As the third season of Broadchurch starts, we’re hoping it will shape up like the 2013 first series – gripping, original, unmissable – rather than the 2015 sequel: repetitive, sometimes ridiculous and easy to ignore.
For those who separated from Broadchurch two years ago, the first of the new episodes is reassuring. The mistake of the second outing was to more or less repeat the first, in which Olivia Colman and David Tennant investigated the murder of an 11-year-old boy in a coastal community. Putting on trial in season two the murderer uncovered in season one may have seemed a neat way of attempting the paradox required of all returning TV – moving on without changing too much – but the contortions required to keep the courtroom storyline interesting devalued the original.
But where Broadchurch creator-writer Chris Chibnall played it safe last time and lost, he now takes a dangerous option – and looks to have more chance of winning. The third Broadchurch gives Tennant’s DI Alec Hardy and Colman’s DS Ellie Miller a completely new case. Trish Winterman, a 49-year-old single woman, reports a rape that happened after a party at an old manor house. She tells them she became unconscious and woke with head injuries and no memory of the assault.
In a big gamble, the first half-hour feels more drama-doc than whodunnit, as Trish is led through an illustration of best-practice police investigation of rape: sensitive questioning and forensic attention at a dedicated centre. After accusations that Broadchurch 2 became unrealistic, Chibnall seems to have compensated with extreme naturalism.
The risk of this is that primetime crime dramas can only bear so much reality. Although the first two series turned on child murder, the killing of Danny Latimer never attained the brutal viscerality of what happened to Trish. The strange trick of detective shows is to somehow make homicide enjoyable, and I’m not sure that violent sexual assault can or should ever be.
Slowly, though, the usual tropes of TV crime fiction come into play, with various residents – including Lenny Henry as a farm shop manager, and Mark Bazeley’s garage mechanic – looking shifty as the police drive away and we cut to a commercial break. And in another requirement of a 9pm puzzler, the situation keeps complicating, with Trish’s evasiveness on certain details testing Hardy’s and Miller’s training that an investigation must start from the position of believing the complainant.
As Trish, Julie Hesmondhalgh shows her unusual talent for depicting the impact of trauma on a character. But the biggest challenge for Broadchurch will be whether it can reconcile the generic pressure for as many twists as possible with the desire to dramatise the investigation of rape as seriously as it requires.
With this Broadchurch return to form following the outstanding second series of Unforgotten (the best British drama of the year so far), ITV is currently bossing the cop-show genre. This, though, will be the last investigation by Hardy and Miller because Chibnall is moving to Doctor Who this year. This career switch adds an extra layer of interest to his Dorset crime franchise finale, encouraging us to look for techniques or people that may turn up in his pan-galactic show.
With Chibnall’s two predecessors as Doctor Who showrunner, their last project before entering the Tardis proved significant. Steven Moffat had spent the previous two years on Sherlock, and his work with one eccentric super-brain came increasingly to influence the other. Russell T Davies limbered up with a BBC bio-drama about Casanova, which had little narrative significance (although the Time Lord was permitted more of a love life) but huge casting influence, as the actor playing the great seducer, Tennant, later turned up as the time-traveller.
As The Doctor is already to some extent a time-crime detective, Chibnall’s experience in the mystery genre seems likely to prove unobtrusively useful in his next scripts. Most promising for Chibnall’s next assignment is how cleverly the scripts for Broadchurch 3 offer bonuses for those who know the back-stories without alienating new arrivals – exactly the challenge he faces at Doctor Who. DS Miller’s unease at her teenage son’s emerging sexuality has an extra layer for Broadchurch regulars who know the boy’s father is a sex-killer. Similarly, when Beth Latimer (Jodie Whittaker) takes on significance in the rape case, scenes that are already tense intensify if you know that her son was killed, and by whom.
And, as Davies cast two actors who had been previous collaborators (Tennant following Christopher Eccleston), the credits of Broadchurch are likely to come under furious scrutiny by anyone fancying a punt on Chibnall’s choice to succeed the departing Peter Capaldi.
The theory that Chibnall might prefer to take into space an established collaborator has given Olivia Colman shortish odds at various bookies, although there must be doubts over her candidacy. One of Chibnall’s Broadchurch stars has already played The Doctor, and it might look unimaginative for him to contract the other, while, more importantly, Colman has increasing international recognition in TV (after The Night Manager) and movies (since The Lobster) and opens in a play at the National Theatre this summer. The fictional Gallifrey and the factual Cardiff are attractive locations, but Colman may now have moved beyond them as an actor.
But I believe Chibnall’s Doctor must and will be a woman, and, while the likelihood is that his choice will come from beyond Broadchurch, it’s sometimes hard, in this finale that seems set to restore the reputation of his crime franchise, not to look at Julie Hesmondhalgh or Jodie Whittaker and imagine them in a scene with a Dalek.
Broadchurch returns on Monday at 9pm on ITV.
