Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dark Heart’ On BritBox, Where A Damaged Cop Investigates The Murders Of Pedophiles

BritBox, the joint streaming venture of BBC and ITV, has been commissioning their own series of late, but like most of the TV in the UK, they take their own sweet time to produce series. For example, Dark Heart, based on the Will Wagstaffe novels by Adam Creed, aired its pilot in 2016. But the rest of its first season is streaming here and airing in the UK now, which is an interesting gap. Read on to find out about the gritty new series…

DARK HEART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of London, then a troubled man in a hoodie, sitting on a train and thinking about a grisly scene of two bodies in a car. As we see him going to the airport, another man gets off another train, goes to a flat where “PISS OFF PEDO” is scrawled on the door, and gets maced as he tries to get in.

The Gist: The troubled man is DI Will Wagstaffe (Tom Riley), whose parents were the ones he was envisioning; they were murdered seventeen years ago, when he was a teenager. He gets called back from his holiday to investigate the murder scene, where the guy was bound and gagged, a bottle of whiskey dumped down his throat, and he’s been castrated. He apparently died of a heart attack from the trauma.

It turns out that the victim is an accused pedophile, who was never convicted due to lack of evidence. While some of Wagstaffe’s squad feel less than gung-ho about the case, Wagstaffe won’t hear it. In his investigation, he tries to figure out who did this; first he questions the victim’s ex wife, then tries to figure out if someone who admitted to a similar attack did so in cahoots with someone else.

In the meantime, though, another accused but not convicted pedophile is attacked in similar fashion but survives. It leads Wagstaffe to think that the first death was not the attacker’s intention, which sends the investigation in a new direction.

Wagstaffe finds that his sister Juliette (Charlotte Riley) has taken refuge in his parents’ old house, where he currently lives, because she thought he was on holiday. She has a black eye, which she doesn’t address, but he thinks it’s from her current boyfriend, who he follows to a dark spot by the river and bashes him in the face. Jules is worried that Will is still wallowing in their parents’ murders so many years later, and wishes he’d move on.

Our Take: One of the things that’s interesting about Dark Heart, whose pilot aired in 2016 but new first season episodes start airing on November 7 (those Brits, they work at their own pace), is that it takes a unique spin on the “troubled cop” trope. Wagstaffe isn’t an antihero who drinks while driving or flips off all authority; his trouble is from the unsolved murder of his parents. He just can’t get it out of his mind, and that’s what drives him to actually excel at his job, even when he’s investigating pedophiles getting castrated.

Tom Riley does a nice job showing Wagstaffe’s pain, especially when he reacts to his sister’s lack of attention to the murder’s anniversary. He’s even got it calculated to the point where he will have lived longer without his parents than with them, and he doesn’t understand how Jules can think that he’ll never find who killed them.

We’re not sure how interested we are in the case that carries the first season, though. Sure, it’s interesting that someone is targeting pedophiles that never got convicted, but other than that aspect, it’s a by-the-numbers investigation, with the tinge of victims and parents who are extremely angry that these people ruined their lives and got off scot-free. But we’re much more intrigued by Wagstaffe’s obsession rather than the case itself.

Sex and Skin: All business.

Parting Shot: We see an extended scene of another accused pedophile in a courtroom, watching as the crown’s attorneys tell the judge that they need more evidence. As he gets out of the bus after his release, we know what’s going to happen next.

Sleeper Star: Anjli Mohindra only gets a couple of scenes in the first episode as Wagstaffe’s partner Josie Chancellor, but it feels she’ll be a bigger part of the story later on. We liked what we saw in the first episode, though.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Go live in a country that doesn’t respect the rule of law, because you’re no good to me,” Wagstaffe says to some of his squad who scoff at calling the accused pedophile who was killed a “victim.”

Our Call: STREAM IT, if only because of Tom Riley as Wagstaffe.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Dark Heart on BritBox