Generally speaking, I’m a fan of what we might call the unlocked room mystery. The kind where someone is murdered or otherwise indisposed and we are then introduced to a wide variety of characters who may or may not have something to do with it or each other. Then all you have to do is wait patiently for the doughty police officers in charge to sniff out any red herrings and present you with the individual or web responsible.
But ya gotta keep things tight and urgent if you’re going to pull off this kind of caper. The latest, Suspicion (Apple+ TV), is a loose, baggy thing that only begins to approach the necessary slickness a good quarter of the way through its eight-episode run.
It starts with a dramatically squandered kidnap. In the corridor of a New York hotel, a young man is quietly nabbed by three figures, wearing replica masks of the royal family, and unobtrusively stuffed in a suitcase – so unobtrusively that I didn’t notice until a second viewing – and wheeled out. He, we eventually learn, is Leo Newman, the student son of Katherine Newman, head of one of the world’s most influential communications companies and controversial nominee for a UK ambassadorship, possibly the two positions least likely to inculcate any feeling of fondness for a character. She is played by Uma Thurman, who appears so fleetingly that the PR team who made her role headline news deserve a special award for chutzpah.
A video of the kidnapping is uploaded to the internet. While we wait for that to go viral, we are introduced to the quartet of apparently unconnected characters upon whose octet of shoulders the plot will hang.
There is Oxford academic Tara (Elizabeth Henstridge), who has an activist streak born of her working-class and/or Mancunian origins (Suspicion seems to think these are more or less synonymous), a messy private life (according to her ex-husband), and an unrewarding tweenage daughter, Daisy. There is Nat (Georgina Campbell), who lives in Peckham, is about to get married and has a wad of cash and a burner phone hidden in her bedroom. She uses some of the former to pay off the loan shark pursuing her mother. She gets into a small, unexciting car chase with him for no narratively good reason but it fills an unforgiving minute or two.
Then there’s Aadesh (Kunal Nayyar), who gives us our first link to Manhattan and the suitcase-based events therein. His furious wife questions why he made a secret trip to New York when he was supposed to be in Birmingham visiting family. I think the real question is why would you not go on a secret trip to New York rather than go to Birmingham to visit family, but Aadesh says he went to pitch his cybersecurity talents to a big US communications company which had asked to see him and who paid for him to stay in a posh, as yet unnamed, hotel. As his wife knows that he is ambitious and frustrated by his dead-end job in her father’s family business, and apparently doesn’t know how vanishingly unlikely this behaviour from a big US communications company would be, she accepts his account.
Finally, there’s Sean (Elyes Gabel), who transforms his appearance on a plane from New York to Belfast by peeling off a fake beard and putting on a cap to evade the police waiting for him when he touches down. At the same time, local forces are fronting up to the other three with more success. By the second episode, they are under arrest and being interrogated, too lengthily to hold anyone’s interest but their own, but further links to the hotel, Newmans Leo and Katherine and potentially to each other are gradually revealed. As is the kidnappers’ demand, which turns out to be more numinous than the traditional “hundreds of thousands of dollars in used bills and a duffel bag, ma, or the kid gets it” and will take the National Crime Agency and FBI agents (Angel Coulby and Noah Emmerich) a bit longer to get together.
Things liven up after that, and Suspicion finds more of its groove. If it never becomes more than a jigsaw – done by others, you just sit back and watch the picture take shape – that’s OK. It never promised to be anything else. Apart from an Uma Thurman vehicle, of course – but we should never have let ourselves be fooled by that at this late stage in the television viewing game.
