It is a truth universally acknowledged that if the opening scenes of a TV drama depict a happy occasion, then something terrible is about to happen.
Hollington Drive, on ITV on Wednesday, began with all the tension of the opening minutes of an episode of Casualty.
Light-hearted joy about to give way to tragedy. In this case it was a middle-class suburban BBQ, as an extended family sipped sauvignon on a pristine patio and talked about running and sourdough.
Anna Maxwell Martin plays Theresa, who has a ten-year-old son Ben and partner Fraser (Rhashan Stone).
What did you make of the first episode? Let us know in the comments
Theresa seems distracted and troubled and likes to imagine herself alone on a boat in the ocean.
Her sister Helen – played by Rachael Stirling sporting a really distracting husky voice – is the headmistress of the local school, a pillar of society, with a daughter Eva and a disengaged husband David (played by Peter McDonald).
At the BBQ, cousins Ben and Eva were bickering and moaning that they wanted to go to the park.
Theresa said no. Fraser, being the “fun parent”, overruled her… When the kids didn’t come back and Theresa searched for them, frantic, I thought I knew where this was going.
But twist No1 was that a different child had gone missing – their neighbour’s son Alex, who is in Ben’s class at school.
And hang on, didn’t Ben and Eva look like they were up to no good?
Didn’t they hide something in a bin by the woods? And aren’t they exchanging guilty looks in the school assembly?
We were virtually slammed over the head with clues, signposting the plot just in case we didn’t get it.
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There were other side-plots. It was revealed that Theresa was attacked and raped a decade ago, falling pregnant with Ben.
She’s now worried that her moody son has a touch of psychopath in his DNA. “You haven’t raised a monster!” says Fraser, slightly too quickly.
Meanwhile, Alex’s teacher said the lad was often anxious, angry and hungry with occasional bruises.
And Helen is having a fling with Gareth (Jonas Armstrong) – the father of the missing schoolboy, no less.
This drama is definitely not subtle but it’s certainly pacy, with bombshells revealed every ten minutes.
As episode one ended, Theresa stormed into Ben’s bedroom, demanding: “I need you to tell me what you’ve done. I need to know what you have done!”
Desperate Housewives-meets-We Need To Talk About Kevin-meets-The Missing, this is a curtain-twitching suburban thriller with a deep sense of foreboding that there’s plenty worse to come.
