Guilt

Guilty

This drama cleverly played with the dilemma of the opposing forces of doing the right thing and being punished for wrong doing. Either position was justified in turns and the two brothers took their corners.

The script was tight and well paced overall, there were, however, just a couple of places where we had repetition of one brother revealing something and the other flying off the handle, these repeats needed editing out and replacing with some scenic shots of bleak Scotland to ramp up the atmosphere.

Their deception spiralled out of control and it was a really very well written black comedy. The acting was first rate from everyone. We could have had more of everything, more car chases, more sex, more violence more drama please.

This drama had it all, I was gripped from the start and this is the BBC at its best in using the fabulous talent that lays at its feet.

Great first season but season 2 lots of drawn out scenes with one to one conversations that feel like speeches where you want to fall asleep. Shame. That said, the music is superb and production very good but content just does not live up to these other aspects that are done so well.

Two brothers driving home a bit worse for where hit a pedestrian and kill him. As it turns out he has terminal cancer so the brothers return him home, his body is found and everyone from the police to coroner assume he died from the cancer. What can go wrong? Well quite a lot as it seems. A suspicious relative, a nosy neighbor and a recovering alcoholic private detective determined to rebuild his career by solving the suspicious death. The writer Neil Forsyth has struck the perfect balance between comedy and drama to make this hugely enjoyable four part series. 8/10

The first series is good, darkly comic and great chemistry between the two brothers. The second series starts well but then feels rushed and it loses its way very badly.

The first season of Guilt is one of the most interesting, tense, and well-written suspense shows in recent times. It's full of intricate, well-crafted twists and turns, characters who feel like real people, side-plots that come together in wonderful ways. The acting is superb, especially Jamie Sives and Emun Elliot, but all the others are good. All in all, it makes for perfect binge watching.

The second season doesn't work nearly as well as the twists and turns that make the first so effective become laborious, complex, and eventually, way too hard to understand. By the third episode it's almost impossible to understand every character's motivation because they've all been switched and changed so often. The ending is nearly incomprehensible. And as good an actor as Mark Bonnar is, the camera tends to focus on him for interminable amounts of time, almost as if his face is actually part of the plot.

So the advice here is, indulge in the first season, skip the second. Apparently the third is in the works, and with luck, the show's creators will revert to their original intentions and pretend the second season never happened.