BBC One's latest crime thriller, "The Jetty", doesn't get off to the best start.
As the storylines emerge, it feels as if the show's creator and writer, Cat Jones, has "thrown a load of clichés at a wall in the hope that one will reel us in", said Emily Baker on the i news site. But as the series gets going, the "twists and shocks come at a rapid pace", creating a momentum that justifies the broadcaster's decision to release all four episodes as a boxset on iPlayer.
The action begins as Detective Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman) is assigned to look into an arson attack on a waterside boathouse in her sleepy Lancashire town. Alongside her colleague Hitch (Archie Renaux), she begins delving into the cold case of a local teenage girl, Amy, who vanished decades earlier. The series cuts between Manning's present day investigations and flashbacks to Amy's story in the 1990s, following her relationship with a much older man and descent into a "grown-up world of sleaze and booze".
When true crime podcaster Riz (Weruche Opia) turns up to make a series about Amy's disappearance, Manning is forced to confront her own past and re-evaluate her relationship with her late husband, Mack.
After a shaky start, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian , the show develops into an "unexpectedly attentive meditation on what it means to move as a woman through a world that is suffused with male violence in all its myriad forms".
Coleman is "never less than magnetic" as the sardonic Manning, said Vicky Jessop in the London Evening Standard . The "wonderfully claustrophobic" series keeps viewers "hooked" as she digs deeper into the case, and a sense of "unease grows and grips ever tighter".
But the plot in the opening hour is confusing, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph . I "twice checked to see if I had started watching a later episode by mistake", and the series is full of female-led drama tropes.
It can be a bit "heavy-handed" at times, agreed Baker on the i news site, and the show's exploration of misogyny and violence against women sometimes feels more "frying pan to the head" instead of "creeping realisation". Still, TV has been "crying out" for a series like this: "I can't remember the last time a BBC crime series gripped me this much."
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