Chasing Shadows (ITV, Thursdays, 9PM) is not your usual, someone’s been murdered, now who dunnit? cop show.
Instead it focuses on the missing persons unit as the team try to track down people who might fall prey to all those serial killers strolling around (so there is a bit of murder).
DS Sean Stone, because cops names must be alliterative, or at least ominous (Taggaart!), is played by Reece Shearsmith who’s now become synonymous with socially unsettled, serious characters, not just League of Gentlemen (seriously, socially unsettled characters!).
Noel Clarke who’s also made his name in gritty dramas (Kidulthood, Adulthood, Star Trek Into Darkness) is the straight man to Stone as DI Prior who lives, plays and works by the rules.
Not that we got to see much of him in this first episode that centered around missing teen Taylor and Stone’s efforts to link missing persons with ‘multiple murderers’ – Stone refuses to call them serial killers – another plot nuance that doesn’t add anything.
Bumped off the murder squad for saying too much at a press conference Stone has been sent to uncover more patterns in the Missing Persons Bureau caseload than the jumpers of a Nordic dramas costume department.
While his new colleague, Ruth Hattersley (played by Alex Kingston) was left trying to keep up, literally and metaphorically, and looking a bit silly.
It seemed a suicide website was behind the disappearance of multiple teens, a website Ruth Hattersley’s son knew all about, what with his obsession with serial killers – sorry multiple murderers.
So who’s been killing kids? The answer’s probably pretty standard.
‘We’re creatures of habit’ Stone told Hattersley – much like crime dramas.
Shearsmith’s character has been likened to that of Sherlock and Saga Noren (The Bridge) because of his apparent lack of empathy.
This has been a popular plot point before, there’s definitely something compelling about Sherlock’s abrasive rudeness for example, it’s almost as if as an audience we like our protagonists to be pains in the bum. In fact it’s not dissimilar to a crime-themed House.
The troubled character of TV crime fighters has become instantly recognisable to contemporary audiences. Like Stone, they dispense with protocol and do whatever they want while expecting indulgence because they’re ‘special’. But they’re also usually bloody martyrs to the cause and it’s boring!
It’s frustrating, this is the real world. Someone like DS Stone would have been fired years ago. Bring back the days of DS’s who clocked off at 5pm and went home to have a chip supper, no psychobabble!
As could have been predicted at the start, Hattersley fed up with Stone’s encrypted powers of deduction ran off to face the suspected killer alone, in one of the many abandoned buildings littering the landscape, only to be whacked and carted off herself.
Although like watching its police-themed predecessors, Chasing Shadows was definitely watchable and it will be interesting to see how the three main characters play out against each other, as long as Stone stops with the affected walk.
Chasing Shadows continues on ITV, Thursdays, 9PM.
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