Return to Paradise review: Just right for a drizzly British winter evening

Meet Detective Inspector Mackenzie Clarke. She’s an Australian copper who migrates to London and makes an excellent profession there, however finally ends up, pissed off and resentful, again dwelling in Australia’s idyllic, sleepy Dolphin Cove, due to some “misunderstandings” on the Met about her “tampering with proof”. Therefore Return to Paradise, the brand new Dying in Paradise spin-off on BBC One.

Clarke (House and Away’s Anna Samson) is now caught within the tiny outpost of legislation and order she originated from, and one she as soon as couldn’t wait to go away. To make issues worse, her commanding officer, Senior Sergeant Philomena Sturdy (Catherine McClements), can also be the mum of the hunky forensics officer Glenn (Tai Hara) who Clarke jilted on the altar to run away to hitch the Metropolitan Police all these years in the past. Regardless of that deep effectively of emotional injury and ethically questionable behaviour, Sturdy feels obliged to take Clarke again as a result of, effectively, she’s simply so rattling good at fixing murders.

However the positives appear to finish there. Clarke will get on awkwardly along with her ex, and although traces of tenderness stay we don’t actually perceive why she handled him so brutally, till, like a sufferer questioning why a funnel-web spider simply bit them, we, and Glenn, come to understand that it’s simply her nature. Clarke is equally ill-equipped to work with the bumbling resident copper, Detective Senior Constable Colin Cartwright (Lloyd Griffith), who has made the other journey to Clarke – emigrating from England to take life simpler in Dolphin Cove.

Refreshingly, there isn’t any hackneyed cobber-Pom enterprise happening, however Clarke is sort of relentlessly impolite to Cartwright, when not ignoring his very existence, and refuses each try by any of her colleagues to construct regular working relationships. So many detectives are “troubled” – however in Clarke’s case the troubles are inherent to her very existence, and she or he nearly enjoys them. Samson performs Clarke with a touch of Benedict Cumberbatch’s indifferent tackle Sherlock Holmes.

She is jolly good, although, at nabbing the disproportionately excessive variety of killers on this nice nook of coastal Australia, the place nobody appears to do very a lot besides hang around on the seashore. As an emanation of the Dying in Paradise franchise, the plotting is simply the suitable aspect of credible, however solely simply, with the primary episode recalling a type of Jonathan Creek mysteries, the place the sufferer, an property agent, is locked contained in the obvious crime scene however by some means finally ends up useless, with a knife theatrically in his again, on the seashore.

“We’re trying on the mistaken crime,” is Clarke’s important perception, and the one which secures her a “short-term however indefinite” contract at Dolphin Cove. As with the crew within the authentic Caribbean paradise of Saint Marie, there are a few junior officers thrown in for comedian ornamentation, and the suspects all collect collectively on the finish to have the entire inexplicable homicidal caper defined to them (a whodunnit staple since a minimum of The Mousetrap).

Most crucially, the franchise has travelled to its new location with out dropping its most important high quality, which is that it may be fortunately consumed on a drizzly British winter night with a glass of Yellow Tail Sauvignon Blanc and just one eye on the display screen. It is a appreciable achievement. Undemanding however reasonably satisfying crime dramas, like an excellent homicide, are a lot tougher to execute than they appear.