r Ethan Winter is a maverick, a wildcard, a lone wolf who won't play by the rules. "Winter!" gasps DI Lauren Bell as the muscular outsider bursts into a police interrogation room and proceeds to subject a tremulous pensioner to the full force of his waxed cagoule. "You can't do this!" But he can do this. And he will do this. Why? Because he's Dr Ethan Winter, dammit, one of the greatest forensic pathologists of his generation; a bearded genius whose approach to obstacles is as uncompromising as his approach to tremulous pensioners.
And yet. Dr Ethan Winter is troubled. We know this because Winter – the new six-part ITV police procedural that shares his starkly unseasonable surname – keeps cutting to scenes in which our protagonist paces silently around his fashionably underlit Bristol flat while scowling into the middle distance. Has he misplaced the keys to his vintage sports car? No, they're over there, next to the gruesome autopsy photos he keeps on the kitchen table in the hope they'll prompt visitors to ask what made him want to be a forensic doctor ("I became a forensic doctor … to mend sores"). Could it be, then, that the source of his malaise is … complicated? That it could in fact have something to do with the murder, a decade ago, of his fiancee – a case which, though ostensibly closed, continues to raise enough questions to provide the series with its narrative backbone? While leaving sufficient time in each episode for the agitated hunk to solve a new, self-contained crime? It's certainly possible!
Dr Ethan Winter is played by Richard Armitage, in accordance with the scriptures. His presence here (in his sixth – sixth! – TV thriller since 2021) serves as a seal of quality, or at least an assurance that the ensuing brooding will be accompanied by a) gratuitous demonstrations of upper-body strength, and b) a voice like a Twix melting in a bra fire.
Anyway, the body of a young woman has been found in a freezer lorry so it's time for some plot. Prickly DI Bell (Annabel Scholey), who has recently moved to Bristol after a mysteriously self-curtailed career with the Met ("It's a long story"), suspects a local recidivist. Bejumpered sidekick DS Ellis Daldry (a wonderfully rumpled turn from Jamie Kenna) knows better. Best leave the solving stuff to our perturbed hero, he tells her. "Ethan can," after all, "read a body like other people read a book." And he can. If by reading a body you mean slowly circling a cadaver while huskily whispering things like "hello, stranger" and "fly eggs". Still, it seems to work, and soon we're bounding after him as he tears excitedly through the woods, nostrils flapping at the prospect of another crime scene at which he can be a maverick.
"Can you smell that?" he gasps. We cannot. Tell us more, corpse man. "FAECES," he bellows, hurtling towards a disused well like a cannonball in a Barbour. "ROTTING MEAT … IT'S A DEAD BODY!"
At this point, there is a strong chance you're thinking, "This sounds like an absolutely terrible TV programme." And you would be absolutely correct. But only partially. The script may be a thing of string and glue but the dead fiancee stuff is gripping and Winter's production values are uncommonly high; the direction, soundtrack and lighting (so many burnished brass sconces!) conspiring to paint Bristol as a glowering storm cloud of polo-necked pain and longing. Based on long-running French thriller Balthazar, the aesthetic here shares a similar, 'ow you say, narked grandeur.
The upshot? It's a potboiler in a belted trenchcoat. Silent Witness saying "bof" while eating an onion. And yet even the many, many ridiculous bits work, folded as they are into a soufflé that is as ferociously watchable as it is unnecessarily expensive.
The fact of the matter is this: sometimes you want prestige drama that roils with nuance and complexity. And sometimes you want Richard Armitage shouting, "FAECES!" while sprinting through Bristol in a cagoule. Let us give thanks.