Just what TV needs – a brooding cop
DARK HEART ITV, TONIGHT, 9PM
DO YOU know what we want on our screens? No, scratch that – do you know what we need on our screens?
Well, I’ll tells ya – we need more cop shows with enigmatically brooding cops.
Ideally, enigmatically brooding cops with a dark and tragic past.
Well, in case you think there just aren’t enough additions to that particular genre, tonight sees the start of Dark Heart (ITV, 9pm), a new cop show starring Tom Riley as the, um, dark and, erm, brooding enigmatic detective DI Will Wagstaffe.
DI Will is still coping with the murder of his parents, and finds himself involved in the hunt for someone who murdered a paedophile.
This first season ran as a pilot on ITV Encore and received a strong reception on that rather niche channel.
So strong, in fact, that it has been brought back for a run on the main network and it also airs on Virgin Media 1 tomorrow night at the same time...
Olivia Benson may be brooding, but she’s not very enigmatic, given the fact that she has a habit of telling both victims and suspects half her life story as soon as she meets them.
It’s easy to pick holes in Law And Order: Special Victims (Universal, tonight, 9PM), but that’s because a show that was once unmissable has, in recent years, become more preachy than a collection of Baptist sermons.
Season 20 kicked off on Universal last week with a ‘special full-length premiere episode’ involving a school shooting and the reasons why the kid went mad and shot up his friends.
As it turned out, it wasn’t so much a special fulllength feature as merely two episodes aired back-to-back and it was almost exactly what we have come to expect from recent seasons of this once-great drama.
In it, we learned that guns are bad – you don’t say? – and that toxic masculinity will kill us all.
The whole ‘ripped from the headlines’ shtick used to be mildly diverting, but the impression these days – particularly since Mariska Hargitay, who plays the aforementioned Benson took over as executive producer – is that they’re simply looking for the latest bandwagon.
Tonight’s episode sees the team try to investigate the case of a missing child who has apparently been separated from her parents at the border and the whole affair ends up as one long rant against America’s border policies.
Good TV should always reflect the concerns and worries of the society around them. But SVU has succumbed to the same weakness as Doctor Who in that it’s more interested in ‘educating’ than entertaining.
The problem is that SVU now does neither.