When The Tower (ITV1) first crash landed on our screens three years ago it brought something fresh and exciting to the overstuffed police drama genre. In Gemma Whelan’s DS Sarah Collins we had an old-school by-the-book copper we could all trust as she tried to get to the bottom of how and why two bodies lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of a dispiriting tower block.
The story, complicated by an ill-advised affair between Collins’s immediate superior DI Kieran Shaw (Emmett J Scanlan) and rookie PC Lizzie Adama (Tahirah Sharif) – he married, she impressionable – teetered on the brink of implausibility but the combination of Whelan’s frazzled intensity and assorted cliffs being hung stopped it tipping over the edge.
It was a hit, with unfinished business. But while season two kept things ticking over expediently enough, we’re now at series three and, despite Whelan’s best efforts, the law of diminishing returns has come into play. Though the original story lingers in the background like a bad smell, this latest outing for Collins and co plunges us into the tawdry world of zombie knives, gang warfare and bad Bulgarians.
All desperately zeitgeisty, but don’t we get enough of that on the news? With precious little originality to offer on the subject and resorting to half-baked community meeting cries of “when are you [the police] going to stop this?” – no explanation of how exactly that’s supposed to happen – the energy rapidly drains out of a thriller that’s decidedly short on thrills.
Unless you’ve only recently finished series two, you’ll be completely adrift on the backstory involving Shaw and Adams that rumbles to a tedious conclusion. I’m sure we’re meant to feel emotionally involved in this relationship but his constant miserable mumbling and her blank lethargy provoked little more than distracted apathy in this viewer.
There are saving graces, not least Jimmy Akingbola having a ball as undercover cop Steve, revelling in a stoned Rasta cover story that provides proceedings with some much-needed light relief. You also get the feeling that The Tower is trying to say something about policing ends and means, with Collins’s lofty integrity counterpointing Adams’s result-driven pragmatism. But that gets lost in the mush of a story that feels cobbled together from a secondhand news report. From top beginnings, The Tower has crash-landed with a thump.
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