Fantastic! A new drama series in which the hero isn't a detective. Instead, William Travers (James Purefoy) is a criminal barrister who (after some sort of traumatic, nervous-breakdown-provoking experience we don't know much about yet) has moved from the pressure cooker of the London legal industry to the ostensibly more laid-back environs of Ipswich. He used to specialise in murder cases, but now he swears he's given them up.
Purefoy makes rather a good barrister. He radiates middle-class solidity and a sense that he really would like to do the right thing by his clients, while commanding the courtroom with his imperious presence and rhetorical delivery. Mind you, in his first case in this opening episode, he had a pretty easy ride thanks to an embarrassingly clumsy attempt by the cops to fit up alleged robber Liam Johnstone (Ivanno Jeremiah), who happened to be black.
After Travers had crisply holed their ludicrous argument below the waterline, it was exit the Filth with their tails between their legs, pursued by internal affairs investigators. However, Travers's withering disdain for the police has put him on a collision course with DI Mark Wenborn (Charlie Creed-Miles), who happens to be far from stupid and has a reciprocally scornful attitude to the over-privileged, insulated planet inhabited by the legal profession.
This clash of cultures and mismatch of expectations seems to be one of the key themes screenwriter Anthony Horowitz wants to explore. Travers's wife Jane (Dervla Kirwan, pictured right), who gave up a high-flying job in publishing when she moved back to her native Suffolk with her husband, has been making herself useful by giving literature classes to the listless yoof at a local young offenders' institution, but she was taken aback by a scorching critique of her efforts by one of the warders. It was all about her liberal conscience, he told her, before going on to inveigh against "Guardian readers", or "pink and fluffies" as he called them. Was she doing this to help the boys, he wondered, or was she really using them to help herself? Ouch.
Meanwhile out in the lonely Suffolk farmlands, the murder of an itinerant labourer who called himself John Jarrold (Robert Whitelock) at first seemed unconnected to the main characters. However, as the episode wound to a conclusion we could see that Jarrold (who, as DI Wenborn was quick to discern, had borrowed his name from a Norwich department store) was very much smack in the middle of the drama. Shockingly so in fact, as the final frames revealed.
He's also one of the links back to Travers's haunted past, which seems to be sending him ghostly flashbacks of a young boy of whom we as yet know nothing. Travers is spending his spare time sitting on the beach looking desperate and stubbly, or feverishly repairing a boat, but we can feel the ominous tread of past sins inexorably gaining on him. The plot is about to thicken hugely, because William has decided that he'll go back to London to help an old friend accused of murdering his 22-year-old secretary.
The moral of the story may be that if you're going to run, you might have to leg it a bit further than Suffolk. It's starting to look as if Travers should have lost himself somewhere in South America.
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