When Nicola Walker’s cynical sleuth Cassie Stuart was killed off at the end of series four of ITV’s Unforgotten, the general assumption was that the cold case thriller would go off the boil in her absence. Many fans feared the show might even have suffered a fatal blow. Unforgotten without deadpan DCI Stuart was like Luther without Idris Elba, Teletubbies minus Tinky-Winky, Poirot without a prying, moustachioed Belgian roving about solving crimes.
Such worries have proved unfounded. The big twist was that the true star of Unforgotten was always its underlying premise. Each season, police stumble upon a long-forgotten crime scene – laying bare a conspiracy that binds together a seemingly random group of people who share a dark secret yet have been furtively getting on with their lives. The formula stays the same for season six, as the show welcomes back Walker’s replacement, DCI Jess James (Sinéad Keenan), who teams up with series regular DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) to solve the mystery of a partially dismembered body uncovered at Whitney Marsh in east London.
