3 out of 5

Created by: Chris Lang

covers seasons 1 – 4

While I could likely extend the following statements to be as broad as possible, let’s zero in on UK police procedurals: that many, many of these shows have a similar format – distinct from US police procedurals – with various levers of tone and pace and etc. raised or lowered as per one’s preferences. But often, I feel like that means there are a couple larger groupings of shows based on their writing quality – Unforgotten is grouped with the better written shows – that then get differentiated by some surface affectations: the actors, the visual bible.

…You can see how this would be extensible to, like, any TV show, yeah? “It’s the same, but… different!”

The reason I’m starting out with something so broad is to account for my feelings while watching Unforgotten, a police procedural which focuses on a crew solving historical cold cases, each season’s case kicked off by the accidental discovery of some long buried body, which allows for a slow unraveling of clues by DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) and DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and their team, inevitably roping in and affecting various suspects and survivors in the modern day. The cold case angle is novel in how it’s applied – the show has an appreciated theme of giving import to what’s often passed over by society, meaning there’s a nice undercurrent of class / race commentary – and writer Chris Lang loves pushing the footwork angle of these cases, putting us through the motions of the endless paperwork and door-to-doors it takes to get at just a thread of a clue; the show feels like a true (-ish) procedural in that sense.

But: I found myself rather split while watching the show, being addicted to the step-by-step of the cases in a bingey fashion, and then also being… quite annoyed at how things moved along. Ultimately, I think that Unforgotten is an incredibly well-written show… that is then made somewhat more generic by its affectations: as we’re introduced to the people involved in each case, there are always these quick-cut edits to their memories of the crime, which are pretty much entirely superfluous. I realize the likely intention of these was to tell the audience that so-and-so was definitely involved – making the show a Why- and Howdunnit, as opposed to a Who- – and maybe to add some hinted sex and violence into an otherwise conversation-driven show, but these moments came across as forced as those descriptions may sound, wholly out of place with dry tone. More impactful than this momentary visual distraction, though, was that all of the character work done for our leads outside the scope of the cases felt like distractions as well, and specifically… with Walker’s character.

This is odd, because I love Nicola.  She can swing the gravity of her characters toward comedy or drama,  employing perfect timing and little mannerisms to shift the pitch of a persona as needed. The initial tone she (and perhaps series director Andy Wilson) settled on for Cassie was one of deep reverence for the victims in her cases, but this gets mixed with some mirth she displays in how the past reveals the clues she needs. The exact blend never feels quite like a real person. It thus feels like the show tries to counter this by going into her personal life – tribulations with her father, with her son – and while thematically it ends up being supportive of the ripple effect these crimes have on those involved (since Cassie is now tangentially involved), these home moments come across as segments from another show entirely. …And because Cassie gets a home life, Sunny should have one too, making his background feel even more removed, like it’s piggybacking off of Cassie’s. …Which it is, since it’s mostly dropped after a point where their backgrounds intersect.

Stepping back to Walker’s persona on the show: despite my praise for the writing and its themes, I do think there’re some blinders there that probably embellished this character split that irked me, namely that despite good intentions, some of the commentary can’t quite break from a white privileged POV, thus inherently making Cassie seem shallow while expressing remorse. It’s a casdcading morass of issues that, by my opinion, could’ve been better solved by just focusing on the cases, and having personality evolutions come while on the job.

Thankfully – back to the good news! – that is what the show most spends its time on, and it’s during that stuff that Walker and Bhaskar shine, as do the other detectives / actors on their team, all with their own approaches / specialties we come to appreciate over the course of things. And when the show is sticking to these “facts,” so to speak, we can witness the social commentary without a character directly speaking to it, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. This more respectful-of-its-audience approach (in not trying to over-explain) also applies to the procedural stuff overall, which doesn’t waste time spelling everything out in duplicate.

I feel like there’s some more meta conclusion to draw here about the show being great at examining the victim’s lives, but not its main characters’, but making that connection is beyond my babbling, which, at length, reports: Unforgotten is an excellent procedural, but kind of an average character drama. Happily, the better bits far outweigh the not-so-great bits.