Roy Grace’s investigations and the secret of British TV series

To tell a credible and exciting story you don’t necessarily need unexpected twists or characters; sometimes, just the normality. Neither Roy Grace’s investigations, from 6 March on Sky Investigation and streaming on Now, everything seems to stop, crystallize in the precise time, neither short nor very long, of a case. The protagonist, the Roy Grace of the title, is a detective who has to start over, which very few trust, and who proceeds gropingly, slowly, without extraordinary strokes of genius: he is someone who observes and listens, and who without any hurry is able to connect the dots, to reconstruct events and things, and to recognize people for what they really are: victims or executioners.

Roy Grace’s investigations follows a specific trend of television English: mini-series made up of very long episodes (in this case two), lasting an hour and twenty, an hour and a half, in which writing has time to breathe and to paint a convincing picture of facts and normality. Like many other detectives of recent years, Roy Grace is not easy to frame: he seems gray, unstable, always late on everything. He is neither nice nor particularly charismatic. He feels alone, broken, yet he has something – obstinacy of the latter, probably – which allows him to always raise his head and move on.

He is a man like many others, who has done, seen and – above all – immediately. In its mediocrity and in his fallibility, there is all his talent. The best, after all, are not only those who succeed immediately, at the first try; often they are the ones who have to wait, who try again, and who put the pieces of a puzzle together – their life, a murder, their job – testing every single piece. The fingers learn to recognize the shape, the edges disappear in the palms, and the fingertips enjoy following the lines and caressing the surface.

John Simm plays Roy Grace, and in his tense face, in his spacious forehead, there is one of the great secrets of the seriality of these years: we need real actors, thick, able to use anything, a joke or an expression, to build their characters, change tone and register, pass from the involuntary comedy of life to the blackest tragedy; we need actors capable of embodying the flatness of everyday life, anchored in the present, made of flesh and blood and not ethereal and untouchable, distant and obsessed with stardom.

Roy Grace’s investigations it works precisely for this: for more than an hour and twenty, the world around us is not replaced by a more incredible or colorful or more fantastic world; it goes like a pause, and in its place we find a reality not so different from ours, where there are no certainties, and in which it is people, all of them, who can make the difference.

The starting point, even for this series, is a book. Or rather: a literary saga, of the same name, signed by Peter James. But that’s what comes next, probably the most important: the team of talents and professionals who worked on the TV version, who reworked the source material, and who cut, changed and fixed everything that needed to be cut. , changed and fixed. Russell Lewisscreenwriter, is one of the key figures of the English channel ITV.