All the conventions of a Golden Age murder mystery are present in BBC One’s new six-part drama, I, Jack Wright. There’s the big country house, the ageing patriarch and his disappointing children, the suspicious new wife, and then a shocking and contested will reading. But can this family saga, set in the present day, successfully evoke the worlds of Christie and Sayers? Or is it doomed to feel like an exhumed corpse, tired and derivative, lacking in the realism that typifies the modern detective drama?
Jack Wright (Trevor Eve) is a millionaire industrialist. He lives in a rambling pile with his third wife Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and their two children. His relationship with his older kids is more strained: there’s feckless layabout Gray (John Simm), who has run into serious money troubles, and try-hard John (Daniel Rigby), who is determined to inherit his father’s brick-baking business. Then there’s Gray’s daughter Emily (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, daughter of Andy), a tech entrepreneur and the apple of grandad’s eye. When Jack is found dead from an apparent suicide, the family gathers for a reading of his will. But nothing, from there, turns out quite as expected. “Certainly I thought I knew him,” Sally admits. “Obviously I was wrong.”
