The Jetty, BBC One review - lowlife in a Northern town

Jenna Coleman seems to pick her roles with care, whether it’s Queen Victoria, the girlfriend of mass murderer Charles Sobhraj in The Serpent, or “occult detective” Johanna Constantine in The Sandman, but her antennae may have been a bit awry when she climbed aboard this one.

The Jetty is long on atmosphere and scenery but short on plausibility, and hammers away at its themes of abused women and abusive men so relentlessly that there’s not much room for anything else.

The plot is kick-started by an arson attack at a lakeside boathouse, but screenwriter Cat Jones’s plan was to use this to ignite a personal voyage of discovery for Coleman’s Detective Constable Ember Manning. Her husband Malachy (Tom Glynn-Carney) died a year earlier, and Ember is doing her best to bring up 12-year-old daughter Hannah (Ruby Stokes) as she negotiates the pitfalls of adolescence in a rural Lancashire town. As the BBC’s blurb puts it, it’s one of the places “that Me Too has left behind.”

What this means in practice is that the place is full of knuckle-dragging misogynistic neanderthals who are always down the pub, typified by the repulsive Liam and Brad Ashby. The theme of under-age girls being routinely exploited gnaws its way through The Jetty like an infestation of Deathwatch beetles.

The claustrophobic small-town community conforms to some familiar village-of-the-damned, “A Town Called Malice”-type stereotypes, as Ember finds that her investigations are boomeranging back on her and dragging up painful memories. She experiences flashbacks to her life with Malachy (or “Mack”), but also begins to uncover revelations about hitherto unknown dimensions of his personality. The way that past mistakes repeat themselves is illustrated by the way that she got pregnant at 17, having been the child of a very young mother herself. Her mother Sylvia (Amelia Bullmore, pictured above) is now a wildly eccentric clairvoyant, who likes to close her eyes and “enter the space” of the departed.

Chief among these is Amy Knightly (Bo Bragason, pictured below with Tom Glynn-Carney), subject of a notorious missing persons case from 17 years earlier. This is coming under renewed scrutiny thanks to the work of “podcast journalist” Riz (Weruche Opia), who’s incredibly pleased with herself and lives in an old stone building on the moors made over like a project from Grand Designs. She has a favourite catchphrase, too: “I chase the darkness but I choose to believe in the light.”Meanwhile Ember’s investigations reveal that the original police investigation was slapdash and full of holes. Needless to say, despite being a mere Detective Constable (perhaps because of her acerbic and stone-faced manner), Ember is a much better sleuth than her supposed superiors.

But the drama trips over itself with the use of a double time scheme, alternating between the present and the Amy back-story without dropping any clues to the viewer. Consequently, until you get used to it, you could end up thinking that characters are being reincarnated in the present (summoned by Ember’s mum, perhaps). It all shakes itself down for an incendiary finale in which what we expect to happen doesn’t. But you could probably have predicted that.

• The Jetty continues on BBC One on Sunday and Monday 21/22 July. All episodes are available on BBC iPlayer
• More TV reviews on theartsdesk