[7.3/10] The family drama material is starting to wear on me. I get it. Mark is a total scumbag child-beating philanderer. Beth is struggling with her pregnancy amid the stress of everything else. There’s cheating and abject smarminess and a sense of things being broken even before this tragedy happened. I don’t want to say there’s no meat there, because there is, but it plays out more like a soap opera than like the prestige drama tone Broadchurch seems to be going for. Or maybe it’s exactly like that dour, prestige drama tone, where everything about the family’s life is very severe and almost cartoonishly awful, with twist upon twist.
At best, you can see a Twin Peaks-esque “Everyone thinks this is the perfect small town, but if you dig deeper into these happy smiling families you’ll find terrible things” energy to this approach. But as with that show, Broadchurch seems to be stacking horrible secret upon horrible secret until the whole thing feels overly exaggerated rather than a piercing view of realness.
Most of this episode is taken up with investigating what's going on with Mark. I get that. He’s the dad. You kind of have to. But he feels like such a red herring, and his cheating situation is so obvious, that there’s not much tension to it. He also seems like such a shit that it’s not fun to spend time with him.
It is still fun to spend time with Miller and Hardy together. I love the scene where Ellie invites her boss over for dinner. Their mutual dismay and reluctance over the social arrangement is funny and charming. Their positions are still a little stock, in the “You’re too close to the town”/”You’re not close enough to understand things here!” sense, but the actors are both good and they have a strong on-screen rapport, which helps a lot.
We also get a little more with Tom, Ellie’s son, which is another of the more interesting strains here. The kid knows more than he’s telling, which adds intrigue from the mystery standpoint. But he’s also clearly grappling with some guilt and struggles as Danny’s best friend, which makes it compelling from an emotional standpoint. We’ve only gotten dribs and drabs so far, but I’m interested to see where this goes.
On the personal front, the third episode also delivers a little more backstory on Hardy. It too feels pretty paint-by-numbers. He’s pushing himself so hard that his doctor tells him he needs to give it up or he’ll die. He’s out here despite hating it because he’s paying penance for what happened at his last gig. And Karen White, the big city reporter, is out here to nail him for screwing up the last big case. It’s the sort of thing you could find in any hard-boiled detective story, and when he’s not opposite Olivia Coleman, even the great David Tenant has trouble making such generic material sing.
Otherwise, I continue to love the cigarette-smoking woman. Her blunt, matter-of-fact attitude is refreshing, and I can’t wait to see her get longer scenes with the leads and other major characters here. Plus, I find Pete the family liaison to be a pretty amusing character, clearly out of his depth in an unfathomable situation, but doing his ho-hum best.
Overall, this is definitely the weakest episode so far, if only because it spends a lot of time on the internal Lattimer family drama, which I don’t find terribly interesting or convincing so far. But hey, despite this unfortunate cul de sac, we are getting a few juicy clues as to what really happened, and we have a Hardy/Miller dinner party scene to look forward to, so there’s hope on the horizon.
Top Suspects: 1. Reverend Coleman -- I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something just a little off about him. My suspicion on motive is that he wanted to break up the family to get to Beth, and given all the talk of God, it could have thematic depth. 2. Creepy Wannabe Psychic Guy -- Frankly, he seems like a red herring, given his plain creepiness over the whole thing, but maybe his “My spirit guide told me it’s someone you know well” is his way of throwing Beth off the scent. 3. Grandma -- I don’t have much to go on with this one. She’s just a major character who hasn’t had much to do yet but has still been present. Maybe for motive, she saw how much stress Danny was causing her daughter or something? Or he was too irreligious maybe? Totally grasping at straws here.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-06-01T01:59:14Z— updated 2021-06-03T03:24:28Z
[7.3/10] The family drama material is starting to wear on me. I get it. Mark is a total scumbag child-beating philanderer. Beth is struggling with her pregnancy amid the stress of everything else. There’s cheating and abject smarminess and a sense of things being broken even before this tragedy happened. I don’t want to say there’s no meat there, because there is, but it plays out more like a soap opera than like the prestige drama tone Broadchurch seems to be going for. Or maybe it’s exactly like that dour, prestige drama tone, where everything about the family’s life is very severe and almost cartoonishly awful, with twist upon twist.
At best, you can see a Twin Peaks-esque “Everyone thinks this is the perfect small town, but if you dig deeper into these happy smiling families you’ll find terrible things” energy to this approach. But as with that show, Broadchurch seems to be stacking horrible secret upon horrible secret until the whole thing feels overly exaggerated rather than a piercing view of realness.
Most of this episode is taken up with investigating what's going on with Mark. I get that. He’s the dad. You kind of have to. But he feels like such a red herring, and his cheating situation is so obvious, that there’s not much tension to it. He also seems like such a shit that it’s not fun to spend time with him.
It is still fun to spend time with Miller and Hardy together. I love the scene where Ellie invites her boss over for dinner. Their mutual dismay and reluctance over the social arrangement is funny and charming. Their positions are still a little stock, in the “You’re too close to the town”/”You’re not close enough to understand things here!” sense, but the actors are both good and they have a strong on-screen rapport, which helps a lot.
We also get a little more with Tom, Ellie’s son, which is another of the more interesting strains here. The kid knows more than he’s telling, which adds intrigue from the mystery standpoint. But he’s also clearly grappling with some guilt and struggles as Danny’s best friend, which makes it compelling from an emotional standpoint. We’ve only gotten dribs and drabs so far, but I’m interested to see where this goes.
On the personal front, the third episode also delivers a little more backstory on Hardy. It too feels pretty paint-by-numbers. He’s pushing himself so hard that his doctor tells him he needs to give it up or he’ll die. He’s out here despite hating it because he’s paying penance for what happened at his last gig. And Karen White, the big city reporter, is out here to nail him for screwing up the last big case. It’s the sort of thing you could find in any hard-boiled detective story, and when he’s not opposite Olivia Coleman, even the great David Tenant has trouble making such generic material sing.
Otherwise, I continue to love the cigarette-smoking woman. Her blunt, matter-of-fact attitude is refreshing, and I can’t wait to see her get longer scenes with the leads and other major characters here. Plus, I find Pete the family liaison to be a pretty amusing character, clearly out of his depth in an unfathomable situation, but doing his ho-hum best.
Overall, this is definitely the weakest episode so far, if only because it spends a lot of time on the internal Lattimer family drama, which I don’t find terribly interesting or convincing so far. But hey, despite this unfortunate cul de sac, we are getting a few juicy clues as to what really happened, and we have a Hardy/Miller dinner party scene to look forward to, so there’s hope on the horizon.
Top Suspects:
1. Reverend Coleman -- I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something just a little off about him. My suspicion on motive is that he wanted to break up the family to get to Beth, and given all the talk of God, it could have thematic depth.
2. Creepy Wannabe Psychic Guy -- Frankly, he seems like a red herring, given his plain creepiness over the whole thing, but maybe his “My spirit guide told me it’s someone you know well” is his way of throwing Beth off the scent.
3. Grandma -- I don’t have much to go on with this one. She’s just a major character who hasn’t had much to do yet but has still been present. Maybe for motive, she saw how much stress Danny was causing her daughter or something? Or he was too irreligious maybe? Totally grasping at straws here.