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Chasing Shadows, being released on DVD by Acorn Media October 20 2015, is not your average police procedural. In fact its not really your average television show period. Normally a show’s lead character might have a few problems, but usually he or she might be physically attractive or have some other sort of obvious redeeming quality which helps an audience like them.
That’s not the case with Detective Sergeant (DS) Sean Stone, Reece Shearsmith. Not only is he socially inept and have the horrible habit of always speaking the truth, he also has the communication skills of a person used to living inside their own head. While he may not have asperger’s syndrome, he has an incredibly difficult time communicating with anyone around him.
When we first meet Stone his superiors are trying to fete him for catching a serial killer at a press conference. Unfortunately Stone has other ideas and proceeds to say he and the whole Criminal Investigation Division (CID) failed as they would have been able to save the final victim if they’d investigated properly. According to him a proper investigation would have liaised with the Missing Persons Bureau in order to identify those people most at risk for being targeted by serial killers.
Naturally this goes down a treat with the brass and Stone quickly finds himself being permanently seconded to Missing Persons. Here he is assigned a new partner, Ruth Hattersley (Alex Kingston) a civilian, who works for Missing Persons. According to Stone, the key to finding those who are being targeted by killers is to identify patterns; patterns that show a common thread between potential victims.
While there’s no denying Stone knows what he’s doing his difficulties with communication drives both Hattersley and the police officer, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Carl Pryor, (Noel Clarke) assigned to supervise his work, to distraction. However over the course of the two, two-part episodes, this disc contains, both Pryor and Hattersley come to appreciate Stone’s brilliance even if his single mindedness drives them both a bit crazy.
What makes this show fascinating is how the writers have been able to integrate the way the three begin to learn to work together as they solve two complex cases involving missing persons. While Stone continues to exasperate both Pryor and Hattersley, we watch as all three of them begin to learn how to work together. While this means the latter two have to start granting Stone some leeway, we also see him making an effort to communicate.
The two cases they investigate, Only Connect and Off Radar, while both involving missing persons, are quite different. In the first a teenage girl has been missing for only a couple of days, but Stone believes she’s in danger. Three other teenagers the same age have previously gone missing and turned up dead. When it turns out the others were all found at abandoned buildings owned by the same bankrupt construction company, all had been members of an Internet Chat Room dedicated to suicide and the first three deaths had all been staged to make it look like they had hung themselves; he’s sure the latest has been targeted by the same killer.
Off Radar involves a lawyer who disappeared almost a year ago. What piques Stone’s interest is the lawyer doesn’t fit into any of the accepted categories for a missing person. When they begin to retrace where he was last seen they discover he disappeared exactly where two other people had been killed by a convicted serial killer. This leads them to assume their missing person was murdered by the same man.
In each case Stone, Hattersley and Pryor have to do the kind of meticulous work we hardly ever see in police shows. While there is a dose of action in each episode, much of the case work involves sifting through records, documents and paying attention to the minutest discrepancies in people’s habits that might give a clue as to what happened to them. It turns out that breaks in patterns are just as important as the patterns themselves.
What makes this show work, aside from the great scripts, is the quality of the acting. As Stone Shearsmith gives an amazing performance of a brilliant man with no social skills. Unlike depictions of Sherlock Holmes, another detective who has troubles with personal relations, there’s nothing romantic or heroic about Stone. Shearsmith’s depiction is so ordinary, so underplayed, we can’t help seeing Stone as an object of pity, not as someone to emulate.
While he aggravates Hattersley no end, Kingston does a great job of showing how her character begins to understand how to communicate with Stone and of realizing there’s something broken inside of him. Her patience, empathy and willingness to challenge him help open a few cracks in his armour eventually. It takes almost all four parts of the two episodes, but you can see them start to develop a working relationship.
As Pryor, Clarke works sort of as the meeting point for the other two characters. While he and Hattersley build a relationship initially based on their mutual frustration with Stone, he also knows he has to figure out a way to work with his DS. What it comes down to for Pryor is that Stone gets results, which is what matters. He may want to throttle him occasionally, but he knows he can trust Stone to almost always be correct.
Chasing Shadows isn’t going to be for everyone. If you like action and shootouts this won’t be for you. However if you want wonderfully acted and brilliantly scripted television, you’ll love it. The only problem is there’s only the four chapters. We can only hope they make more.
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