Of all the UK’s terrestrial channels, ITV is most like the streaming giant Netflix. Both broadcasters create shows governed by a pulpy, prurient sensibility, propositioning the public with middling primetime thrills. Coldwater, a new six-part drama on ITV, follows in the aesthetic footsteps of The Sister, The Suspect, and Passenger, evoking a hyperbolic, over-saturated world where sinister forces are always just around the corner.
Andrew Lincoln is John, a middle-class Londoner whose gentle life is shattered after a violent episode at a playground. John runs from the incident – abandoning his nine-year-old daughter in the process – and the debilitating guilt he feels leads to the family, including wife Fiona (Indira Varma), moving to the remote Scottish village of Coldwater. There, John and Fiona fall in with their new next-door neighbours: vicar Rebecca (Eve Myles) and her slippery, God-fearing husband, Tommy (Ewen Bremner). “Don’t forget what happened to Jonah,” Tommy warns John. “He kept running away from God and ended up in the belly of a fish!” But John is tired of running, and an unlikely friendship strikes up between the two men. Naturally, it isn’t long before tragedy strikes, and the true colours of this close knit community begin to show.
Written by Northern Irish playwright turned screenwriter David Ireland, Coldwater opens with a very conventional thriller set-up. Family relocates to deepest, darkest countryside and discovers new evils there. That is firmly within the genre’s established parameters: see DI Alec Hardy moving to Broadchurch, Robin Griffin’s return to Laketop in Top of the Lake, or Tim Roth’s scouse sleuth heading to the Rocky Mountains in Tin Star. Fortitude, True Detective, Sharp Objects, Requiem, Hinterland, the list goes on. So, Ireland is not breaking new ground here, though the show does threaten to spin off in an interesting direction when it evolves into an examination of misogyny (both expressed and internalised). “Deep down you didn’t intervene,” Fiona scolds John, over his failure to help a mother being attacked by a violent man, “because you wanted to see a woman punished.”
But, soon enough, the genre requirements reassert themselves. This is ITV after all, so almost every available dial is pushed to its maximum. Lincoln and Varma are both fine actors, though Lincoln huffs and puffs and moves, at times, in a manic caricature. Myles and Bremner, on the other side of the cul-de-sac, are allowed to cut loose, and relish the opportunity to lean into the nuance-light malevolent energy. “John’s a weak man, he’s pliable,” Bremner’s Tommy purrs. “I’m deep in his soul.” For all its vague theological murmurings – for all that John presents us with a genuinely flawed, unlikeable protagonist – Coldwater ultimately settles into its binaries. Right and wrong, good and evil.
Maybe that’s enough for Sunday night fare. But this isn’t the first time, recently, that ITV has squandered a good cast and a primetime slot on a story that doesn’t live up to its pitch. Both Playing Nice (starring James Norton as a father whose son was accidentally swapped at birth) and Out There (a vehicle for Martin Clunes as a vengeful farmer) might have looked enticing prospects on the schedule but were fundamentally anticlimactic. Coldwater throws even more into the mix – serial killers and cold cases and adultery and child abuse – but the impact still feels diminished. And at the heart of the problem is a failure, once again, to create compelling, plausible characters. Why should we care about John’s PTSD? Why should we invest in his marital issues? Why should we be concerned about him falling in with a bad crowd, if we don’t, first, feel a stake in him as a genuine human?
This isn’t just a problem for ITV. It’s an issue with low-attention span TV in general, which demands that audiences are thrown straight into the action. Coldwater opens with the playground attack, presumably out of a desire to shock audiences into committing to the show. But it also means we can never fully understand the changes the event precipitates. Despite some interest in examining the issue of violence against women through the prism of the psychological thriller, Coldwater ends up rushed and schlocky, like so much that is carelessly put out on British TV.
