Why you should be watching ITV's Marcella

Suspend disbelief, trust no one and play spot-the-London-landmark - there’s a lot to enjoy in this British take on Nordic noir

Anna Friel in woman-on-the-brink mode in Marcella (ITV)

What do you get when you ask a Swedish writer at the forefront of the Nordic noir juggernaut to bring his brand of dark, complexly plotted crime drama to London, with a female British lead? Marcella, starring Anna Friel by The Bridge writer Hans Rosenfeldt, now two episodes into an eight-part run and twisting its way into the public imagination. With this, Rosenfeldt has swapped the sparsly populated, freezing Scandinavian vistas – it’s very often snowing in those shows – for London’s sky scrapers, traffic, rain and people, lots of people, and all of them potential stranglers, stabbers or worse. With over six million tuning into the first episode and near to that number watching the second, this original drama for ITV (rather than another remake of a Scandi effort like Sky Atlantic’s The Tunnel) is proving to be a gripping watch – not least because almost anyone could have dunnit.

Part of its appeal is the huge roster of characters, not all introduced immediately, instead drip-fed. They come from across London’s diverse social spectrum, from millionaire property developers to illegal immigrants and convicted murderers. Often at first seemingly unconnected, the viewer is slowly reeled into the web. Deep breath now: at the centre is Detective Sergeant Marcella Backland, played by Friel. She’s been out of the Metropolitan Police’s murder squad since having her second child over ten years before and she has Unfinished Business. Her last job, attempting to find the Grove Park Killer (USP: suffocating victims with plastic bags sealed with duct tape and tying their limbs with cable ties) went unsolved. When the murderer, or a copycat, appears on the scene, Marcella asks for her old job back. She needs something to get her teeth into as her husband, Jason (Nicholas Pinnock), a lawyer at a construction firm (of which more later) has left her and their two kids are away at boarding school. So that gives us the police procedural element, populated by Marcella’s not entirely welcoming colleagues headed up by DI Rav Sangha (Ray Panthaki), DCI Porter (Nina Sosanya) and a potential love interest DI Tim Williamson (Jamie Bamber).

Marcella's colleagues on the murder squad: Charlie Covell as DI Alex Dier, Ray Panthaki as DI Ray Sangha, Jack Doolan as DC Mark Travis,Nina Sosanya as DCI Laura Porter (ITV ) (ITV)

Over at DGT construction (the haves in this equation, if you will) there’s the wealthy Gibson family, led by matriarch Sylvie (Sinead Cusack) who runs the family’s property development and construction business. They buy up land all over the city and ruffle feathers as they go. It’s a family affair – her daughter Grace (Maeve Dermody) - spoiler alert - is in a relationship with Jason and swiftly goes missing – very soon after Marcella finds out about her. We also know we’re supposed to keep any eye on Marcella’s chief suspect from 2005, Peter Cullen (a definite have-not), serving out the last days of a prison sentence working in a very creepy bakery.

The DGT Construction lot: Nicholas Pinnock as Jason, Sinead Cusack as Sylvie Gibson, Patrick Baladi as Stephen Holmes and Harry Lloyd as Henry Gibson (ITV)

Then there’s Cara, who on top of working for an internet sex-chat site, is sleeping with and robbing partners through a casual affairs app. Asking for trouble elsewhere is postgraduate student Maddy Stevenson, played by Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael, who has built up a relationship with Cullen as part of her studies into the Grove Park Killer. Got all that? Probably not, but that’s part of Rosenfeldt’s skill. It’s a fiendish puzzle, played by an impressive cast, crafted to keep viewers guessing – and it works, mostly.

The snippets of their lives we see look and feel like an authentic version of London, albeit with a heightened grisliness: Cara’s lounging in her red dressing-gown in in her pokey council flat, on her laptop – instead of Facebook, she’s on a live sex chat; Couple Yann and Matthew stewing over beers in the pub, with oozing corpses the topic of conversation; the couple in the corner shop with bodily fluids dripping through the ceiling near the cornflakes.

In the same way that the Øresund Bridge and the Danish and Swedish landscape almost feel like another character in The Bridge, London looms large here. Friel has gone as far as to call it “London noir”. In the opening credits you get the glinting points of the city at night, Canary Wharf and The Shard, overshadowing squat council estates. Those scenes give way to Victorian terraces and through it all, the lights of the traffic blur with the rain. “I wanted to give the audience the feeling that this story couldn’t be set anywhere else but London. That’s not the easiest for a man from Sweden to do,” says Rosenfeldt. Luckily he had help. He co-created the show with producer Nicola Larder (The Tunnel) who has said that she wanted to capture the feeling you can get in the city where “you’re constantly watching your back”. They filmed all over –Peckham, Brixton, and Islington, Camden – and the jumping around the capital helps to capture its diversity.

Friel is compelling as a woman in turmoil. In her jumper, shirt and jeans uniform and a khaki parka with an over-sized fur hood, she stalks around applying the same dogged tunnel vision to discovering the identity of her husband’s lover as she does to her conviction that Peter Cullen is the man they’re looking for, even if that involves breaking a few of the rules. She’s certainly not just a British version of The Bridge’s

emotionally-stunted lead detective Saga Noren (Sofia Helin). “Marcella makes many of her decisions from an emotional standpoint rather than a logical one,” says Rosenfeldt. She’s also, rather implausibly, prone to stress-induced periods of rage that she can’t recall. So far these have involved smashing her husband’s car windscreen, kicking a sanitary bin to pieces in the women’s toilets and potentially attacking Grace Gibson (or worse). Larder has said she wanted “a woman who has lost everything so is capable of anything.”

Emotional overload: Marcella after one of her blackouts (ITV)

Make no mistake, the crimes are grim and it might make you think twice before going down a dark ally in a city, or even feel slightly nervous going into your own home. Nowhere’s that dangerous really and it could feel ludicrous if you let it. But let yourself by drawn in by Marcella. When Rosenfeldt gets to the last piece of the puzzle, going on the action so far, the reward will be worth it.

Marcella continues on Mondays at 9pm on ITV