Culture | TV BBC One’s newest crime thriller, The Jetty, delivers death, danger and menace in spades. It follows the implausibly named Ember Manning, who is training to be a detective for the Lancashire Constabulary, played with sardonic wit by Jenna Coleman . Oh and there’s tragedy in her past – she’s a mum in her early 30s whose husband Mack died a year earlier, leaving her to parent their teenage daughter Hannah (Ruby Stokes) solo.
Ember had Hannah when she was 17 and while that’s never been a problem for her before, things start to change when she’s called into investigate the arson of Mack’s old boathouse. The arson itself is relatively open-and-shut but where it leads is anything but. Soon Ember is poking her nose into the case of local girl Miranda Ashby (Shannon Watson), and it leads her into a sordid underworld of dark secrets, missing women and crimes whose leads have long since gone cold.
The Jetty is a complex series, and Coleman carries it beautifully; whether she’s doggedly interviewing suspects or breaking down at home, she’s never less than magnetic. The police case is just the start of the story, really: what the show is really about is power, and how power can be abused, especially in relationships between young girls and older men. Ember’s revaluation of her relationship with Mack (who was significantly older than her when they first met) offers parallels to another story: that of two teenage girls who form an intense and unhealthy frien.
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