It is quite clear that Ross Kemp has the presence to be in a hard-hitting police drama of quality. It is not difficult to imagine him as a short-tempered, rough-handed detective, and, unlike many actors who play such roles, he would actually be plausible as a character who can hold his own when it comes to dealing with violent criminals.
This makes it all the more disappointing then that he is wasted in this amateurish attempt at a drama. The dialogue is bad
and riddled with cliché to the point of being insulting, and sounds like it was written by school kids, and not particularly well-read ones.
The show looks cheap, and a tree could act the cast off the screen. So wooden are the actors, they could be used to make the coffins their acting careers are surely to be buried in.
The main character is a box-ticking irritant who garners no empathy from the viewer, due to her obnoxious personality and because of the narcissistic and heartless way she treats her friends. That she is motivated only by self-interest, is epitomised by her threatening to kill an innocent dog in order to extract information from a terrified woman. How are we supposed to like this person? Were the writers banking solely on the fact that she is a wheelchair user for the audience to warm to her?
This of course removes any potential tension, because you really don't care whether or not she survives
A character needs to be likeable in order for the audience to care about their plight. Instead they go with an insufferable busy-body who makes you wish the killer had done us all a favour while he had the chance, and spared us everything that followed.
Of course, it is 2023, so Ross Kemp, on the rare occasions he appears on-screen (despite him being the reason most of us bothered to tune in in the first place) portrays an incompetent man, who has to be told how to do his job by a woman - a wheelchair-using one at that.
Incidentally, it is rather telling that the only positive reviews here mention superficial things about the showcasing of disabilities, which are irrelevant as to whether or not this is a compelling and worthy story.
The 10 star reviews are very suspicious, almost as though they were written by Beth Alsbury's friends, or by those more interested in virtue-signalling than the quality so blatantly lacking in this show - and of course we get the obligatory accusations of bigotry for daring to point out how poor Beth Alsbury's acting was in this show - She would fit perfectly into Hollyoaks.
But then she was not helped by just how insufferable her character was, or by the appallingly bad dialogue, and perhaps she would fare better with a likeable character and with a script written by adults.
