Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson lead a starry cast, but this dense opening episode is no match for Herron’s more famous series
Don’t let the placid Oxford suburb setting fool you. It might take place on quaint streets and down country lanes, but Down Cemetery Road, Apple TV’s latest foray into the British thriller genre, is anything but “cosy crime”.
With a killer cast led by Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson, the eight-part series’s rebellious streak is all the more understandable with knowledge of the source material. For this is Apple’s latest Mick Herron adaptation – writer of the novels upon which the streamer’s other critical darling, Slow Horses, are based.
From the opener, it’s hard to tell that Thompson is set to be the series lead as Zoë Boehm, the punkish private investigator who gives Herron’s book series its name. Instead, Wilson’s art conservationist Sarah Tucker sits front and centre. It’s her face, eyes magnified comically wide, that makes up the opening shot, and her silent scream that ends the episode.
Life in Oxford is a picture of middle-class bliss for Sarah, until – during a heated exchange with her husband’s odious colleague Gerard (a toe-curling Tom Goodman-Hill) at a dinner party that evening – a deafening explosion occurs in a neighbouring garden.
The scene plays out in slow motion, shards of glass and globules of wine flying through the air with near balletic grace. It’s a striking image that instantly jolts back into the present day at the crime scene, where Sarah learns that she ran into the victims earlier that day. The little girl, Dinah (Ivy Quoi), is taken off to the hospital; her mother does not survive.
Yet when Sarah goes in search of Dinah, ostensibly to drop off a sweet handwritten card from her friends’ kids, nobody will tell her where the child is. Smelling conspiracy, Sarah finds herself at the front door of Oxford Investigations, a PI firm headed up by Thompson’s fiery Zoë. “Have you taken a wrong turn en route to the artisanal cheese shop?” scoffs Zoë, snarling and unimpressed.
The two are positioned as chalk and cheese partners: Zoë is abrasive, Sarah more mellow. Both Thompson and Wilson give strong performances, but I can’t help but feel their characters belong on different dramas. Emulating Slow Horses‘ swirling mix of tension and humour is blatantly the aim here.
Meanwhile, over at the Ministry of Defence, a senior ministry figure simply known as C (Darren Boyd) is disciplining Hamza (Adeel Akhtar) in a menacing tone, unimpressed that his team have been setting off “barely controlled explosions in densely populated university towns”. This storyline is less tangible – information is teased euphemistically, sending us into overdrive as we try and figure out what is actually going on.
Morwenna Banks’s script isn’t light on levity, but subtlety is all but thrown out of the window in the name of comic relief here. When C orders Hamza to “mop up this piss fountain you’ve created before it becomes a piss geyser the size of Old f***ing Faithful”, we’re shown a Malcolm Tucker-type I struggle to believe in.
In its favour, though, is that unlike so many British crime dramas, Down Cemetery Road is remarkably devoid of exposition. Instead, it slowly sets up the nuanced characters and their interlinked lives, where tension simmers behind the middle-class facade.
I expect the lack of clarity will lead some to switch off, but for those who don’t, the premiere builds enough excitement – and ends on an unexpected and gripping cliffhanger – to make it worth sticking with. Given the star power behind it, I know I will be.
‘Down Cemetery Road’ continues next Wednesday on Apple TV
