BRIGHTON, GRACE, AND SORDID CRIMES

ITV — GRACE 1–4–2022–2023

BRIGHTON, GRACE, AND SORDID CRIMES

The episodes are twice as long as a normal series episode, hence, they are nearly feature-length. The action takes place in Brighton, a seaside resort for vacationers. It is wet and windy most of the time. The city per se is not very attractive, and its only attraction is the pier with some kind of gambling, from the time when gambling was banned from English soil.

The length of the episodes permits more detailed, hence, more complicated cases adapted from Peter James. All of them are sordid, bleak, and revolting. Yet there is some humane dimension at times in the obstinacy of the police personnel, and Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, first of all, and his black assistant.

Even a cold case that has been cold for a very long time, is scrutinized properly and, like all the other cases, reveals some deep contradiction between and among people, some greed, hatred, jealousy, and even darker motivations that are so human that we could wonder whether they are catching like COVID-19. I guess it is safer to consider that all this is TV fiction. Otherwise, we would suspect all our neighbors to be serial killers, at best, in remission, like cancer at times.