishing, you never stopped investing in them as people. Hollis had believed his miscreant son the killer and risked everything to cover up for him (actually wild child Eliot probably just struck a deer on his druggy late-night drive). Lowe was an everyday bloke whose world had come undone when his credit card was hacked and used to download child pornography.

And Carr, whose file had found its way to a blogger desperate to break into journalism, was the person you hoped you didn’t grow up to be – a sad sack doing his best and discovering his best simply didn’t cut it. Far from a rogue’s gallery, these were hapless strivers caught up in a whirlwind.

If the procedural aspects felt like a peg upon which to hang the story of four tragic men muddling through middle age, that is exactly as intended, as Lang told Deadline Hollywood recently.

“Shows like mine and other cop shows are sold as genre shows but really it’s just a hanger on which to tell human interest stories,” he said. “They happen to provide a good structure with a beginning, middle and end with a resolution as well as more complexity, but really you’re looking at how people live their lives. People will always be fascinated by that and the police element is just a wrapper.”

Unforgotten is a whodunit for people who find the concept of whodunits a bit hoary. It aimed not to shock but to evoke empathy, with both the victims and the detectives for whom dispensing justice was another day at the office (a bit of a rubbish day at the office, as it happened).

This was a murder mystery rooted in the real world, which meant it was slow, sometimes frustrating and without a happy signoff. Its crowning achievement was to pull off a low-key ending – that oily doctor was guilty all along – without it seeming as if it had pulled one over on you. Lang has indicated he is open to a fourth season if everyone’s schedules can be lined up. The sooner these stars align, the better.

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