Entertainment
ITV’s crime thriller Karen Pirie lacks bite-Keith Watson-Entertainment – Metro
the pace is leisurely to say the least.
Lauren Lyle stars as Karen Pirie (Picture: ITV)
Fans of TV crime thrillers tend to fall into two distinct camps.
On the one hand you’ve got devotees of a particular crime-cracker, be it Poirot, Vera, Sherlock or countless others, for whom the crime comes secondary to the riddle-solving hero/heroine of the hour.
On the other hand – and I’ll nail my colours to the mast of this group here – there are those for whom the identity of the detective comes a distant second to the compelling complexity, or otherwise, of the case in question. On the rare occasions when both come together, well, the crime earth moves.
That doesn’t quite happen in Karen Pirie, ITV’s latest name-up-in-lights detective series.
Because what we have here is a case where the quality of the characters far outstrips the case they’re cracking. Lauren Lyle’s lively portrayal of DS Pirie – ‘it’s not a great time to be a Karen,’ she quips – far outstrips the cold case that’s her career big break.
Which is a surprise because the plot comes courtesy of ace crime writer Val McDermid, but the double time frame of the story, in which Pirie is set the task of solving the murder of a St Andrews barmaid from 25 years previously – cops from the past being, as ever, totally useless – never really catches fire, at least in the first episode.
The new crime drama begins tonight (Picture: ITV)
Lauren as DS Karen Pirie and Zach Wyatt as DS Phil Parhatka (Picture: ITV)
And that’s another catch: Karen Pirie feels for all the world like a Sunday night feature-length thriller where the story is wrapped up before the closing credits.
But no, Pirie’s efforts to discover how a trio of dopey students apparently managed to evade detection all that time takes up the whole run. Given the shortage of suspects, the pace is going to be leisurely to say the least.
But what keeps Karen Pirie watchable is Lyle, a fresh-faced and quietly comical twist on the TV detective formula who brings a zingy edge to the table. Her chemistry with underling DC Murray (Sex Education’s Chris Jenks) looks like it might bite. If only they had a more gripping case to get their teeth into.
Karen Pirie begins tonight at 8pm on ITV.
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