Dealing with sexual assault in the mystery thriller genre involves walking a tightrope. Murder is a safely sanitised act, defanged by the centuries since Poe and Conan Doyle pioneered the form. But there is still an uncertainty about how to create tension with sex crimes. Cast suspicion on the act, and you slip quickly into victim blaming; create a whodunit around the perpetrator, and you end up contorting the realistic facts. After the ratings success of Liar (which ended up way down at the sensationalist end of the spectrum), ITV returns to this tricky genre with No Return, written by Danny Brocklehurst. He has just adapted two Harlan Coben novels, Safe and The Stranger, for Netflix, which should be an indicator that his tastes err on the side of pulpy.
In No Return, Sheridan Smith plays Mancunian matriarch Kathy, who flies her family out to Turkey for their “big holiday”. The brood includes her 16-year-old son, Noah (played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis from The Kid Who Would Be King), who, after attending a beach party, is arrested for sexual assault. From that point onwards, the holiday devolves into a tortuous traipse through the corrupt Turkish legal system. The set-up is suitably tense, the family’s predicament sufficiently anxiety inducing. But in order to facilitate our sympathies, the show plays a rather tacky bait-and-switch, hinting heavily that Noah’s alleged victim is a young black girl before – twist alert – it’s revealed to be a fellow teenage boy. It feels like an unsubtle shift in the power dynamic, designed to make the he said/he said ambiguity more palatable.
