You don’t have to speak algorithm to understand why Apple TV might have gone for Down Cemetery Road. It’s based on author Mick Herron’s first series of books. Slow Horses, Apple’s last series adapted from Herron, has been one of the streamer’s biggest hits. Slow Horses is brilliant, but its formula is eminently repeatable – take Herron’s excellent novels with a central character who is dishevelled but larger than life, pack the script with a very British form of wit and snark, set it in a memorable locale and people it with Emmy-bait actors.
And so, just as the fifth series of Slow Horses concludes, we get Down Cemetery Road. As Herron’s readers will know, this time we have swapped genres from espionage to crime drama and we are in Oxford, not London. But in the form of Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson) we have a lead detective who, on reflection, one would very much like to see lock horns with Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb. She is every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical, sarcastic, badly-dressed, unhygienic and unlikely.
Down Cemetery Road is a thriller delivered with such confidence that we don’t even meet Boehm until the end of the first hour. Instead, we get to enjoy Ruth Wilson delivering a performance every bit as mesmeric as Thompson’s.
Wilson plays Sarah Trafford, an Oxford art restorer of the sort who tucks her cardigan into her cords, who decides to investigate when a house on her street explodes, killing two adults. Sarah becomes obsessed with what has happened to their young daughter, as no one else seems interested, and ends up going to Boehm’s husband Joe (Adam Godley), also a private detective. But, let’s just say further events make it obvious that the disappeared girl is linked to a much bigger plot.
This being a Herron adaptation, it won’t surprise you to learn that this one goes “all the way to the top”. A massive establishment cover-up is duly exposed while a revenge plot with an assassin out to get Boehm provides the dramatic fuel.
Much of this is enabled by a series of convenient McGuffins that suggest writer Morwenna Banks may be more interested in character than plot – a scarf that keeps appearing; a pair of obviously suspect neighbours. She also has much more time for her female characters than her male ones – Darren Boyd’s Secret Service supremo is so pompous and entitled, Adeel Akhtar’s bumbling operative so entirely useless that they both become caricatures.
Ruth Wilson is mesmeric as Sarah Trafford, an Oxford art restorer
But then there have been plenty of thrillers, from Conan Doyle to Le Carré, where the women are mainly clichés, and more to the point, you can forgive a lot if something is funny: Down Cemetery Road is about as hilarious as a series splattered with sudden violence and a child abduction at its centre could ever be. Banks is a comedy writer who once did sketch comedy with Thompson and is also the voice of Mummy Pig in Peppa Pig.
Take that CV into account and you can see how she has crafted Down Cemetery Road as an absurdist commentary on the way stupid men cause problems and brilliant women end up having to solve them. With Thompson and Wilson – two really brilliant women – at its heart, it is founded on two unforgettable characters. There are three other Zoe Boehm novels in print – rest assured that Down Cemetery Road won’t be a dead end.
The first two episodes of Down Cemetery Road are now available on Apple TV