Review of Manhunt

Having just finished the first season, I wanted to write down my preliminary thoughts. This is a very different kind of a police procedural, as it is meticulous in keeping it as close as possible to the events involved in actually solving these three cases. These were real crimes, 3 murders and an attempted murder committed by one man. The source material is a memoir of Colin Sutton, the lead investigator in these crimes who also collaborated in checking the accuracy of the series. As Martin Clunes, who plays Sutton, said in a Facebook Live interview, "It was a story worth telling because this is how crimes get solved. It's not glamorous. Policemen don't wear their best clothes to work. It takes a lot of hard, boring work, trolling through CCTV... and looking at everything." The series was the highest new drama in the 2 years before it. The realism is a positive and a negative. The authenticity has a popular attraction but Clunes reminds us that it would be a mistake to forget that those girls were taken. The biggest challenge was to keep the story moving forward, dispute the tedium of the police work. It was a hard line for the production to walk. I'm giving this first season a 7 (a story worth watching) out of 10. {True Police Procedural}