What is the deal with unwelcome third series of once-loved British dramas? First ITV announces that Broadchurch is following up its disappointing second season with a third outing, and now the BBC follows suit with The Fall.
Not that The Fall’s return is a tremendous surprise, of course, for those who stuck with last autumn’s increasingly frustrating game of cat and mouse – as DSI Stella Gibson and her covetable wardrobe of silk blouses reeled in serial murderer Paul Spector. Slowly doesn’t quite do the investigation justice: by the time the two finally faced off across the interview table, we’d endured five hours of increasingly implausible television. (I find myself wondering: can there really have been an episode where Spector hid in Stella’s wardrobe while she had a massive argument with a man occasionally put on screen to progress a storyline about corruption that literally just disappeared? Yes? Why didn’t we all just switch off?)
The arrival towards the end of series two of smart young cop Tom Anderson – played by Colin Morgan of Merlin fame – flagged that writer/director Alan Cubbitt had further ambitions for his detective and her nemesis. And the season finale only made that clearer, with an ending that acted more like set-up for a third instalment than any kind of satisfying pay-off for committed viewers. Thanks to the incredible tracking powers of right-time-right-place Jimmy and his shooting skills (spoilers!) Anderson lies injured and Spector apparently on the brink of death, with Gibson desperately trying to keep him alive. A cliffhanger to reel us back in for a third outing that, according to writer/director Allan Cubitt “was conceived in the hope of further exploring the characters and the themes that are at the heart of The Fall”.
Forgive me if I’d have preferred an ending that actually came to a conclusion.
You can understand, of course, why broadcasters, writers and actors are loathe to let go of the characters and worlds they’ve so painstakingly created. And it’s not that The Fall’s Stella Gibson (or indeed Broadchurch’s Alex Hardy and Ellie Miller) aren’t worthy of more screentime. Gibson, in particular, is a cop who deserves future adventures. Intelligent, contained, unpredictable and not afraid of shagging her colleagues, she manages to seem both dramatically interesting enough to sustain future series, and an original character in a crowded crime-drama market. I’d be happy to hear her throaty mutter float down the police-station corridors as she handpicks those colleagues she trusts by her side.
And you can understand too, the allure of hanging on to Fifty Shades’ Jamie Dornan, now a massive star, who will also return for The Fall’s third season. But we really don’t need to see more of Paul Spector, whose character really fell apart in the second series as his delusion became more unbelievable. (Let’s not even start reminding ourselves of his relationship with “the Benedetto girl”.) But according to Ben Stephenson, the BBC’s controller of drama commissioning: “Allan has known the end game from the beginning – the cat and mouse game between Gillian and Jamie has one last act to play out. Who will win?”
For a show that has struggled with criticism of its lingering gaze upon the bodies of murdered women, and the glamourising of a man who sees killing as his art and is portrayed as intellectually fascinating, I can’t really imagine where The Fall is going to go with Spector. Please not as some kind of advisor to Gibson: a clever and capable woman who surely should not be relying on a killer to solve her crimes. Especially one who still appears to believe that his murders are something more than violent, ugly death.
In the same way that Broadchurch 2 would have likely been stronger had it focused purely on the Sandbrook murderers, instead of splitting its focus between Joe Miller’s court case and the unsolved mystery haunting DI Hardy, the Fall needs to shrug off Paul Spector – and his hold over Stella – and move on to a new mystery. (Where that corruption case disappeared to might be a start.) That doesn’t mean reducing The Fall to a Midsomer-case-of-the-week type format. But it does mean leaving behind a storyline that has already far out-stretched its welcome.
Instead the BBC says that the new series will see the relationship between Spector and Gibson “intensify”. It’s not a promise that has me reaching for my TV planner in anticipation.
