Floodwater Happy Valley gets bogged down by a tedious plot
How refreshing, I thought to myself, as After the Flood (ITV1) began. A police drama that isn’t about a murder! We’re in a Northern town where the river has burst its banks, and officers are scrambling to deal with the emergency. There is danger – a baby swept away after his mother’s car becomes trapped in rising floodwaters – and the logistical issues of evacuating residents, whose concerns include looters and how a tank of tropical fish will survive after a power cut.
Then, inevitably, there’s a murder. Rare is the TV drama that can manage without one. Still, the flood adds interest and makes for an arresting opening sequence. A man leaps into the water to save the aforementioned baby, succeeds in rescuing it but is carried away himself. This is all observed by PC Joanna Marshall (Sophie Rundle), who seems strangely inert until we learn that she’s seven months pregnant.
Marshall has an understanding boss but an unlikeable husband who also works on the force and exhibits the kind of mildly controlling/belittling behaviour that would give Mumsnet messageboard-users a field day.
On her last day on the beat before transferring to desk duties, Marshall is called to a murder scene: a body in
a lift. This is something she’s keen to investigate, because she’s training to be a detective. But Unlikeable Husband thinks she should stay in her lane and leave the detecting to people like him.
To be fair, he has a point because Marshall decides that the best way to trace the dead man’s relatives is to go outside police channels and to seek a DNA match via a genealogy website, despite a colleague explaining that this would be illegal. Shall we put this idiotic move down to pregnancy hormones?
Writer Mick Ford has set up a decent mystery here and fleshed out the drama by supplying Marshall with a busy personal life – besides the husband and the pregnancy, she has to contend with her boorish in-laws. But, having watched the whole boxset, I can tell you it sags in the middle thanks to an annoying Frenchwoman and a subplot about a housing development. Philip Glenister is in it, but not enough.
They’ve tried to make it Happy Valley-lite. The location (actually filmed in Derbyshire, but could easily pass for Calderdale), the small community, even the theme music are similar. But we’re not in the same league. Sarah Lancashire would wipe the floor with this lot. Anita Singh
If 2023 was the time of Barbenheimer, it was also the year that audiences gave up the ghost on superheroes. Now Marvel, reeling from a humiliating string of flops, has apparently thrown in the cape, too. Echo, its glum new Disney+ spin-off, is connected by the slenderest threads to the wider Marvel universe while having almost no superhero elements.
Echo’s tone is grim and gritty. There’s lots of John Wick-style overcooked violence as the five-part mini-series takes up the story of Maya Lopez, aka Echo, the high-kicking anti-hero first seen trading blows with Jeremy Renner in 2021’s forgettable Hawkeye. All the bone-crunching and neck-snapping is presented as a selling point. Disney has raised a clamour about Echo’s “TV-MA” rating (ie unsuitable for under-17s).
It’s just a shame the violence is so ham-fisted, as Echo benefits from an excellent lead performance by Alaqua Cox. Lopez is deaf and has a prosthetic leg – as does Cox. However, these are treated not as impairments but indispensable components of her personality. As is the character’s Choctaw heritage, through which she shares a quasi-supernatural connection to the goddess who founded the Native American nation.
Hawkeye introduced Lopez as an enforcer with the “Tracksuit Mafia” – a goon squad in the employ of New York mobster Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin (Vincent D’onofrio). But Maya turned on her mentor before fleeing to her family home in Oklahoma.
As Echo begins, Kingpin is supposedly dead. Yet his criminal empire lives on, making Lopez a marked figure. When his minions catch wind that Echo has survived, the pace cranks up, and figures from her past life are drawn into her violent web.
Despite Cox’s passionate and earnest performance, Echo never stops feeling like a spin-off of a spin-off. Marvel appears desperate to pivot away from the full-throttle escapism audiences flocked to in the first place. Echo tries to break new ground. But in the end, it repeats the error committed by recent Marvel movies by locking into an underwhelming groove from which it cannot break free. Ed Power
After the Flood ★★★ Echo ★★★