The Guilty (TV series)

The Guilty is a three-part television drama, broadcast on ITV from 5 to 19 September 2013. The drama stars Tamsin Greig, Darren Boyd and Katherine Kelly, and involves the police investigation into the disappearance of young boy, Callum Reid. In 2008, DCI Maggie Brand (Greig) is tasked with finding the missing boy, while dealing with her own personal problems – but he remains missing. Five years on, Callum's body is recovered and Maggie is determined to discover what happened. The series was subsequently released on DVD in the Netherlands in 2014, but as of 2016, remains unreleased in the UK.

Critical reception
Mark Lawson of The Guardian said of the opening episode: "This maternal parallel brings a fresh depth to the by now standard scenes in which a detective breaks bad news and O'Malley's scripts cleverly lengthen the shadow by making DCI Brand's relationship with her own young son complex and a source of concern and regret to her: it becomes increasingly clear that the title The Guilty may apply to more people than merely the killer of Callum. Director Ed Bazalgette also achieves unusual smoothness in the shifts between now and then. The flashback is a problematic device in crime fiction because it is often used – most grievously in Agatha Christie dramatisations – to convey events that, it turns out later, never happened, but were simply the lying version of a suspect. This always feels a cheat to me: if Dr Arbuthnot never in fact did catch the 7.50 to Didcot, then how were viewers able to see it so vividly as he described his actions to David Suchet?

In The Guilty, though, the two past and present strains of narrative seem to be reliable and exist simultaneously – without any of the visual or musical clues that sometimes signal flashbacks – as they must surely do in the minds of bereaved parents. Tamsin Greig also succeeds in bringing much to a path deeply pitted by the heels of distinguished Equity members. Greig is rather similar to Olivia Colman in having suddenly moved to a new rank of recognition as an actor after years of work in TV comedy. Among her particular qualities are an acerbic edge in the voice and the capacity to suggest deep disappointment and hurt. In The Guilty, the latter aspect underlines the mother-mother storyline, while the former brings an unease to the routine police scenes through the suggestion that soft-voiced compassion or encouragement of colleagues is something at which DCI Brand has to work. It would be almost impossible to create an original police series, but The Guilty impressively manages to leave some new fingerprints on a much-handled form."

Cast

 * Tamsin Greig as DCI Maggie Brand
 * Arsher Ali as DS Vinesh Roy
 * Tom Beard as DSI Alan Reece
 * Darren Boyd as Daniel Reid
 * Ruta Gedmintas as Teresa Morgan
 * Katherine Kelly as Claire Reid
 * Linda Marlowe as Lynn Brand
 * Jade Ogugua as DC Lenny Jackson
 * David Pusey as DC Max Cauldwell
 * Pooky Quesnel as Ruth Hide
 * Jay Simpson as DS Ron Singer
 * Alan Williams as Frank Lawson
 * Nicola Thorp as Miss Brenner
 * Daniel Runacres-Grundstrom as Callum Reid
 * Tommy Potten as Sam Colman
 * Jude Foley as Older Luke Reid
 * Teddy Fitzpatrick as Young Luke Reid