The Guilty

The Guilty es un drama televisivo en tres partes, transmitido en ITV del 5 al 19 de septiembre de 2013. El drama está protagonizado por Tamsin Greig, Darren Boyd y Katherine Kelly, e involucra la investigación policial sobre la desaparición de un niño pequeño, Callum Reid. En 2008, la DCI Maggie Brand (Greig) tiene la tarea de encontrar al niño desaparecido, mientras lidia con sus propios problemas personales, pero este sigue desaparecido. Cinco años después, el cuerpo de Callum es recuperado y Maggie está decidida a descubrir qué sucedió. La serie fue posteriormente lanzada en DVD en los Países Bajos en 2014, pero a partir de 2016, permanece sin estrenar en el Reino Unido. Recepción crítica Mark Lawson de The Guardian dijo del episodio inicial: "This maternal parallel brings a fresh depth to the by now standard scenes in which a detective breaks bad news and O'Malley's scripts cleverly lengthen the shadow by making DCI Brand's relationship with her own young son complex and a source of concern and regret to her: it becomes increasingly clear that the title The Guilty may apply to more people than merely the killer of Callum. Director Ed Bazalgette also achieves unusual smoothness in the shifts between now and then. The flashback is a problematic device in crime fiction because it is often used – most grievously in Agatha Christie dramatisations – to convey events that, it turns out later, never happened, but were simply the lying version of a suspect. This always feels a cheat to me: if Dr Arbuthnot never in fact did catch the 7.50 to Didcot, then how were viewers able to see it so vividly as he described his actions to David Suchet? In The Guilty, though, the two past and present strains of narrative seem to be reliable and exist simultaneously – without any of the visual or musical clues that sometimes signal flashbacks – as they must surely do in the minds of bereaved parents. Tamsin Greig also succeeds in bringing much to a path deeply pitted by the heels of distinguished Equity members. Greig is rather similar to Olivia Colman in having suddenly moved to a new rank of recognition as an actor after years of work in TV comedy. Among her particular qualities are an acerbic edge in the voice and the capacity to suggest deep disappointment and hurt. In The Guilty, the latter aspect underlines the mother-mother storyline, while the former brings an unease to the routine police scenes through the suggestion that soft-voiced compassion or encouragement of colleagues is something at which DCI Brand has to work."