What happens when ordinary people fall down the rabbit hole of extraordinary criminal activity? This is a premise that has captivated prestige television in recent years, from Sally Wainwright’s miraculous Happy Valley to Noah Hawley’s pitch-black re-imagination of Fargo. Normal people – neither good nor bad – trapped in a cycle of bad decisions. And this is the territory that Steven Moffatt – ex of the parishes of Doctor Who and Sherlock – is treading with his new four-part BBC thriller, Inside Man.
The man on the inside is Stanley Tucci’s Jefferson Grieff, a former professor of criminology now on death row for murdering his wife. He’s imprisoned somewhere deep in the arid American South, where he takes a philosophical stance on his impending death. When asked whether he wants to be executed, he replies with a shrug, “I don’t want to be executed, and my wife didn’t want to be murdered”. But when he’s not wisecracking about capital punishment, he takes on freelance cases of “moral worth” in his capacity as “the death row detective”. It’s all very Sherlock Holmes, albeit in a mind prison rather than palace, and he even has his own Watson – Dillon (Atkins Estimond), a hulking, chipper serial killer with a photographic memory.
