How do you create a unique police drama nowadays? With the ever-growing choice of streaming platforms come an equal amount of crime shows. Gone are the days where we only had Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and the occasional Nordic Noir.
But this glut isn’t necessarily a bad thing, when the set up is as juicy as the one in Six Four, ITVX’s latest offering. Inspired by Hideo Yokoyama’s best-selling novel by the same name (which was itself inspired by the writer’s 12 year stint as a police reporter in Gunma prefecture in Japan) and set in Glasgow, it follows a story of corruption, kidnappings and an uncompromising search for the truth.
Police detective Chris O’Neill (Kevin McKidd) and his wife Michelle’s (Vinette Robinson) daughter has gone missing after he has found out that she isn’t his biological child, which spurs him to revisit an old case handled by his brother, the Assistant Chief Constable. It concerns the disappearance of another teenager, Julie Mackie – and in the process, he spots traces of an internal cover-up, and questions about his brother’s involvement arise.
Meanwhile Michelle, a former undercover agent, heads down to London, despite Chris desperately trying to stop her, in an attempt to look for clues about their daughter’s whereabouts. It’s clear from the get-go that there is more skullduggery going on beyond one missing teenager. What’s Michelle searching for in her past? What did happen to Julia Mackie and why was her disappearance not investigated further? And before any of these questions are answered, another teenage girl – the daughter of the Justice Minister – is kidnapped.
While it might sound like the plot is a little bit all over the place, the steady pacing (barring the weirdly long opening scene of Michelle running away from Chris to catch a train to London) and the careful focus on a small number of interesting characters (so you can get a grip on them all early on) make it easy to keep track.
And the cast delivers excellent performances. Kevin McKidd (you might recognise him from Grey’s Anatomy) convinces as a frustrated detective, desperate father and worried husband, and Richard Coyle (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) is perfectly cast as the shady Justice Minister who seems to have his fingers in an awful lot of pies. And Vinette Robinson’s performance should not go by unremarked upon. While, at first, we might think she’s just a desperate mother looking for her child, we soon realise how much she’s willing to risk for the safe return of her daughter, as her own dark past is uravelleing.
It’s also only four episodes long, perfect for someone who hasn’t got the patience (me) to sit through ten of them in order to get to the ‘who-dunnit’ part. There is something very satisfying about the fact that while the mystery seems unsolvable by episode two, all loose ends will be neatly tied together a couple of hours later. It’s tightly plotted too, and filler-free, making for four powerful episodes full of twists and turns. And while I’m not going to spoil the ending, Six Four yields much-needed closure in a TV-culture obsessed with cliffhangers. Something I for one am grateful for.
