Karen Pirie premiered last week, garnering praise from us at Digital Spy and the viewers at home for being a refreshing spin on the tried and true detective drama.
Our review praised the show for giving the murder victim a personality and a voice, but it's not the only way that Karen Pirie tries to set itself apart.
Speaking to Digital Spy and other press outlets, titular character actress Lauren Lyle focused on how Kaz is different from the detectives who usually lead these types of crime dramas.
"She's really odd, she marches around, she's a 'doesn't think before she speaks' kind of person," Lyle said.
Related: Outlander star reveals if she would return for Karen Pirie season 2
"I think she's smart, I think she's determined, I think she's quite hopeful. I think a lot of the time detectives on screen are quite often down and out guys or women who have something really difficult going on in their lives that they are dealing with. But Kaz is a fresh, hopeful, young person right at the beginning of her career ready to take it on and sort of f**k anyone who says otherwise.
"I think that's something we genuinely haven't seen before. It's a cliché but I can't name any other mid-20s female detective on screen."
"It's really good fun," she added on the subject of her character being so unfiltered. When asked about her inspiration for that aspect of her character, she said it "just reminded me of my dad".
Related: Karen Pirie's Emer Kenny explains mistake made by other detective shows like Line of Duty
For research, Lyle watched "every detective series" and had a map of the case on her wall to keep track of everything.
"I'd come home from set and navigate my evenings in silence and just prepare for whatever jargon of interrogating the next day," she explained. "I used to call my friends and run the interrogation scenes."
Karen Pirie is available to watch as a box set now on ITV Player.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer and resident Welsh person at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016.
In his time he's covered a host of live events, interviewed celebrities big and small and crowbarred a countless amount of great/awful (delete as appropriate) puns into articles.
A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe's main interest is in video gaming. Although particularly a PlayStation gamer, he plays across Xbox, Nintendo and PC/Steam Deck, and likes to keep tabs on many games he's not got the time to play.
Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish (which you really should do).
Freelance film & TV writer, Digital Spy
Critic and writer Jo Berry has been writing about TV and movies since she began her career at Time Out aged 18. A regular on BBC Radio, Jo has written for titles including Empire, Maxim, Radio Times, OK!, The Guardian and Grazia, is the author of books including Chick Flicks and The Parents’ Guide to Kids’ Movies.
She is also the editor of website Movies4Kids. In her career, Jo has interviewed well-known names including Beyonce, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Cruise and all the Avengers, spent many an hour crushed in the press areas of award show red carpets. Jo is also a self-proclaimed expert on Outlander and Brassic, and completely agrees that Die Hard is a Christmas movie.
