Watch It! - Unforgotten
Five seasons of this incredible show are available on Prime and PBS
As a kid, I remember making fun of the stuff on PBS' Masterpiece Theater as being boring British stuff with everybody wearing powdered wigs. I have no idea if the stuff they showed back then was really boring and wigged, but it certainly was British.
Whatever the case, the rebranded Masterpiece has now long been a source for some of the best British TV. That includes my beloved All Creatures Great and Small which just finished its fifth season over here with a banger season that included all of the exciting stuff you'd expect, like cows who got sick from the lead paint the town's air raid warden ordered be painted on them[1], a dog who died when he licked lead paint off of a cow, carrier pigeons who died when they ate lead paint chips from the inside of their coop, and wait...I just realized most of the plots are lead paint related.
Season five takes place during the height of World War II and blackouts are being enforced to help hide towns from German bombing runs at night. Apparently out in the Yorkshire Dales cows wandering onto the road at night was a big deal and cows were getting run over by drivers who couldn't see them. This made no sense unless drivers were also abiding by the blackout rules by not using their headlights. Because blackout or no, there weren't any lights on country roads in the first place. Anyway, the Air Raid Warden, played by Jeremy Swift (Higgins from Ted Lasso) ordered farmers to use iradescent paint to stripe the cows, and all paint back then had lead in it so the cows were getting sick. Then one of them died from the paint and a dog licked the dead cow and he died and spoiler alert, the dog was the Air Raid Warden's. You can see why I love this show, the plots are impeccably rendered. ↩︎
But Masterpiece isn't just the home of All Creatures Great and Small and Downton Abbey or whatever, it's also where the incredible show Unforgotten airs. Unforgotten is also available for free on Amazon Prime Video.
Unforgotten focuses on a crime investigation unit in London that deals with what they call historical murders, or what we would call cold cases. And every season starts out the same way. Somebody is digging a foundation or doing a teardown to remodel a house or building a new highway and in their demo work they find a bone sticking out of the ground or wall, or in one case most of a fairly well preserved body in an old stand-up freezer. And in come our heroes to figure out how that body got there.
The cases are typically 20 or 30 years old, which creates all kinds of added drama because the suspects have long moved on with their lives and thought they have put whatever the incident was behind them.
In the first episode of every season you will meet four or five characters who will somehow have their lives ruined by the discovery of the body, even if they weren't the murderer. I heard about this show on the Pilot TV podcast and it sounded somewhat interesting but Boyd and Kay were going on about how great it is, so I found it on Prime and was hooked by the end of the first episode.
I've seen the first five seasons--season six just aired in the UK and will come to PBS and Prime later on this year--and they're all terrific. They are a nice mix of dry humor and gut-wrenching moments. Season two is particularly brutal in the way the investigation ruins one character's life. The two leads are both well played by Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar. Walker is so good that I've started watching her other shows, the Scottish black comedy Annika, and the mini-series River where she co-stars with Stellan Skarsgaard. It is not really a spoiler to reveal that she leaves Unforgotten after season four and is replaced by Sinead Keenan who proves to be completely up for the challenge.
You might know Bhaskar as Dr. Jafri from the Paddington movies, or as the star and creator of The Kumars at No. 42. Regardless, as Sunny on this show he'll be your favorite character.
Each season is just six episodes and they don't waste a minute. It's always fascinating to see how well they tie all of the seemingly disparate characters you meet in the first episode together and how good they are at faking you out from episode to episode as to who the murderer really was only to still come up with a completely logical conclusion. If you suffered through the Paradise finale on Hulu, that's a great example of a frustrating and half-assed resolution to a key mystery. Which was even more frustrating because the second to last episode of that show was great.
Anyway, I don't want to get into much more detail about Unforgotten because the joy of this show is not knowing what's coming, other than the reliable ear worm theme song, the fact that as the season moves along the seemingly random images in the title sequence start to make sense, Cassie's relationship with her dad which seems to just be filler until it all comes to a head in season four, and my favorite thing in every episode is that they always go to a slow motion cut of the suspect looking out the window and seeing Cassie and Sunny (or any of the other investigators on the team--who you will see in every episode and finally remember their character names by the end of season three at the earliest) getting out of their car to come question them. The fact they do it every time becomes unintentionally hilarious. And you'll wonder how they know what's going on. Did the investigator accidentally turn the siren on? How do they know they're there, or who they are?
Watch the first episode of season one and just try to stop there.
I dare you.
