3 out of 5

Created by: Hans Rosenfeldt

A sly female copy with social quirks and mental problems.  A vile crime with endless whodunnits following the increasing number of victims.  A cross-cultural investigation.  …The Bridge?  Ah, close you are, as Marcella comes to us from the same creator, Hans Rosenfeldt.  This time it’s mostly a solo act, though, and Marcella’s brashness may push her toward the right answers, but the legality of getting there is often undone with her occasional slips into fugue states, which seem to be brought on by stress.  And after one particularly stressful night, Marcella “wakes” from her fugue, covered in dirt and blood.  Whoops!  …And this seems to tie-in to the series of crimes she’s investigating with bound and suffocated victims.  Double whoops!  But we’ve all been there, yes?

Like The Bridge, Marcella as a show suffers from a bit too much subplotting, which Rosenfeldt seems to confuse as character building.  If the show wasn’t purposefully oblique in order to play certain cards in a certain order, it wouldn’t be as noticeable, but this is a series that thrives on the withheld, so it’s frustratingly wayward when what we really want is more time with our lead.  Anna Friel as Marcella is a blessing to the show, playing a difficult part – hard-edged, not much ‘revealing’ dialogue – with a tricky balance of coldness and innocence, which keeps us on edge wondering how involved with the right or wrong side of these crimes she may be.  Without a similarly compelling cast, though, it’s hard to ring us in emotionally, and so ‘Marcella’ has to keep the plates spinning on its mystery, which it does dutifully enough.  This isn’t a discredit to the remaining actors, more to say that there roles are fairly one note in comparison to Friel’s part, and once it becomes clear that the show is going to juggle its open ends up until the last episode, we can relax into the tension, and let it sway us as desired into watching more.

The resolution is thankfully more satisfying than The Bridge’s first season crime, making it more worth the time waiting for those subplots to wind together, but the perfect blend of these elements – the moodiness, the grisliness, the untrustworthy narrative – still eludes Rosenfeldt somewhat, and if not for the great casting of Friel, Marcella would’ve had a much tougher job of convincing us to stick around long enough to start craving the next episodes.