The Deceived, Channel 5, Monday to Thursday
It would be unfair to say that The Deceived was poor, but it did struggle to stand out in an extremely packed crime drama field.
Running over four consecutive nights gave it some impact and matters improved after the unconvincing opening episode, but this isn’t one you’ll be recommending to your friends.
Then again you might want to watch it just because of the significant local interest.
It was created by Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee and her husband Tobias Beer.
It’s set principally in Co Donegal and features a smattering of dialogue as Gaeilge and a selection of actors you’ll be familiar with.
Paul Mescal, who has been nominated for an Emmy for Normal People, plays a Donegal builder and part-time firefighter, although I suspect that had filming taken place a few months later his role would probably have been enhanced and included more O’Neills wear.
Ian McElhinney, the dad in Derry Girls, plays a father with some memory issues and psychic Cloda O’Donnell is played by another Derry Girls alumnus, Louise Harland.
The whodunnit opens in Cambridge where a student falls for her English lecturer.
Ophelia soon discovers that she’s not the first young woman to be seduced by the sultry charms of Dr Michael Callaghan and so we begin.
The opening pace is frenetic. Within the first 20 minutes we meet the main characters, find out that Roisin (Michael’s novelist wife whom we just met) has died in a fire at their family home in Donegal, Michael disappears and Ophelia tracks him down at the moment his wife’s coffin is lowered into the ground on the wild west coast of Ireland.
Not long after Ophelia announces she is pregnant and no one seems too bothered that she’s moved in with Michael in the fire damaged house.
It’s fairly clear early on that Callaghan is up to no good. Who has ever heard of an accidental fire in a television drama.
In the big, old and draughty house, Ophelia begins to hear and see strange things and Michael’s hold over her increases. He may even be slowly poisoning her with a strong tea-like drink he encourages her to take to keep her strength up.
Roisin’s mother Mary, who has a shrine to her daughter at home, is strangely compliant with Callaghan and even agrees to look after Ophelia when he has to return to Cambridge to bring his father home following a minor stroke.
At this stage a Cambridge colleague enters the whodunnit frame when Ruth visits Callaghan’s dad in hospital using the name of his deceased wife in the visitors’ book (do they have such things in English emergency departments?)
Later we learn that Callaghan’s best friend secretly loves him (another suspect then) and that our anti-hero may have killed another Cambridge student after Ophelia finds her things hidden in a garden shed at the big house.
We are even teased at the end of episode three that Roisin might still be alive.
The four episodes, including the big climax, are available at Channel 5 on demand.
Mescal doesn’t have a central role, but he undoubtedly has some star quality and that rare, indefinable ability to make you want to watch him.
Emmett J Scanlan gives us a satisfyingly deceitful Callaghan, although his voice, which seems designed to portray him as both sexy and sinister, starts to grate very quickly.
It’s solidly done and fits in the zeitgeist about coercive control and abusive relationships but the amount of new drama is astonishing at the moment and unfortunately The Deceived is one of the also rans.
