3 out of 5

Created by: Steven Moffat

If you don’t buy the central premise, regardless of how good the rest is… it’s just hard to get over.

Despite some really wonderfully black humor from writer / creator Steven Moffat; despite a top tier performance from the always great David Tennant – and supported at that tier by Stanley Tucci, Lydia West, Lyndsey Marshall, and the (also always great) Dolly Wells – and despite a perfectly bleak, knife-twisting sense of tension that demands binge-watching… I just never quite bought the central premise. And from that spin out several inflection points in the plot that thus require a suspension of disbelief I couldn’t manage, topped by a final act rug-pull that’s a bit cheap, besides being something we’ve seen way too many times to be an effective rug-pull.

Inside Man is a show about which it hard to say much without spoiling the experience, but it’s a series of escalating incidents (of varying ranges of innocence) that pile up to a devastating whole for viccar Harry (Tennant) and his family. Across the way, death row detective Jefferson Grief (Tucci) holds court with journalist Beth (West), who’s searching for her missing friend, Janice (West). From afar, we spot similarities in these storylines, but even if not much is directly happening as they get going, the performances – and rather mirthful tone; might this be a comedy? – have us watching. Of course, things become intertwined, and that intertwining is what draws the net tighter and tighter around Harry.

But: it’s that first decision that gets us there that kept sticking with me. And every decision that spiraled out from that has hints of the first. And when a writer feels the need to add some occasional lines justifying the logic, it makes me feel like I’m perhaps not alone in my feelings. I can sort of sense Moffat working backwards, based on some concluding sentiments uttered by Tucci’s character, which would also be sort of spoilery; he gets like 90% of the way back to the beginning, following that thread, but, again, it’s how it begins that doesn’t feel as solid, and so everyone is relying on all the show’s strengths to move you past that.

Which obviously worked! Without the amazing casting and otherwise nerve-wracking tension, such doubts in the story would sink any other show, or movie, or book. But I knew I was going to be in it from start to finish.

As a last “maybe it’s just me” note, I’m not a father, and I’m not religious; I often find those factors affect my involvement in many stories, and the confluence of factors here may’ve just hit right on the emptiest spot of my lil’ black heart. I dunno. Regardless, that disbelief in tow, Inside Man still gets a good ol’ thumbs up from me.