Happy Families

Happy Families, scripted by Daniel Boyle and directed by Adrian Shergold, drops Morse into the gilded, poisonous world of a great industrial dynasty. Sir John Balcombe, a leading businessman and patriarch of one of the country's wealthiest families, is discovered murdered in the grounds of his own palatial home, and the household that gathers to mourn him is spectacularly ungrieving. His wife, Lady Emily, is aloof to the point of indifference; his sons, Harry and James, bicker like resentful schoolboys; and the great man's empire looks rather less solid than the obituaries will claim.

The investigation is as much a study of inheritance as of homicide. Anna Massey's Lady Emily and Martin Clunes's James Balcombe, all wounded vanity, give the family a comic cruelty that the script is careful not to soften, while Jonathan Coy's Harry supplies a weaker, greedier note. Gwen Taylor's Margaret Cliff, a woman connected to the household in ways that matter more than she first admits, becomes a key pivot. Alun Armstrong's Superintendent Holdsby and the press pack that descends on Morse turn the case into a public ordeal, and the chief inspector — never at his best when rich men are involved — finds his methods and his character alike under scrutiny.

Shergold directs with a sharp, almost theatrical eye for the absurdities of wealth, the grand rooms and the petty squabbles making the violence feel like just another family tradition. Rupert Graves's Billy and Andrew Ray's Alfred Rydale widen the cast of possible motives beyond the immediate clan. The resolution confirms that the Balcombes are their own worst enemies, and that the dead man's sins were visited on his heirs in ways the inquest will never capture. It is a wry, savagely funny hour, and one of the clearer statements of the series' conviction that money protects nothing and excuses everything. The Balcombe fortune, it emerges, was assembled as much by bullying as by brilliance, and the patriarch's will is a document engineered to keep his heirs squabbling long after his death. Charlotte Coleman's Jessica White and Ralph Nossek's Professor Masterson widen the cast of those who wanted the old man gone or silenced, and the press, led by a pack of journalists who scent blood, turn Morse's every move into copy. George Raistrick's Sir John, seen only in the contempt of others, becomes a portrait painted entirely by resentment. Shergold lets the black comedy curdle in the final act, when the family's performance of grief collapses into open warfare, and Morse — who despises them all — is the only one honest enough to say so. The murder, in the end, is the least interesting thing the Balcombes have done to one another. Lewis, the perpetual outsider to these drawing rooms, watches the Balcombes with a Geordie's unimpressed clarity, and his verdict on the family is the one the audience shares.