In its latest police procedural Ellis, Channel 5 dutifully hit every beat of the genre: tenacious cop with an opaquely complex past? Check. A mystery tied up before the credits roll? Check. But despite some cursory efforts to invigorate the formula with up-to-date identity politics, Ellis managed to feel both rushed and excruciatingly long (the episode ran at two full hours including time for ads).
Returning to work after taking unexplained “gardening leave”, stoical DCI Ellis (Sharon D Clarke, also currently starring in Mr Loverman on BBC One) was brought back onto the force to spearhead an investigation in the Peak District. Swimming captain Rowan (Daire Scully) had died mysteriously and his girlfriend Maggie (Freya Hannan-Mills) had disappeared.
Upon her return, the all-white force and chauvinist incumbent DCI Belmont (Chris Reilly, Slow Horses) made it clear that Ellis – a black woman – wasn’t welcome. That is, everyone but affable DS Harper (Andrew Gower), who quickly switched loyalties and became Ellis’s obliging sidekick.
Policing is inextricably linked to power, and a series about it being wielded by a black woman could have been fascinating. Unfortunately, the drama’s politics never went more than skin deep. Ellis’s perma-expression of having one eyebrow almost imperceptibly raised above a frown might have insulated her from the surrounding hostility, but offered very little in the way of revealing an inner life to anyone watching.
Belmont was sure that Maggie’s stepfather was responsible for her disappearance and presumable murder. He was also black and Ellis chalked his suspicions up to racism. She also had a hunch that Maggie was still alive, confirmed when the teenager eventually reappeared after five days (and it felt like it took that long, too). Maggie’s recollection of a droning noise during her captivity was enough to lead Ellis to a farm covered in whooshing wind turbines where Rowan’s cousin Amy (Beau Gadsdon) lived with her father Adam (Jonathan Harden).
After more than an hour of seemingly aimless dead ends, what followed was a rushed, muddled denouement, in which characters kept making enlightening explanations that ruined any believability. We learnt that Adam had been molesting Amy, made her pregnant, and murdered Rowan to stop him telling people. “Oh baby girl,” said Ellis as the abuse came to light – an entirely unprecedented moment of tenderness, presumably supposed to underscore their shared womanhood in lieu of any personalities.
As for poor Maggie, drunk in Rowan’s car when he was killed, she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, held hostage because the writers – sorry, I mean Adam – didn’t know what to do with her.
The hurried resolution of the episode made the meandering of its first three quarters all the harder to stomach. Meanwhile, although much had been made of Ellis’ race and gender, the impact on the plot was entirely superficial – more afterthoughts than the rich storylines they could have provided. It was patronising.
But Ellis’s one-crime-per-episode format provided a get-out-of-jail-free card and as the first episode drew to a close, its titular heroine was prepped for her next assignment elsewhere. And so, we’ve been set up for a kind of policing Super Nanny where each instalment will presumably see her in a whole new location. See ya, Peak District and plot holes alike!
Perhaps Ellis could have been saved by a good editor, pruning it down by (at least) half. Instead, its bloated length and underdeveloped characters made the programme more exasperating than exhilarating. With two more episodes – that is, four more hours of your life – to come, I’d encourage you to make like DCI Ellis and move onto something else.
‘Ellis’ continues next Thursday at 8pm on Channel 5