The best thing that can be said about Down Cemetery Road is that its crumminess is so immediately apparent that viewers will have every early warning to check out from the start.
Apple TV+’s second series based on the work of Slow Horses author Mick Herron, premiering Oct. 30, features its own grouchy, insubordinate Jackson Lamb-esque protagonist in Emma Thompson’s Zoë Boehm, a private eye roped into solving two related crimes, one of which hits close to home. The illustrious actress’ participation, however, can’t salvage this rote, mushy mess, whose story is bloated, conspiracy is deflating, and rah-rah feminism is corny—a trifecta that turns it into an exercise in excruciating unoriginality.
In Down Cemetery Road’s first 10 minutes, art restorer Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) deals with a trio of chauvinistic men: her snooty art gallery boss; her husband Mark (Tom Riley); and Mark’s wealthy banker acquaintance Gerard (Tom Goodman-Hill), with whom he’s trying to seal some ill-defined financial deal.
Regardless of this rampant sexism, Sarah has a keen eye for detail, and that comes in handy when her dinner party is interrupted by a house on her street suddenly exploding. During the ensuing chaos, Sarah hears that the little girl who lived there, Dinah, miraculously survived (unlike her unfortunate parents). The following day, Sarah—who, it’s conspicuously pointed out, doesn’t have kids of her own—decides to visit Dinah at the local children’s hospital to deliver a card drawn by the son of her hippie-dippy friend Wigwam (Sinead Matthews).
This nice gesture is a tad strange, albeit not as weird as the fact that Sarah is aggressively prevented by hospital staff from having any contact with Dinah. Upon running into Gerard, Sarah is slandered (not for the last time) as a “nosy neighbor,” and though Down Cemetery Road intends this to be another example of misogynistic marginalization, the fact remains that she is behaving like a pesky busybody, butting into concerns that are clearly none of her business.
Nonetheless, she presses onward, and upon discovering that Dinah has been airbrushed out of a photo in the newspaper—implying that a cover-up is afoot—and then being rebuffed by the police, she turns to Oxford Investigations, a private firm owned and operated by married sleuths Joe (Adam Godley) and Zoë, who are currently estranged, as evidenced by Zoë’s ongoing affair with a younger man.
Having embarked on this quest, Sarah drops her entire life (including work, to which she never returns) to search for Dinah, a girl whom she believes she once ran into but, in fact, doesn’t know. This is silliness, yet Down Cemetery Road attempts to distract attention from that basic fact by miring her in all manner of espionage peril, most of it revolving around a strange man who seems to be following her.
Sarah is of little interest to Zoë but Joe’s curiosity is piqued, and when that lands him in hot water, Zoë is drawn into the crazy case. Except, of course, that it’s not really crazy, as the series intermittently focuses on a mysterious Department of Defense official known only as C (Darren Boyd) as he nastily, sarcastically badgers buffoonish underling Hamza (Adeel Akhtar) to close the book on this entire matter before Sarah’s snooping leads to trouble.
Showrunner Morwenna Banks casts the proceedings as a single white suburban female fantasy in which Sarah gets to be a protective mommy figure without the actual parental responsibility; to stick it to various male creeps; and to have an adventure with her new bada– friend that involves uncovering deep, dark government secrets.
Those carefully buried bombshells, however, are about as implausible as everything else in Down Cemetery Road, whose narrative is a sixth-rate photocopy of similar prior genre tales, and whose plotting is defined by a procession of oh-so-convenient twists. The show routinely gets from point A to point B via Sarah seeing, overhearing, or being told a vital piece of information at the precise instant she needs it, and that sort of shoddy storytelling is lowlighted by her learning about her husband’s bad behavior because the dolt doesn’t know how to hang up his cell phone.
Just as vexing, Down Cemetery Road fills out its eight episodes with superfluous scenes and incidents, such that it appears to have been specifically designed for distracted at-home viewing. At one particularly egregious juncture, Sarah responds to the sight of a police car by panicking and hitting the gas, even though such behavior is completely unjustified by the circumstances at hand and, in fact, is liable to attract the very attention she wants to avoid.
Nitwittery of this variety is everywhere in Banks’ show. Worse, even when something of note does occur, it’s usually bland or clichéd, such as covert operative Amos (Fehinti Balogun)—who functions as the material’s villain—casually strutting away from a burning building.
In a long leather coat, her hair short, gray, and sharp, Thompson does her best gruff, scathing hardcase routine, but unlike Slow Horses, Down Cemetery Road doesn’t have the courage to make its main character truly grungy and nasty.
Zoë is a milquetoast type of harsh, no-filter rule-breaker, her disobedient attitude less demonstrated than merely signaled. Even so, she’s more appealing than Wilson’s Sarah, a meddler whose every decision is goofier and less believable than the last. Sarah’s big character trait is that—as proven by her leaping off a rooftop while studying at Oxford and high on hallucinogens—she’s attracted to danger, and if you think this overwrought hang-up ultimately plays into the finale, well, you’ve probably seen one of this banal affair’s ancestors too.
Everyone in Down Cemetery Road eventually gets a very personal reason for trying to save Dinah and thwart C and Hamza from concealing their misdeeds from the public, yet it’s all a lot of strained and affected effort in service of little payoff. Running too long and always keeping its audience two steps ahead of the action, it’s a chore whose chief destiny, in all likelihood, is to one day be cited in a term paper about the modern streaming TV series’ death by distention.
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