Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Suspect’ On BritBox, Where A Cop Painstakingly Investigates His Estranged Daughter’s Death

The new BritBox series Suspect is an adaptation of a Nordic noir series from Denmark with what seems to be an interesting premise: In each episode, the main character, a police detective, questions someone about the death of his estranged daughter. The episodes are two-handers for the most part, and last for 23 intense minutes. One or two episodes of that sound great, but will we want to see eight of them like that? Read on for more.

SUSPECT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of willowy plants waving in the breeze. Police detective Danny Frater (James Nesbitt) sits in his car, going in and out of sleep.

The Gist: He wakes up, looks at the report in his hand, and walks into the morgue. He’s trying to see if the unidentified body that’s been brought in is the missing young woman he’s been trying to find. The medical examiner, Jackie Sowden (Joely Richardson) gives him as much information as she can give him from the autopsy, other than the fact that she was found hanging in her flat and that she had a lot of hesitation marks on her wrists, but he keeps pressing for more. Everything she sees is consistent with suicide. He’s about to leave when something about the body under the sheet stops him.

He goes back, looks at a necklace that’s in a jar, then goes over to the body and pulls back the sheet. To his horror, he sees his daughter Christina (Imogen King), whom he hasn’t been in much contact with for some time. In shock, he starts demanding that Jackie give him more information, because she couldn’t have possibly killed herself. He then locks the two of them in the room.

In his immediate grief, he comes to the realization that he wasn’t at all supportive of his daughter, but it comes through in demands to open her back up and see if there are other signs that she struggled with someone or had other injuries. He even picks up a scalpel and attempts to see if her hesitation wounds could have been made by someone else. A sympathetic but threatened Jackie manages to get out, and his boss Richard (Ben Miller), whom she called immediately after Danny saw Christina, tries to talk him down, or at least out of the room.

He eventually leaves, but not before grabbing the keys to her flat and seeing a vision of his now dead daughter on the other side of the door.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The format of Suspect is unique (more on that in a bit) but the intensity of Danny’s quest to find out just what happened to Christina has the same vibe as the Taken films, or maybe Luther. The format feels a lot like the recent FX/Hulu show The Patient.

Our Take: The intro to each episode of Suspect is strange, until you realize what the format is. You see Nesbitt’s name and one or two other actors, then we see a dream-like set of opening credits, with some of the same actors whose names we’ve already seen now being shown and credited again. It’s a stellar cast — Nesbitt, Miller, Richardson, Sam Heughan, Sacha Dhawan, Niamah Algar, Richard E. Grant, Anne-Marie Duff, Antonia Thomas. You wonder how writer/producer Matt Baker managed to get all of these great actors onto one show.

Here’s how: Each episode has Danny questioning someone who was in Christina’s life in an intense 23-minute episode that feels a lot like a stage play. Baker adapted Suspect from the similarly-formatted Danish series Forhøret, and director Dries Vos gives each episode its dreamlike quality. But they’re essentially two-person plays, with lots of room for lots of emotional acting in each episode. In a lot of ways, it plays out like an anthology of sorts, even though there is essentially one story arc and main character throughout.

As you might expect, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Sure, you get lots of Nesbitt going through the myriad of emotions he feels as he realizes how little he knows about Christina; the second episode, where Algar plays Christina’s wife Nicola, whom he didn’t even know about, reveals a lot about Christina’s life and emotional state. But you also get a lot of repetition because the scenery doesn’t really change for the vast majority of the 23 minutes each episode runs.

The series is eight episodes that violate the “show don’t tell” rule of TV storytelling, and while the acting is great, the exposition weighs it down. It also sometimes plays out like a 23-minute Law & Order scene where the cops question someone who gives them the name of someone else to question. It’s watchable due to the performances of Nesbitt and the rest of the top-notch cast. But how long you’ll watch depends on how invested you are in figuring out just what happened to Christina and why she and Danny were estranged.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After Danny sees Christina on the other side of the back door to the morgue, he gets the key he stole from the front door, opens it, and leaves to do his own investigation.

Sleeper Star: It’s hard to pin down a sleeper star when each episode will have a different person being questioned by Nesbitt’s character.

Most Pilot-y Line: Danny demands that Jackie give him the keys. “Come on, I dare you! They are going to throw the fucking book at you for this!” she yells. Way to be sympathetic to Danny’s grief, Jackie.

Our Call: STREAM IT, but only if you’re in the mood to watch a series of acting showcases. The great cast of Suspect saves the show from being a leaden disaster, but the story underpinning all that capital-A acting isn’t all that interesting.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.