Grace S02E01: A sympathetic detective with interesting cases – Lagarde

In the second season of the British series beauty John Simm returns as Detective Roy Grace, who solves murders in the seaside town of Brighton and Hove.

A lone character suddenly hears a strange noise in an adjacent room and feels an uncontrollable need to find out what is happening. It’s a cliche that comes up sooner or later in every thriller. But the impact of such a fairly simple and almost predictable scene is many times greater when you as a viewer care about the character at the center of that scene.

Without revealing anything else, it would be very difficult if this scene had a negative outcome for Cleo Morey (Zoe Tapper) in the first episode of the second season of the British detective series. beautyThe sympathetic but somewhat shy title character has finally made a decision and asks her usual pathologist for an appointment.

beauty, based on the book series by author Peter James, is an old-fashioned thriller series in a very positive way. Things are generally well put together; As a viewer, you are presented with enough pieces of the puzzle to guess the outcome – in the first episode of the new series, Grace and his colleagues search for a killer who appears to have been in several places at once. And you know enough about the most important characters to feel for them more than you do for the average detective in this type of series. The hour and a half each episode takes also provides space for this in an enjoyable way.

It is somewhat confusing how the NPO cut the seasons in half as they were broadcast in the UK (something possibly related to the relatively long production break between parts). The first episode of the second series was previously attached to the first season, so that it was the first Dutch episode of the second series. Not dead enough, seems like a fairly abrupt reboot. Two new series are in the works.

Grace S02, from Saturday 30 September 2023 on NPO 2 and also in full on NPO Plus