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Well, it’s back. The Scandi noir-style TV show Suspect enthralled audiences in 2022 with its tale of murder and deception. Now, for no particular reason I can discern (the central mystery seemingly having been resolved), it has dusted off the police badge and is back for a second go. The results are mixed.
A quick refresher for those who need one. Suspect’s season one (which in itself was an adaptation of Danish crime drama Face to Face) followed cop Danny Frater (James Nesbitt) as he attempted to track down the killer of his daughter, Christina.
That series ended with Danny finding said guilty party and stabbing them with a kitchen knife. Case closed, you might think. Except, where’s the fun in that – and so we’re back for another season of sleuthing and vague hints that Christina’s killer might actually still be at large. Whoops, sorry!
Danny being confined to a psychiatric facility after his understandable breakdown, Anne-Marie Duff steps into the role of the series’ protagonist as Danny’s put-upon ex-wife Susannah.
She’s a psychiatrist who lives in a Scandi-chic house in the middle of the forest (so isolated and brooding!), and who receives a visit one day from a fellow named Jon (Dominic Cooper). He’s looking for help quitting his smoking habit, but when put under hypnosis, reveals he’s secretly a trained killer – and that he’s going to kill again if Susannah doesn’t stop him.
If that sounds a bit flimsy, you’d be right. Things get flimsier from there. The rest of the season follows Susannah around as she attempts to get people to take her suspicions seriously – and to be honest, I don’t really blame them for being skeptical. And wouldn’t you have it, the whole thing also seems to be linked to Christina’s death. How terribly coincidental.
Similarly to season one, each episode focuses on a new ‘suspect’, ranging from Danny’s old boss (and Susanah’s former lover) Richard (Ben Miller) to distrustful officer Louisa (Vinette Robinson).
It’s a fun, gimmicky concept, but it lends the whole thing a stifled air and means the action doesn’t flow very organically: we are stuck in certain scenarios with certain characters until the episode ends.
Unsurprisingly, this means the series does start to drag, and the conspicuous absence of Nesbitt (explained away as being first in a psychiatric facility, and then by having a convenient accident) adds to the slightly staged, awkward feeling of it all.
Plus, Susannah is not a likeable character – almost everybody we meet has beef with her for some reason. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it does make it hard to care about her quest to save this girl for no better reason that her being “someone’s daughter.”
And while Duff sells her heart out as the grief-struck therapist, she’s also hampered by terrible dialogue. “I think someone may be coming to kill me!” she cries at one point to Louisa. “I may be wrong, but I have a feeling somebody may be coming to get rid of me… permanently.”
Which leads us to the heart of the problem: Susannah is not a police officer. She has no idea what she’s doing, but the show treats her psychotherapy skills as some kind of superpower, letting her bamboozle and outwit her foes, when all she’s doing (to my ears, at least) is spouting wild conspiracy theories and wearing people down with her verbal barrage.
The resulting mess asks the audience to invest far too much in her credibility as an investigator, while ignoring the glaring plot holes along the way. The true crime here is the waste of Duff’s talents: maybe it’s time to lock Suspect up and throw away the key.
