Above Suspicion: Part 1

A seventeen-year-old student, Melissa Stephens, is found dead, and the murder squad that takes the case has spent years on killings of a different kind. Six women, all prostitutes or drug users, have been strangled with their own tights, their hands tied behind their backs with their bras, and left at beauty spots; the squad puts the series at eight years old. Melissa fits none of it. She is young, she is not on the margins, and she is the kind of victim the public will mourn, which the squad reads as the killer escalating and moving on to women he can choose at will.

Into that case walks DC Anna Travis, a rookie and the daughter of the late Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Travis, a decorated detective. DCI James Langton chose her out of respect for her father and hands her responsibilities unusual for a newcomer, which puts her at the centre of the inquiry and earns her the resentment of colleagues who have waited longer. Kelly Reilly plays Travis as a woman plainly out of her depth: sickened at the crime scenes, mocked for her clothes and her inexperience, and dependent on Langton's approval. Christopher Menaul, who directed the first Prime Suspect, directs, and the imagined flashbacks layered over photographs of the victims were read by one reviewer as a gimmick rather than an aid.

Anna finds the vital piece of evidence that links a single man to the killings: the actor Alan Daniels, a popular performer on the brink of international stardom. The link runs through a house in Manchester where Daniels grew up. The case against him is circumstantial, and he is a public figure whose arrest would set off a media storm. Langton agrees that Anna should get close to him, and the first part ends with the arrangement in place, Anna due to go on a date with a man the squad believes is a serial killer. Nothing is resolved here and no culprit is finally established. This part sets the trap; the confession and the answer belong to the following night. Jason Durr's Daniels is built to be liked, which is precisely the problem the squad has to work against.

Its strength is the decision to name the suspect almost at once. The drama is not identification but proof and judgment, and the title's pun carries the whole story: the man under investigation is a celebrity who believes himself above suspicion. The victims, prostitutes and drug users, gain one undeserving victim in Melissa, the student who missed the last train, to make the horror legible to an audience that might not otherwise care.

The weakness is compression and signposting. The plotting telegraphs its turns and the resolution arrives with little room to breathe; more than one contemporary notice said the ending felt rushed, and the dialogue clunky. The Guardian was the harshest, calling the series lurid, lame and lazy, though ITV's director of television called it the writer's best work since Prime Suspect. It is nonetheless the first screen Anna Travis and the start of the Travis and Langton partnership that runs through everything after it, and the first time one of La Plante's own novels was adapted for British television. Around 6.80 million watched this opening part, and the drama won its slot.