Strangers, episode 1, review: John Simm's latest tilt at frontman

The series won’t be Simm’s hit, but it confirms that few actors are better at relatable bafflement

In February, John Simm was inescapable, appearing in two prime time dramas simultaneously, a pun not lost on wry observers. On BBC Two he was a politician in Collateral, while in ITV’s Trauma he was a grieving father railing against the surgeon who failed to save his son.

Simm can hardly be blamed for the scheduling, but the effect was unnerving, as if we were living in some crackpot junta where an amiable northern dictator had seized control of the broadcast tower to display his full range of embattled middle-aged men.

It is one way around the risk of viewers switching channel: simply ensure you are on all of them. Sadly it didn’t work. Quantity is not the same as quality. Collateral had its moments, but Trauma was mainly cobblers, and six months later Simm finds himself slightly in need of a hit.

He is about as prominent as British actors get without being truly bankable. You are never sorry to see him, but nor do you set the Sky+ box by his presence.

Strangers (ITV) is his latest tilt at frontman, a glossy eight-part thriller with lofty ambitions. He plays Professor Jonah Mulray, an academic working in London who travels to Hong Kong to identify the body of his wife Megan (Dervla Kirwan), who has been killed in a car crash.

In the compelling opening minutes, the certainties in Mulray’s life are removed one by one, like a stage set being dismantled. Megan was married to someone else, David Chen (Anthony Chau-Sang Wong), and had been for many years before Jonah and Megan met.

They had an adult daughter, Lau Chen (Katie Leung, who you might remember from such Harry Potter characters as Cho Chang). Listening to a voicemail Megan had left herself in her final moments, Mulray learns she had got mixed up in something. With his life in pieces, he decides to investigate. Gangsters, detectives and shady government shenanigans ensue.

As the title hints, the message of the first episode is how quickly the things we think we know can become unfamiliar. At the outset Mulray happily lectured his students on nationhood, explaining that they are only consensual illusions.

He soon learns that if you find yourself in a foreign land without a passport, with only the consulate in the form of Sally Porter (Emilia Fox), nations can seem very real. Relationships, families and sense of self are more fragile.

In one sense Mulray’s discoveries about Megan change nothing – the fact of the time they spent together, the things they did, their feelings for each other are still there, preserved forever by her death – yet they also change everything. Her secrets are like an abandoned mine beneath a village which might have lain undiscovered and harmless but instead brings the whole edifice toppling down.

Hong Kong is well chosen as the setting for this collapse. It is only 20 years since handover but aside from a few place names and the ever-smaller cadre of drunken bankers, the British influence is rapidly fading.

The idea that Britain might have even thought about ruling this rocky Chinese island, let alone actually done it, is increasingly difficult to credit. A Brit adrift in Hong Kong is an easy metaphor for Britain in the world, ever-more toothless in the face of rising Asia.

We see the city as it appears to Mulray, a hard and hostile place beneath the glowing towers. Simm plays disintegration deftly, even if the vicissitudes of the plot require more exposition than one might expect in a chat between two husbands of the same woman who have just found out about each other.

Oddly for a thriller, Strangers is best in its quiet moments. The more it tried to force the story forwards, as with the Lau Chen subplot, the more it creaks. A sassy-babes-in-jail scene, in particular, was excruciating.

The series won’t be Simm’s hit, but it confirms that few actors are better at relatable bafflement. Through him, we understand that the things we most love – nations, wives, lives – may be illusions, mere false representations of what they purport to be. Simulacra, perhaps.

Strangers airs on Mondays on ITV at 9pm