TV review: The Fall | Dates

The Fall

BBC2, Monday, 9pm

Dates

Channel 4, Monday-Wednesday, 10pm

The Returned

Channel 4,Sunday, 9pm

Eight minutes left: I’ve worked it out (how clever am I?). Six-and-a-half minutes to go and I’m reminding myself that by “they” I really mean Stella Gibson, who sometimes sleeps in her polis station – the rest of the Belfast force sleeping on the job when they’re not being bent. Four minutes remaining: come on, come on. Three minutes: jings, this is tense… I wonder how Stella’s silk blouses always look so immaculate the next morning? Two minutes: no! He’s getting away! Thirty seconds (to the killer): put your foot down, man!

It’s the mark of a good drama, maybe a great one, when your emotions are twisted hither and yon. When it poses so many questions, then forces you to ask a rather big one of yourself. Such as: why did I want Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan) to escape when he was so evil? OK, maybe not escape, but cut out the strangling and carry on the weird cat-and-mouse with Gibson, a kinky control freak like him. But for how long: an entire second series? That wouldn’t work. Now I’m not sure where The Fall goes from here.

Where has it got to, thus far: the drama-of-the-year stakes? The best moments were all the ones where Gibson (Gillian Anderson – brilliant) did or said something that made you think: “Well, I’ve endured 1,349 cop shows with the detective being hopefully billed as ‘maverick’, but that’s definitely new.” Or maybe she simply flicked her blonde peek-a-boo off her face, out of those whirpool-ish green eyes – that was usually enough. Belfast, too, played its role well: a nasty mix of new money and old antagonisms.

The Fall won’t be my No 1 – serial-killer thrillers, ultimately by their nature, can’t be – but it was gripping. Apart from the last episode perhaps. Aside from the final few minutes, the finale didn’t seem sure of itself, as if writer Allan Cubitt and the Beeb weren’t expecting a second series. Maybe there was a whole other last episode where the Belfast bogeyman was caught, but that had to be tinned because no-one banked on Jamie Dornan turning in such a spellbinding performance.

In this, The Fall is similar to Homeland: dangerous central relationship, grown-up thrills, show paints itself into corner… then has to go again from this position. The results may be the same too: a less-than-terrific reprise. Unlike Homeland, The Fall still has the Gibson-Spector face-to-face in reserve, but will that be enough? Lots of questions then, and for that, for now, we should applaud The Fall. From behind the sofa, obviously.

Disconcertingly, Dates began in the kind of bar where Spector might eye up potential victims. But it’s an altogether different kind of drama: vignettes about internet dating, first meetings wrapped up in half an hour, wham-bam (two of last week’s stories featured actual knee-tremblers). In the wrong hands, this could have been too self-conscious. No, it could have been disastrous. Clichéd stories and actors not understanding the two-hander concept, deciding they’d better fill the empty spaces with “big acting”. The right hands, though, were writer Bryan Elsley, and Oona Chaplin and Will Mellor for the first tale, then Sheridan Smith and Neil Maskell (Utopia’s near-mute psycho, saying a bit more this time), then Chaplin again, trying her luck with Ben Chaplin (no relation).

Stories two and three were of a darker tone, featuring respectively mano-a-mano dater-waiter sex in the loos and death. The first one was possibly braver for not straying from the table and seemed to contain more truths: about dating desperation and the cold, hard, bored, smug metropolitan of the species. He was Northern; her experience of the North being limited to Cheshire and “holding midfielders, chlamydia, Maseratis” (the script sparkled). “I’m a lorry driver,” he said. “Oh,” she said, epicly unimpressed. “What kind?” He said (another great line): “Red lorries… yellow lorries.” On her second date we got to find out why Chaplin’s Mia was the way she was. “You once paid me 300 quid to f***,” the former escort told the doctor, shocking him out of his smarmy preamble. Like the first, the second night ended all right too, and then she was left with a choice: “Red lorry… or yellow lorry?”

I don’t normally do supernatural thrillers, and especially not those with zombies in them, but I might stick with The Returned which, being French, does its own thing, albeit in a Twin Peaks-ish setting. One by one the victims of a school bus crash some years before are returning to their alpine village, and in the nick of time too. Even by the standards of municipal Gallic architecture, the planned memorial is hideous. «

Twitter: @aidansmith07

TV review: The Fall | Dates | The Returned