Welcome to your first odd-couple detective drama of 2025. Patience is an adaptation by Matt Baker (Hotel Portofino, Before We Die) of Franco-Belgian creation Astrid et Raphaëlle. It’s about the evolving partnership between a young autistic cataloguer of police evidence (here named Patience and played by Ella Maisy Purvis), and dedicated older detective Bea Metcalf (Laura Fraser), who pulls her out of her comfort zone after recognising that Patience’s secret talents as a criminologist are being wasted in the bowels of the archive. She adds the unwilling young woman to her investigative team after Patience links the DCI’s current case – a man with apparently everything to live for, who self-immolates after withdrawing £8,000 from the bank and dropping it in a car park bin – with others that were dismissed as suicides but actually make no sense as such.
Off they trot, uncovering an increasingly preposterous plot involving the suggestibility-inducing drug scopolamine, a jittery hotel maid, a sex addict, a missing sister, a sceptical boss who says things such as “Spare me the intuition” when brought several mountains of circumstantial evidence, plus cigars left at all the crime scenes. One hopes that in real life it wouldn’t have taken the introduction of a preternaturally talented pattern-spotter to see that this might be a link between the deaths, but I gather policing is fairly dismal across the board these days, so who knows. After a new victim, a telling matchbook from a hotel and two very drawn-out episodes, we eventually get resolution.
