Often, Britain can come across as a bit undramatic as a setting. The Scottish Highlands are okay, but for England, let's face it, there’s a lack of drama in the environment.
We have hills, not mountains or volcanoes; meadows and landfills not vast plains and deserts; bracing seaside resorts not hazy beaches over which large statues of Christ loom.
And when it comes to the weather, we’re on the mild side. It's humdrum, nothingy. The best British arts have always played off this slight crapness with humour and flair: think of Kes, The Smiths, Get Carter, the Red Riding trilogy, This Is England, Happy Valley with all their glorious gloom – but if you get it wrong it can just be a bit, well, crap.
So to After the Flood, an exciting Biblical title conjuring up ideas of a Tupelo-style epic storm against which a maverick cop has to battle to solve a murder. Except we actually find ourselves in a fictional Yorkshire town called Waterside, which experiences some pretty heavy rain.
OK, that's fine, but it really is just a bit of a nasty downpour, which makes the river burst its banks and floods a few streets in the town for a day... It's not much of a spectacle. Some businesses are damaged. A sheep dies.
Still, there's some drama: our bobby on the beat Jo Marshall (Sophie Rundle, best known for Peaky Blinders) spots a mother stranded in a partially submerged car with a baby. The mum pulls out the baby seat and – oops, butter-fingers! – drops it into the rushing water. And off the baby goes on a white water ride from hell.
Except what should be horrifying is actually farcical (no way any parent would drop a chunky baby carrier, nor choose to scream instead of grab it), particularly when a man jumps in to get hold of the baby, has to take it out of the seat and then passes the very obvious doll to Jo before he is swept away.
It’s not the most disturbing of starts for viewers who love the heavyweight uber-dark Scandi dramas or True Detective, which returns this week starring Jodie Foster. But we are led to believe via flashbacks this was a haunting incident for Jo, partly as she wonders at the identity of the man, and partly because she is pregnant.
Again, this seems a great premise. Pregnant police officers have their own mini-history on screens. Police chief Marge in Fargo being the original, and best, obviously. But also Carey Mulligan in Collateral, and Olivia Colman in The Night Manager.
The way it is generally depicted is that the pregnancy is immaterial to the detectives’ expertise in their jobs, acting as a foil to their genius, a limit on their pursuit of the bad guys, but never ultimately getting in the way of their detection.
Not quite so here. Jo is a police officer who is about to become a trainee detective, far from an expert. But because of some instinctive, burgeoning gut feeling – that trope of all the best mavericks cops – she feels compelled to stretch the boundaries of straight police work. Except, the way she goes about it here is often so blatantly silly and simply naïve, that the old suspension of disbelief can’t take the pressure of the waves of daftness that burst over and over.
So after the floods, we have a body turn up. Found in the lift shaft of an underground car park, apparently trapped there and drowned by the water. Though of course Jo, first on the scene, senses something amiss, which is confirmed when the lab says he’s been dead for days.
She decides to copy some crime scene photos – handily in a folder on her colleague’s desktop – and takes then home for a look. The person she confides her suspicions to? Not her actual detective husband Pat (played by Randle's real-life husband Matt Stokoe) who’s already in the department, but her mother, Molly (Lorraine Ashbourne).
When Jo goes in for her first day as trainee detective, she asks another colleague why they can’t run the DNA of the John Doe through the system to identify him. It’s illegal, she’s told, it's to do with data protection. She's frustrated by this, wants to do what her gut says and make discoveries on her own. But rather than, say, doing some detecting to find out who the body is, she sends his DNA off to an ancestry testing site.
Yes, that’s right. She's new and impulsive, but come on. This is a pregnant trainee detective risking her career on her first day. For no good reason! It’s not that she had any emotional link to the crime scene or the body. She just kind of does it.
And while we’re supposed to see this as irresponsible, it’s also supposed to come from her taking charge while the men around her hesitate. But she doesn’t even know what’s going on with the case. She doesn't speak to anyone about it apart from her mother. It just comes across as a bit lazy rather than maverick. Therefore the motivations of a lead character we're supposed to be rooting for come across as selfish and woolly. Sarah Lund from The Killing she ain't.
Of course, Jo opens a can of worms. The DNA test (the results of which are back within a day) inadvertently leads to the sister of the deceased being notified (Tasha Eden, played by Anita Adam Gabay), who, from her home in France, calls Jo up, yelling at her about what’s going on and claiming her brother has been dead for years. Tasha then turns up in Waterside (within a day), but rather than telling the actual police about Jo’s actions, she instead teams up with her to unveil the mystery of her brother's death.
So we have a situation where Jo, the sister of the deceased whom she illegally identified, and Jo’s mother, are trying to solve the case, while also keeping their actions hidden from Jo’s husband Pat. Who Jo thinks just wouldn’t understand, and who just wants her to stay at home and be a mum.
The problem is, we are at a point in TV history where we’ve watched, and bonded very closely to, female detectives trapped in a world of men, both killers and colleagues. Lund of course, Spiral’s Laure, Kate Winslet's Mare of Easttown, all the way back to Foster’s Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs.
Jo’s own position trapped in a men's world doesn’t convince, her working environment is not brutal or misogynistic enough, the men are just a bit slow. And within that world, she doesn’t come across as a maverick genius with a nose for the truth, just a liability.
Now, as the series goes on, we may very well see her develop as a character, and see the consequences of her naivety play out. There’s some interesting things floating around Philip Glenister’s character, Jack. He's an eco-housing developer who looks like he’s involved in a cover up – the building where the body is found is one of his – and council-level corruption around dodgy land deals, which may have played a role in the floods.
Jo and Tasha may grow into an interesting duo, despite the way the met, amateur(ish) sleuths stumbling into greater knowledge and self-discovery.
But so far, this is not the dark and stormy noir that would be great for January, it’s an irritating bit of drizzle.
