Because I’m in court all day, every day, I’m not a great fan of most police procedurals a la CSI, but I love a good crime thriller with fun twists, well-written protagonists, and exotic locales.
If you’ve got time this summer to get hooked, I recommend two — “Kill Eve” and “The Fall” — both very different, but compelling in their own right. What they share are female leads and the obsession of the hunter with the hunted (and vice versa).
“Kill Eve” is smart, classy, and funny, with two killer female leads, one an investigator, the other an actual psycho killer. Sandra Oh plays Eve Polastri, a down-to-earth, hard-working, looking-for-something-bigger investigator for the British domestic counter-intelligence organization, MI5. She’s too smart to be working behind the scenes and gets pulled into a secret investigation of what she intuits is a female serial killer doing contract hits for a shadowy group known as “the Twelve.”
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Jodie Comer is Villanelle, the professional assassin, who’s as well-dressed as she is quirky. You get the sense she loves her job; she does it with panache, whether it means dressing up like a maid or pretending to be a prostitute. Her kills are cool, clean, and deliberate. When she looks into her victims’ eyes as life drains from them, it’s with the fascination of a little kid roasting her first marshmallow. Ultimately, it’s Eve’s job to travel the globe and find Villanelle. But who will find who first? Beware, it’s more than a cat-and-mouse game. The two don’t really want to kill each other — the plot’s more nuanced, the twists more sexy, and I think we’ve got a second season in store.
“The Fall” takes itself more seriously — maybe too seriously. Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame stars as a senior police official in Belfast, Ireland, investigating a series of murders of young women. The killer’s hiding in plain sight (this is not a whodunnit, but more a how-to-catch-him). He’s not a social misfit, but a handsome family man who works as a bereavement counselor (Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey).
Episodes can be ponderous — lots of long moments of Gillian Anderson swimming to outpace her own personal ghosts and Dornan jogging to get in shape for his next kill (it apparently takes a lot of strength to choke the life out of someone). But what makes the series compelling is its attention to detail. Side characters are fully fleshed out — the young female police officer who Anderson takes as a personal assistant and who blames herself for failing to save the life of a victim; Dornan’s early girlfriend who barely survives a murder attempt but may have a dark side to her sexual tastes; and a female victim of domestic abuse who freely admits she’d provoked her husband into hitting her. There’s even a great bit about a criminal defense attorney champing at the bit to defend the infamous Belfast strangler and willing to do whatever it takes to get him off. In a true-to-life scene, he scolds his younger colleague when she expresses shock at their client’s violence, basically telling her that if she can’t defend someone who’s both guilty and violent, she’s in the wrong business. She promptly quits.
Belfast, itself, comes to life — its feel, its weather, the neighborhoods where mostly working class and cop-hating thugs live.
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The three-season series takes its time to capture the criminal and bring him to justice and although the plot takes a left turn toward the end that makes a few episodes more like “House” than a crime show, it’s worth the watch.
The series meanders rather than charges, but the scary moments are still thrilling as is the curiosity of knowing what led a nice-looking, loving father of two to go so wrong.
Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.