We feel like we’ve written the headline to this review a lot in the last couple of years, especially for shows on Acorn TV and BritBox. Namely, there seem to be a lot of shows where a police detective — almost always female — returns to his/her hometown to solve a case or cases, but mostly to dig up the town’s dark secrets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if these series are iterations of the same basic idea, then they are going to really depend on the performances of the main characters, as well as how truly quirky (and maybe evil) these secretive townspeople are. A new Irish series on Acorn has one of those two things.
BLACKSHORE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman is sitting at the bar of a pub, and can hear a woman resisting the advances of the man she’s with.
The Gist: She follows the two of them into the restroom, and identifies herself — Detective Inspector Fia Lucey (Lisa Dwan). When she pulls them out of a stall right before the woman gets hurt, the man calls both of them “fucking skanks,” leading Fia to hit him in the face so hard he breaks his nose.
We then see Fia driving into the town of Blackwater, home of the Blackshore distillery. When she’s stopped at a light, a woman crossing the street sees her and is shocked.
We find out when she reports for duty at the local Guarda station that she was given a temporary reassignment from Dublin after the pub incident, and she decided to go back to her hometown, where he hasn’t been in 15 years. She’s put on the case of Róisín Hurley (Clara Fitzgerald), who was reported missing by Charlie Reid (Aidan McArdle), the manager of the hotel she owns. She goes missing a lot, due to her drinking and a reputation for bed-hopping. But this time it seems different.
She’s partnered with a patrolman, Cian Furlong (Rory Keenan). They don’t get off on the right foot when she bluntly asks if being lazy or incompetent has kept him as a patrol officer all these years.
Fia knows Róisín because the missing woman gave her a job at the hotel when she was younger and a pariah in town due to a tragic event in her family which happened in 2004. Marjorie Whelan (Ingrid Craigie), the woman that saw her earlier that day, is horrified that she’s back; she and her husband, Dr. James Whelan (Barry McGovern), believe her father had something to do with the disappearance of their teenage daughter not long before the tragic event in the Lucey family happened.
Fia gets a lot of info from Donna Walsh (Jade Jordan), the front desk clerk at the hotel, but senses Donna is holding something back. She also has to contend with Bill McGuire (Stanley Townsend), the owner of the distillery and co-owner of the hotel; he’s a massively powerful figure in town who has moles everywhere.
Soon Róisín’s body is found floating in the lake, and it had been there since soon after the last time anyone saw her. As Fia investigates, she has to contend with photographers harassing her and an increasingly tense working relationship with Furlong.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The recent New Zealand import A Remarkable Place To Die also involves a female police detective returning to her hometown to solve murders and dig into long-buried secrets.
Our Take: Created by Kate O’Riordan (Smother), Blackshore is more or less a typical “small town with secrets”-themed police procedural, with a season-long murder mystery that’s wrapped into all of the goings on in the town. If there’s anything that distinguishes this from other shows of its type, it’s the family tragedy that Fia has to face now that she’s back in her hometown.
There are people in Blackwater who offer her a warm embrace, namely her aunt and uncle, Sandra and Donal Riley (Ally Ni Chiarain, Andrew Bennett) and her cousin, Emma Riley (Lisa Dwyer Hogg); they took her in after the family tragedy she suffered when she was a young teenager. They should help keep Fia from being completely angry and bitter, but she is certainly not feeling those warm feelings from anyone else.
The reason why we’re being cagey about the family tragedy is that O’Riordan and her writing team are pretty cagey about it for the first 40 or so minutes of the first episode. The annoyance you may feel at our cageyness is how we felt watching it on our screens. The tragedy itself is revealed by the end of the first episode, and in ways that feel like forced exposition, so the idea that it needed to be alluded to but not spoken about in the first part of the episode didn’t feel like suspense-building at all. If you were going to reveal the tragedy by the end of the episode, why not just mention it in the beginning?
The other thing we’re not sure of is exactly what Fia is doing in Blackwater other than solving this one murder case. Is she there to clear her father’s name? Maybe prove that the family tragedy didn’t happen the way everyone in town believes it did? It’s unclear.
What we do know is that enjoyed Dwan’s seething performance as Fia, whose anger is palpable throughout the episode. The cheap shot she takes at Furlong when they first meet is an indication, though by the end of the episode, that cheap shot may prove to be prophetic. The rest of the characters feel like generic small-town-mystery types, but that may change as we go along.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: After Fia gets CCTV video from Donna, she sees someone on the footage that she doesn’t expect.
Sleeper Star: Jade Jordan’s character Donna Walsh feels the same outsider vibes that Fia had when she was in Blackwater. Whether that will make her an ally or not is still undetermined.
Most Pilot-y Line: Emma, who runs the local newspaper, looks at an online edition of the paper that has the story about the disappearance of the Whelans’ daughter. Frustratingly, there is no date on it, despite being the front page of the paper.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Blackshore is an entertaining-enough small-town mystery procedural, with an intense performance by Lisa Dwan. But there’s nothing about it we haven’t seen in other shows from the past few months.
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.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Blackshore’ On Acorn TV, Where A Police Detective Returns To Her Hometown To Solve A Murder And Face Her Dark Past appeared first on Decider.
