Unforgotten

Chris Lang’s Unforgotten is a decent police drama whose cast deserves a less crowded script. It wants us to take an interest in several people, rather than simply wait for a detective to identify the culprit. That is a sound ambition for a series built around an investigation. The difficulty is giving each of those people enough time to matter, and the acting often persuades us to stay when the storytelling does not.

Nicola Walker, as DCI Cassie Stuart, and Sanjeev Bhaskar, as DS Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan, give us a good reason to begin. They make the detectives worth listening to even when the dialogue is working too hard to keep us informed. Their work gives the police scenes a steadiness that makes the surrounding changes of focus more noticeable. We would have welcomed more time with them and fewer interruptions from the other narrative strands.

The supporting cast makes that complaint slightly awkward, because these are hardly people we want dismissed. Trevor Eve plays Sir Phillip Cross, while Bernard Hill plays Father Robert Greaves. Both help make the separate stories seem worth pursuing, even when the series struggles to keep them all in motion. The result is a succession of promising characters whom we do not always get to know well enough.

Chris Lang’s dialogue is uneven in ways that the performances cannot always cover. At its most convincing, it gives the actors room to suggest a person beyond the immediate needs of the inquiry. Elsewhere, we can hear the effort of making sure the audience has understood, and the speech loses the untidiness of ordinary conversation. Those passages are especially exposed beside the more convincing exchanges, which the same cast handles with much less apparent effort.

Andy Wilson’s direction is strongest in its handling of the ensemble, where the series finds much of its credibility. The trouble comes when another story needs attention and the focus moves before our interest has properly settled. Michael Price provides the music, but the score cannot make those repeated shifts feel less disruptive. What the series needs at those points is more time with the person already in front of us.

We were frustrated when the story moved away from Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar; the other strands kept interrupting our interest in their detectives. That frustration matters more here than it would in a brisk puzzle designed chiefly to keep us guessing. The first series has six episodes, and its attempt to give so many characters their due leaves some of the emotional work unfinished. The performances remain watchable even when our interest in the case starts to wander.

As an ensemble police drama, Unforgotten needs its separate stories to strengthen our interest in the investigation. Too often, they delay it. There is enough good acting here to make the series a reasonable choice for a patient evening, but we would not recommend it simply for the mystery. Try an episode for the cast, and see how much patience the rest earns.