quote:

There are any number of times when watching a TV murder mystery — or, if you're watching it on a broadcast network, then it's pretty much every time — that you might long for a lot less sensationalism and titillation. Less gore. Less "I've seen this before in 15 other similarly purple-colored iterations."

The latest British miniseries to do big numbers over there (averaging roughly 8.95 million viewers each of its three nights, bringing it into Bodyguard territory and qualifying as a huge hit) is the ITV-produced Manhunt, which will premiere here Monday on the Acorn streaming service, which specializes in British and international fare.

Manhunt does seems keenly British in the sense that it tries intentionally hard to focus on the less glamorous and more boring and harder realities of actual detective and police work than is often depicted on television. Part of that might have something (maybe a lot) to do with the fact that Manhunt is based on a real serial-killer case that riveted the country and garnered countless tabloid-style headlines. The treatment it needed was decidedly more granular and low-key, and Manhunt pulls that off admirably.

Based on the memoir of Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton, who was in charge of the investigation that took place between 2004 and 2006, and created for television by writer Ed Whitmore and Sutton, Manhunt presents a murder that could be connected to at least one other (and, by good police work, eventually even more) and all along the way focuses as much on that grunt work as possible, avoiding bloody flashbacks, brutal depictions of any kind or lurid corpse photos, etc.