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Something of a tradition, the two-hour crime drama on a Sunday night. It stretches from Vera and Grace, all the way back to Inspector Morse in the 1980s.
But it’s a dangerous format. If the characters are weak, if the story sags, if the dialogue drags, viewers will really start to feel it around the 60-minute mark. Then an ad break will come around, they’ll wander off to put the kettle on… and not bother coming back.
The cosy detective show McDonald And Dodds, starring Jason Watkins and Tala Gouveia, ought to have thrived as a series of well-paced one-hour episodes, for instance. But it simply didn’t have the complexity or the characters to last double the length. Viewing figures slumped, and earlier this year it was quietly cancelled.
Karen Pirie is different. Based on the superb books by Val McDermid, this returning drama has plots as deep and dark as a coal mine shaft. The characters aren’t merely well drawn — they’re alive, constantly seeking to understand and learn more about each other.
This three-part adaptation of the novel A Darker Domain opened in a Fife fish shop during the miners’ strike in 1984. A young mother was sharing a chip supper with her best mate and cooing over her one-year-old.
A thread of tension ran through the scene, vibrating with a hidden threat. But nothing hinted at the explosive violence to come, as a masked gunman seized the mum, taking her and the baby hostage.
DI Pirie (Lauren Lyle) wasn’t even born when the kidnap happened. But the young woman was the daughter of Scotland’s wealthiest oil baron, Sir Brodie Grant, and it was all too plausible that the unsolved case was one every copper would know.
Based on the superb books by Val McDermid, Karen Pirie has plots as deep and dark as a coal mine shaft
This three-part adaptation of the novel A Darker Domain opened in a Fife fish shop during the miners’ strike in 1984
The characters aren’t merely well drawn — they’re alive, constantly seeking to understand and learn more about each other
Its parallels with the John Paul Getty kidnap are hard to miss, and acknowledged in a brief aside by Pirie to her slightly dim sidekick, DC Jason ‘Mint’ Murray (Chris Jenks). He’s none the wiser: ‘John Paul?’ he asks. ‘As in the pope?’ Mint gets all the best jokes. When Pirie asks if he’s ‘media trained’, he replies, ‘No, but I’ve watched a lot of Arnold Schwarzenegger speeches on YouTube.’
The two timeframes are expertly intercut, with some flashbacks lasting just a few seconds, helping us to grasp what people are talking or thinking about. This technique removes the need for long passages of explanation.
Grant in 1984 is played by Jamie Michie, as a bullying, demanding tycoon who expects the police to work as his own private army. James Cosmo is the same man 40 years later, emotionally broken but as controlling as ever, employing an investigator to look into Pirie’s past.
The private eye will surely have discovered that she’s in a relationship with another colleague, DS Phil Parhatka (Zach Wyatt) — one she hasn’t disclosed to her bosses. That deep, dark mine shaft is going to take more twists.
