Ivan Radford | On 11, Feb 2024

This review was originally published in January 2020.

The second contender for January’s darkest new TV show – alongside White House Farm – is Channel 4’s four-parter Deadwater Fall. It might not be based on a true story, but it’s no less convincing, with David Tennant giving a heart-wrenching performance that carries a documentary-like impact. He plays Tom Kendrick, local GP to the small town of Kirkdarroch. He has three girls, a devoted wife, Kate (Anna Madeley). His picture-perfect life, however, is destroyed when Tom’s house goes up in flames, taking the lives of Kate and the three girls.

The series is written superbly by Daisy Coulam (Grantchester), who makes sure that this is an ensemble drama through and through. Flashing back and forwards to show us the family before and after the blaze, we get a real sense of Daisy as a person – she’s a selfless, well-meaning primary school teacher who has a complicated bond with her colleague, Jess (Cush Jumbo), and Jess’ policeman husband, Steve (Matthew McNulty).

Throughout director Lynsey Miller observes the kind of tiny gestures that make up relationships, revealing genuine, loving bonds or teasing shifting loyalties and hidden secrets. The cast are more than up for the challenge of bringing those minutiae to life: Cush Jumbo gets a deserved chance to steal the spotlight, while Madeley is heartbreakingly brilliant as an increasingly ambiguous figure, making sure that, like the characters themselves, we continuously revise our opinions of everyone we meet.

Tennant, meanwhile, is equally hard to read, as his reactions – and interactions with the town’s residents – are fraught and awkward beyond tragic sympathy. His dynamic with Maureen Beattie’s trembling mother, Carol, is part of the key to the whole mystery. The result is a jigsaw that makes us constantly piece together – and re-piece together – our perception of Tom and his family. Trust gives way to suspicion, as a precisely paced drip-feed of clues and twists leads us from padlocked bedroom doors and injected substances to bullying and depression.

The result could well be the next Broadchurch, with its compassionate and detailed understanding of small-town ties and the way ripples of grief spread from neighbour to neighbour. But with only four episodes in total, the tight focus and unflinching depiction of devastating horrors unfold into something gripping and memorable in its own right.

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