Friel goes undercover to get at the bare facts
Marcella star’s saucer eyes don’t give much away other than at some point she will have another shower (or bath) writes Aidan Smith
You might be surprised that Anna Friel is back as Marcella, given that her detective prone to violent blackouts appeared to die at the end of the last series after cutting open her mouth with a pair of scissors.
Has she gone and done a Bobby Ewing? Quit the show like Dallas’ Patrick Duffy only to realise it’s a cold, unforgiving world out there and force the producers to take him back, in his case re-entering the action via a shower and rendering an entire season just a dream?
This must be it, you’re thinking, for in the opening scene Friel is in the shower. Well, at least the writers have come up with a new beginning since we were first introduced to Marcella in 2016 in the bath.
Then … oh look, she’s in the bath again! Does Friel have naked, smallest room-based scenes written into her contract? Both The Street and Deep Water had one, not that I’m counting. Don’t call me the pervert – I don’t write the scripts.
Anyway, she’s not Marcella Hardman this time, but Keira Devlin, who’s gone blonde to be an undercover gangster’s moll.
She’s infiltrated the Maguires, a vicious Irish crime dynasty who casually bump off one of their own when he’s caught stealing.
This was Devlin’s man, but in no time she’s in bed with the poor sap’s brother-in-law while these two are spied upon through a hole drilled in the ceiling by the clan’s weirdest, but brainiest member who rarely leaves his attic room overstuffed with hand sanitisers. He’s the biggest perv around here.
Amanda Burton is the Maguires’ matriarch, a toweringly unsentimental character overseeing dodgy deals and human trafficking with a vast portrait of herself in the hallway of
their mansion and the Belfast cops in her pocket.
Burton is terrific at being a chilling bitch who nevertheless doesn’t seem smart enough to suspect Devlin – at least not yet – with our girl endearing herself to these thugs when the most thuggish of them bottles the Foreign Secretary’s son to death in a nightclub VIP room and she helps the murder trail go cold.
What a mad show. And what great, gaping holes of credulity exist therein.
Marcella was devised by Hans Rosenfeldt, who brought us the brilliant Danish-swedish crime drama The Bridge.
Back in those far-off, pre brexit days, everyone was expecting free movement over to ITV of those cool Scandinoir stylings. And there was no border hold-up to the central character being unhinged, sexy, infuriating to her bosses, but expert at her job.
The show started off promisingly, but seems, after a couple of episodes of season three and no longer bearing Rosenfeldt’s hand, to have gone Awol like its protagonist.
Friel, though, is highly watchable and I don’t just mean in that way. Who knows how this will turn out and which side of the law Marcella/ Keira will choose.
Those saucer eyes are wide open, but they’re not giving much away. Maybe all we can say for sure is that at some point she’s bound to have another shower (or bath).
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