Broadchurch is standout TV
Every so often, a seemingly simple, by-the-book crime drama comes along that breaks every preconceived notion of TV as a wasteland. Broadchurch, playwright Chris Chibnallís slow-burning, 10part character study of a quiet, seaside community struggling to get past the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was the most tweeted-about drama in U.K. television history when it debuted there earlier this year, according to its U.S. broadcaster, BBC America.
Broadchurch ends here in Canada with a two-part finale Sunday and Monday on Showcase. The overarching mystery will be resolved, the murderer revealed and a new mystery hinted at — parent broadcaster ITV has already commissioned a second season — but all that seems irrelevant. What matters to anyone who cares about TV’s ability to touch and move its audience in an emotional and meaningful way is that Broadchurch has been exquisite.
There have been moments in Broadchurch that were sublime in the way they depicted a community coming to terms with loss, whether it was Jodie Whittaker’s grieving, heartbroken Beth Latimer, mother of the murdered child, telling her 15-year-old daughter Chloe, played with almost preternatural intuition by Charlotte Beaumont, “You have to be older than you are now, because I don’t know where this ends,” or one grieving mother telling another, “I wish there was a handbook for this, a guide; what do I do, from day to day?”, or the village pastor, played with coiled tension by Arthur Darvill, lashing out at David Tennant’s dishevelled, emotionally fragile investigating officer D.I. Alec Hardy, “All you have is suspicion and an urge to blame whoever’s in closest proximity. You do not get to belittle my faith just because you have none. People need hope right now, and they certainly aren’t getting it from you.”
Broadchurch is quiet and soulful, full of striking imagery and featuring some of the past year’s most subtle, moving performances on the small screen. TV is a visual medium but rarely uses imagery the way feature films do. Broadchurch reminds us just how resonant the visual image can be.
From a girl, peering outside her classroom window at the world outside and a tear slowly rolling down her cheek to the high overhead view of a slow, rolling wave breaking over a sunlit beach, to an emotionally shattered mother trying to forget her worries by jogging through a hillside trail littered with autumn leaves, seemingly unseeing and unaware of everything around her, Broadchurch has consistently reached for something resembling art.
The final revelation may yet disappoint. That’s the risk in whodunits, from Agatha Christie to The Killing. More than anything in recent memory, though Broadchurch reminds us that mystery is secondary to character.
There have been times when it has felt as real as any documentary. In a year that has already given us Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Homeland, Broadchurch stands apart. (Showcase — 8 & 11 p.m.)