Jess and Sunny, the two slightly phlegmatic cops who run a London cold-case unit in the sterling crime drama “Unforgotten,” are looking out over a marsh where a body has just been found. Make that part of a body.
Jess: “OK, so realistically, how far can you chuck an arm? Twenty feet? Thirty?”
Sunny, confidently: “Maximum.”
Jess lays out a search area for further body parts: 200 feet left and right, 40 feet out, “just to be on the safe side.”
Sunny: “Cool.”
That exchange, which gets the ball rolling on the show’s sixth season, demonstrates the special British-mystery blend, both cozy and sharp, of “Unforgotten.” (The season premiered Sunday on PBS’s “Masterpiece”; all six episodes are available as a binge at PBS.org.)
It is a procedural fan’s dream, with each step in the season-long investigations carefully but casually accounted for, beginning with the question of how long the body had been undiscovered, i.e., how cold the cold case is. The details add up, and they are easy to follow because of the frequent meetings Jess (Sinead Keenan) and Sunny (Sanjeev Bhaskar) hold with their team, at which everyone pays attention and uncomplainingly follows orders. The show has a positive fetish for efficiency and collegiality.
At the same time, there is a steady undercurrent of humor — an acknowledgment that to do this sort of job, these characters need to be able to laugh, or at least chuckle, at themselves and at the grisly facts they uncover. Unlike the glamorous or dangerous or kooky protagonists of other cop shows, Jess and Sunny are quietly dependable nerds with endearing propensities for snark. Sunny, in particular, is always seconds away from a smirk, though he is so good-natured that it often dissolves into a sheepish grimace.
“Unforgotten” is in most ways a happily formulaic British mystery, with the ritualistically cryptic introduction of suspects at the beginning of each season and the nimble hopping between plot lines that generates many small cliffhangers in each episode. It applies the formulas in smart and sensitive ways, though, and dull patches are rare; the choreography of detection and melodrama is consistently subtle and pleasing. It can’t hurt that every episode — 36 so far — has been written by Chris Lang, the show’s creator, and directed by Andy Wilson.
The current season, which was broadcast in Britain in March, departs from the show’s norm by engaging more directly with the ideological tenor of the times, a decision you can’t fault it for. (Many fans will complain anyway, taking the idea of apolitical comfort viewing as something approaching a religion.)
One suspect spends his time chatting online with fellow conspiracists while another is threatened with cancellation over a run-in with a student. One is a conservative broadcaster who specializes in trolling while another is an immigrant enraged by the harassment meted out to his fellow Afghan refugees.
These scenarios are handled with nuance and a lack of hyperbole, as you would expect, though given the limited screen time each receives, the outcomes of several feel a little pat and artificial. “Unforgotten” lives on its organic combination of crime drama and well-made soap opera, and Season 6 feels a little diffuse, not as emotionally fraught as earlier seasons in which the suspects were more personally intertwined.
But the new season benefits from an increasingly seamless integration of Keenan into the ensemble, and of Jess into the story. Keenan replaced Nicola Walker, whose character, Cassie, the former top cop, left the show in clumsy fashion at the end of Season 4. In Season 5, the newly arrived Jess felt closed off and opaque; it was a letdown after the dogged, awkward charm that Walker had always brought to Cassie.
Jess is still grouchy and reserved, but her character now makes more sense as we get a fuller picture of her feelings about her marriage. And the rapport between Jess and Sunny, and between Keenan and Bhaskar, maintains a smooth hum — minus competitiveness or sexual tension — that works for the show.
Jess, the squad’s top detective, is the show’s lead character, but Sunny is the soul of “Unforgotten,” his ubiquitous backpack slung over his shoulder as he tirelessly tracks down leads and squints skeptically at dissembling suspects. In Season 6, Sunny is lonely and on the dating apps, and Bhaskar, who has a gift for a kind of heightened normalcy, communicates Sunny’s neediness without making us feel sorry for him.
Sunny’s great gift is empathy, which he uses both to sort through the lies and half-truths he encounters and to handle with delicacy the grief and anger that the cases inevitably stir up. “Unforgotten” is about the stories people tell themselves when life goes wrong, and about how willing they are to tell the real story when life catches up to them years later. In that context, Sunny’s willingness to listen makes him a hero.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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