In this first episode, a number of balls are chucked gleefully into the air – and we may all need notebooks to keep track
Lucy Mangan | June 13, 2017 | The Guardian
If I didn’t know Fearless (ITV) was written by one of the writers and producers of the likes of Homeland, 24, and Person of Interest – Patrick Harbinson – I would be slightly worried about the number of balls that had been chucked gleefully into the air by the end of the first episode in its six-part run. To wit:
1. A human rights lawyer (Emma Banville, played with characteristic passion, intelligence and assiduity by Helen McCrory), whose speciality is uncovering miscarriages of justice, is being persecuted by the tabloids, who claim she is hellbent on setting “paedos” free.
2. Whose latest case involves investigating the possibly unsafe conviction of Kevin Russell, a man who has been in prison for 14 years for the murder of schoolgirl Linda Simms. He says his confession was coerced, and Emma – by the remarkably simple means of getting the autopsy report looked at by a scientist not in the police’s pocket and finding therein a whole lot of stuff that simply Does Not Add Up – quickly secures a retrial.
3. Who is also in the process of trying to adopt a child with her partner, an unfriendly witness from a former case. He is an erstwhile newspaper photographer and is played by John Bishop, who has an honest face but a thick Liverpudlian accent so we don’t know what to think.
4. And who is sheltering the wife and child of a refugee doctor who has returned to Syria to treat patients there.
5. Thus causing her to be surveilled and suspected by counter-terrorism agencies at every turn.
6. And who appears in the last 10 minutes or so to have unwittingly waded even deeper into the mire with Kevin. For lo! A set of photographs of Linda semi-clad and posing in his workshop turn up for the retrial, closely followed by Michael Gambon. He rings an American woman on a secure line and they talk cryptically about how much these photos might reveal if they did not “own” the man who took them.
7. Oh, and she is beset by nightmares connected to her father (in a hospital bed and, in his delirium, urgently apologetic to her), so a layer of dark family secrets are neatly added to the thriller millefeuille. The thrillefeuille.
It is all fabulously confident and classy stuff. Lots is clearly going to happen and we may all need notebooks to keep track but after a barrage of psychological dramas, it feels quite refreshing to be watching something that acknowledges a wider world and works with a broader palette than one baffled/grieving/terrified/secretly pathological man/woman/unassuming middle manager/parent plunging down a mental rabbit hole.