A true crime series riddled with X Factor-style clichés
Last night on television Benji Wilson
The Investigator: a British Crime Story is a real-life crime show that somehow manages to look like a spoof. This is some achievement given that the case that’s being investigated for this second series is intrinsically fascinating. Mark Williams-thomas, who’s best known for making the documentary that exposed Jimmy Savile, is the super sleuth who started examining the file of Louise Kay, an 18-year-old who disappeared from Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1988 along with her particularly distinctive Ford Fiesta.
The police have been, we assume, flummoxed for 30 years and yet Williams-thomas tugged at a few clues, made a few calls and a whole Gordian knot of evil doings started to unravel. By the end of the first episode Williams-thomas thought he might be on to not one but two serial killers and on the verge of explaining a whole nexus of unsolved murders.
Produced by Simon Cowell’s Syco production company, The Investigator is a show built on solid ground – true crime from the US, from The Jinx to Making a Murderer to The People vs OJ Simpson, has provided some of the best television of the last five years.
Even the first series of The Investigator in 2016 brought something new to the macabre party, pointing out how different British crime stories were to American ones, with a distinct attitude to policing and a different criminal justice system.
The problem in 2018 is that the genre is exhausted. Not only have we seen all the above-mentioned American instant classics but shows like The Detectives and The Murder Detectives, set among the real police to whom they have startling access, have moved things on. The other problem is that the makers of The X Factor just can’t help themselves when it comes to using the narrative clichés of modern talent shows.
Somewhere in here is a powerful story of the impact of a missing woman on her family, and there are some very moving scenes in which they talk about their loss. But it’s all drowned out by Cowell-isms – beating the poor viewer round the face with an endless series of tacky cliffhangers, withholding information at ad breaks to keep you coming back, and underlining important moments with musical stabs that are as subtle as being slapped round the face with a soggy doormat. The effect varies from the distracting to the discomforting, given that this is a real life missing person’s case. Someone needs to investigate The Investigator and suggest another line of enquiry.
When the first series of Silicon Valley was shown on Sky Atlantic in 2014, attitudes to Silicon Valley itself, with its tech start-ups, unicorns, angel investors, Facebook and Google, were somewhat different. The US comedy, which followed the fortunes of a group of likeable nerds founding a start-up, was one of the first to suggest to a mainstream audience that big tech, in spite of all of its self-righteous rhetoric, was as aggressively pragmatic as any large corporation has ever been. Pied Piper, the start-up firm who’d had a good idea, were routinely crushed by Hooli, the show’s cipher for Google or Facebook. The audience was expected to be appalled and thus root for the little guys.
It’s fair to say that come the launch of a fifth series of Silicon Valley, the mood has changed. Big tech and all the evangelists in hoodies are by now seen as not merely ripe for satire but shady, data-hoarding behemoths to be feared.
It leaves Silicon Valley shorn of narrative thrust. The departure, apparently in high dudgeon, of TJ Miller, one of the show’s major stars, has also deprived it of one of its best characters, the cocksure entrepreneur Erlich Bachman. And there’s a third fault line which is that Pied Piper now appear to be on the verge of major success in their bid to recreate the internet as a force for good – traditionally, when the guys you’re rooting for actually make it, that’s the end of interest in the story.
So it’s hardly a surprise that the opening episode was a little unsure of itself, referring to Erlich but claiming he’s on perpetual holiday, still falling back on the jokes about Teslas and berks in headphones on Segways.
To viewers wandering if it deserves their continued attention, hang on in there. In the next episode, the show gets its funny, and its pertinence, back, but also becomes more interesting, as it develops the character of Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Pied Piper’s reluctant CEO, as he slowly evolves into the hard-nosed businessmensch – albeit one with chronic anxiety – that he has always despised.
The Investigator: a British Crime Story
Silicon Valley