Prior to its broadcast, publicity for the second series of Broadchurch walked a tricky tightrope between not saying anything at all and saying way too much. The campaign was as sparse as it was relentless, throwing up a din of indecipherable teasers and unlockable Twitter trailers.
Watching any ITV at all over the last month was like having the world’s surliest policeman standing an inch from your face roaring “Nothing to see here!” over and over again. Would there be another murder this time around? Why was Hardy still in town? Had Joe Miller and the Latimers managed to claw their shattered lives back together? Nobody knew but, look, here are 20 identical shots of the back of David Tennant’s head.
You could argue that ITV didn’t need to make all that fuss. Broadchurch’s audience on Monday night was always going to be huge – the first series was such a sensation, and the early January TV schedules such a tedious pile of nothing, that people would have tuned in regardless.
But still, a bit of advance warning might have been nice. The total lack of spoilers – fuelled by creator Chris Chibnall’s desire for everyone to experience the story at the same time – helped to make the first series a success, although it did at least manage to telegraph its basic premise before it went into lockdown. From the first minute onwards, that series was always a whodunnit. But this one? Not a clue. For all anybody knew, on Monday evening we all could all have sat down to watch an eight-part musical about the adventures of a wisecracking, skateboarding ghostboy.
That spoiler vacuum also invited a new level of scrutiny. Without even a brief TV listings description to go on, there was a danger that Broadchurch would end up turning into Sherlock or Mad Men, with every character, plot strand and ambient background object obsessed about and over-analysed until people lost focus of what the show actually is: an above-average populist TV drama.
In fact, Broadchurch’s tell-nothing strategy actively limited my enjoyment of last night’s opener. I spent so much of Monday watching the ridiculous Broadchurch countdown banner ads that I’d managed to guess the entire plot just by parsing each decontextualised snippet for clues. I figured out that the girl in the flashback was one of the murdered Sandbrook girls. I’d guessed that the killer had been sending the bluebells, and that he’d be coming for Hardy.
I wasn’t certain that Miller would plead not guilty, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s slightly too large performance as his lawyer in the opening minutes gave me a strong inkling. In fact, the only part of the episode that came completely out of the blue was the fact that Charlotte Rampling would be playing a Rambo-esque lawyer forced out of retirement for one last job – but that’s only because the whole idea sounded so completely bonkers.
Had there been some advance warning of the plot – even a sliver, even “a figure from Hardy’s past comes back to haunt him” – then I would have been more content to just go along for the ride, without ruining the first episode by doing so much ridiculous detective work in preparation.
But this is all moot now. The cat’s out of the bag. There’s no need for any heavy-handed publicity campaigns. Now we can just get on with the fun part – watching Broadchurch tie up all its disparate threads in a satisfying way. It’s going to be fun.
