After the second review of the Flood series – Sophie Randall shines in the return of this dark police drama | television

MMost crime dramas don’t even try to raise themselves above their genre. Someone is murdered, suspects abound, investigators wander around for a bit, then the perpetrator is arrested and everyone forgets what they just witnessed. There is no harm in that. However, a select few are so good that they fall out of their category: the likes of Happy Valley and Line of Duty have cops gathering evidence to try and catch the villain, but they’re so good that they leave the mundane crime behind and rise to mix it with more popular dramas.

Then there are the shows that fall somewhere in between. You could call them premium genre pieces: they adhere to the model of the detective fests that air on weeknights on terrestrial channels at 9pm, and can be enjoyed at exactly that level, but they pinch the edges, adding quality where they can’t easily be bothered. One thing is not forgotten; In 2024, the first season of Mick Ford’s post-flood Yorkshire series was another.

The main trick after the flood is simply that there is too much going on. In the first season, the series’ heroine, Jo Marshall (Sophie Rundle), was a rookie police officer who applied her strong morals to a murder case she was not assigned to, without telling her senior police husband what she was up to. She does so during her pregnancy, in a way that exposes deep historical corruption in her department – ​​all in the wake of floods in her town that were constantly raining, enabling the script to make a powerful, but not arrogant, point about the climate crisis and the way communities in northern England have been left defenseless against rising water levels. The ending, which saw a second flood, the birth of Joe’s baby, the solution of the murder and the reveal of the identity of the corrupt king, was brilliant.

Now we are a year later. Joe is the right detective. She’s estranged from the father of her child, Pat (Matt Stokoe, the other half of the real-life Randle), but together they vow to take down the feckless cop who secretly runs the city. Then a dead body turns up in the moors, which must be linked either to a chemical company dumping nasty stuff into the river, or to the burning of upland heather (which has actually happened in 21st century Britain, done to make it easier to shoot grouse, with the loss of vegetation making ordinary working people living down the valley more vulnerable to flooding), or to transporting commercial waste on farmland, or all three. Oh, and there’s someone going around town painting red X’s on random buildings, protesting what we don’t know.

Randle remains brilliant in the lead role, with Jo a beacon of empathy and curiosity in a place where almost everyone keeps their heads down as either villain or victim. That she now lives with her widowed mother Molly means we get more of the lovely dynamic between Randle and the star of the supporting cast, Lauren Ashburn: Jo and Mo are right at the stage of the parent-child relationship where who is caring for whom is in constant flux. Meanwhile, Molly’s encyclopedic knowledge of the entire town’s workings going back decades makes her a personable sidekick when Joe’s investigations falter, and her big mouth and perpetual bullshit detector has now landed her on the local council, allowing the show to explore just how ill-equipped the local authorities are to protect the environment.

After the Flood is still far from your average crime saga where the discovery of a body sparks buried secrets in a town with sad residents and bad weather, but preserving a distinct genre piece is a delicate business. Get too caught up in these metaphors and they will drag you down. Season 2 retreads similar ground rather than advancing its formula: its subplots are callbacks to the first round’s darkest surprises and are less interesting than the original’s revelations, while the murder case—which sees Jo working with an inherently friendly and trustworthy new partner, Sam (Jill Halfpenny)—replaces the season 1’s death in a flood that wasn’t actually a drowning with a body full of shotgun pellets that weren’t actually gunfire. It’s the same thing again, but to a lesser extent. Jo runs the risk of jumping from clue to clue and suspect to suspect like any other TV cop.

Also, this may sound crude, but: there is no flooding. The impressive set piece that opened the first round announced that the show was aiming higher, and the lack of an equivalent here suggests those scenes have been toned down a bit. After the flood began to wash away.