What separates the really good police procedural television shows from the rest of the pack? Nowadays everyone has a stable of really good script writers working for them, and no show would dream of ever just having a straight ahead who-done-it anymore. However, that doesn't mean most of them aren't still following a familiar formulae. A crime is committed and police try and solve the mystery and catch the bad guys. Since they're all doing roughly the same thing with equally well-written and directed stories, it usually comes down to the actors to make a show stand out from the rest of the crowd.
At least that's the case with Above Suspicion. A new season of episodes is now available on DVD from Acorn Media. As in the show's first season the cast is headed up by Ciaran Hinds as Detective Chief Superintendent (DCS) James Langton and Kelly Reilly as Detective Inspector (DI) Anna Travis. Two superior actors individually, taken together on screen they feed off each other talent and energy in a display that makes for brilliant viewing.
The daughter of a late colleague of Langton, Travis was a fresh Detective Constable when she first came to work with him. She has been instrumental in helping him solve two high-profile and grisly murders. While he might have initially had a kind of paternalistic protective attitude towards her because of who her father had been, their relationship has gradually changed over the course of the last series into something with the potential for being less platonic. Right from the start, we can't help notice the amount of tension that continues to exist between the two characters.
Travis has been assigned to assist in the investigation of a very high-profile murder. An ex-police officer has been found dead in a drug dealer's apartment. While the priority is solving the murder, Langton and his team also have to figure out what the ex-cop was doing there. When they start checking into his background, what he'd been up since he left the police, they find a rather complicated picture. Not only did the man have a fiancee, but he had also recently married another woman. He had been employed as the second woman's driver for only a month before they were married. On its own this is suspicious. Added to the facts his wife isn't exactly upset by the news her husband is dead and she's a lot better off than he was, the police begin to wonder what's the secret behind their relationship.
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