If all crime dramas need a distinguishing gimmick to draw punters in, Bloodlands (BBC One) – which is back for a second series – arrived last year with three. James Nesbitt has long since been part of that top echelon of TV actors whose casting is a selling point on its own. The show’s location, Northern Ireland, promised to offer not just chilly landscapes but a deeper dramatic purpose, steeped in the region’s recent history. And, while critics readied their cliches about the setting almost constituting a separate character in the drama, there was a further sweetener: Jed “Line of Duty” Mercurio’s production company had made it, suggesting fiendish plotting to get lost in.
A hit duly followed, nicely dark and paranoid in tone, with a narrative that pulled off the classic whodunnit trick of making us forget the most likely answer to the riddle. DCI Tom Brannick (Nesbitt) investigated a kidnapping, the details of which mirrored a politically explosive old mystery from 1998, when the wounds of the Troubles were raw: a criminal mastermind known as Goliath had caused four people with links to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) or IRA to disappear, including Brannick’s wife. Ah, said everyone who’s seen a crime drama before: it’s him. Nesbitt. He’ll turn out to be Goliath. Then an episode-two shocker saw Brannick suddenly shoot a supporting character in the face for knowing too much, at which point we assumed him being Goliath was so obvious it couldn’t be true. A couple of eventful instalments later, and – dizzied by twists, overcome by the whiff of red herrings – we were somehow excited to be told that Brannick was Goliath after all.
