The pressure mounts as the body count rises
In 2014, the Swedish-Danish crime thriller The Bridge began a run on BBC4. Fans of the series may be interested to know that its creator, Hans Rosenfeldt, is also the man behind this new drama, Marcella (Monday, ITV, 9pm) – his first British project. “Turin is a city in the north of Italy that I don’t know much about, but it was there that Marcella was born,” reveals Rosenfeldt.“I was there to talk about The Bridge, and my thoughts on the remakes that have been made. It’s there that I met TV executive Nicola Larder. “Later, at a very nice dinner, she said she had an idea about a police series set in London, where we meet the protagonist at her lowest ebb, having just been left by her husband, with her kids away at boarding school and a serial killer from the past reappearing. Would I be interested in developing it further? The answer to that, as you’ve probably guessed, was yes.” Of course, cops on the edge aren’t exactly a rarity – in fact, millions of us have recently been gripped by the second series of Happy Valley, in which Sarah Lancashire played Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant still somehow picking herself up and carrying on with her life despite being repeatedly hit by its slings and arrows. Here, the action takes place in London rather than West Yorkshire, and focuses on Marcella Backland, played by Anna Friel. When we first meet her, Marcella is heartbroken by the break-up of her marriage and needs a new purpose. As a result, she returns to the police career she gave up 10 years previously, and throws herself into her work with the Met’s Murder Squad to stop herself falling apart. Her first case involves a serial killer whose raison d’etre appears to be the same of a murderer she was trying to find in 2005. Has he started a new killing spree, or have the latest crimes been committed by a copycat? “Anna Friel was the only actress I had in my head,” says Larder.“I’d worked with her briefly and I knew she was this incredibly powerful method actress. And I’d missed her – she hasn’t been in the UK for a while. She’s the right age for this character and emotionally she just lets herself go into a part. “Thankfully her first meeting with us went really well. I felt she had plugged herself into mine and Hans’s bodies and she understood this character from the inside out.”