With so much competition, any new crime drama needs to find a way to stand out. ITV’s 2024 series After the Flood managed this by beginning with a spectacularly staged flood submerging a Yorkshire town – it wasn’t just a murder mystery, this was a mini-disaster movie.
These broader ecological concerns continue as Mick Ford’s cop-slash-climate-change drama returns with moorland fires now blighting the inhabitants of fictional Waterside.
The seemingly oven-ready baddies come in the form of the local landowning family: entitled bigwigs burning off the heather in preparation for the new grouse-shooting season. As a protester explains, when you burn the moor, you bake it, meaning water will run off it to flood the town. Meanwhile, someone is daubing red crosses all over the place (diagonal ones, not the St George variety – this was filmed before the flag-raising contagion), and fly-tippers are making life a misery for a local farmer.
All of which calls for the welcome return of Sophie Rundle’s former PC Joanne Marshall, now a fully-fledged detective with a one-year-old baby in tow. In fact, the developments in Jo’s personal life and career converge early on as, driving to baby Eve’s first birthday party, she stops off to investigate a crashed Ford Transit.
Lorraine Ashbourne as Molly Marshall (Photo: Matt Squire/Quay Street Productions/ITV)The blood-stained van eventually leads to the body of a young church warden lying in the scorched heather. The lad had been coshed to death long before being shot in the chest, while a second corpse is discovered at the end of the episode, with the same post-mortem shotgun blast.
Rundle is an invariably appealing actor, having starred in hits Gentleman Jack, Peaky Blinders and Happy Valley. But what really makes After the Flood worth watching is the supporting cast. Lorraine Ashbourne (Riot Women, Sherwood) returns as Jo’s mum, Molly, a local councillor imbued with Ashbourne’s trademark earthy humour.
When dodgy property developer Jack Radcliffe (Philip Glenister, another welcome returnee) arrives back after a three-month sojourn in Lanzarote, Molly is suitably unimpressed. “We went to Lanzarote once,” she tells him. “Grey sand everywhere, like holidaying in a car park.”
Nicholas Gleaves is brilliantly menacing as Jo’s corrupt, murderous superior, DS Phil Mackie, who has Jo and her estranged husband Pat (Rundle’s real-life partner, Matt Stokoe) in a fix. Although he knows that they know he’s a bad’un, Mackie has such potentially ruinous intel about Pat (that he too was “on the take”), as well as being a physical danger to Jo’s fledgling family, that she has seemingly come to an understanding with her bent boss.
Nicholas Gleaves as Phil Mackie and Philip Glenister as Jack Radcliffe (Photo: Matt Squire/Quay Street Productions/ITV)Mackie tries to bind Jo even further into his evil web by recommending her for an award for her police work in series one. “That’s me publicly signing up to Mackie’s version of events,” as she tells Pat.
The first series of After the Flood ended on a morally ambiguous note: would Jo report her husband and boss to her superiors? We get our answer here because Jo and Pat, although now estranged, are jointly running a covert investigation into Mackie – even though it could mean jail time for Pat.
While the police corruption angle carries inevitable echoes of Line of Duty, the first series, thanks to the Yorkshire setting and Rundle’s participation, has been described as “Happy Valley-lite”.
But this rather dismissive comparison with Sally Wainwright’s BBC drama is unfair, and After the Flood, with its eco-concerns, is very much its own beast. And while Jo is no Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire’s inimitable character in Happy Valley), neither is she meant to be. Mackie, however, is shaping up to be a villain every bit as skin-crawling as James Norton’s Tommy Lee Royce.
‘After the Flood’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on ITV1
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