The Jetty

Cat Jones, the writer of The Jetty (BBC1), has ladled many traditional ingredients into what on the face of it is yet another drama about a missing teenage girl. But her brew is pleasingly laced with something more socially urgent: the slippery problem of consent and the sexualisation of teenage girls.

The jumps between the past and present can be jarring (for a while I didn’t even realise the scenes with Amy and Caitlin had gone back in time). But all of that is easily forgotten when the story itself is so compulsive.

The Jetty isn’t Happy Valley, but it is much, much closer to it than you might have expected.

The Jetty has all the ingredients of a forgettable British crime-by-numbers drama destined for the graveyard slot of Monday nights in July. Yet, clunky dialogue and comedy names aside, a parallel narrative charting two teenage girls’ relationship with wayward older man Malachy (House of the Dragon’s Tom Glynn-Carney) is intriguingly ambiguous, providing enough tension to keep viewers guessing.

While there's much to appreciate about The Jetty, there are some elements that don't quite work. Riz has a parody-like quality to her, a consequence of how she is both written and performed, and the wider dialogue attempts poeticism, but falls flat in places, with characters sounding mannered or overwrought.

The Jetty doesn’t reinvent the crime drama. In fact, it borrows widely from the BBC’s vast back catalogue. But the restrained and self-contained nature of the narrative, and its likeable protagonist, offsets most of that triteness.

It fails on the basics, which isn’t Jones’s fault: badly lit and with dialogue that is sometimes hard to decipher. But the plot in the opening hour is such a mish-mash that I twice checked to see if I had started watching a later episode by mistake. Then there are the female-led drama tropes.

This was on for a middling score as the story keeps you hooked and there are some nice lines and interesting characters despite how confusing and inaudible it is, but the ending is a Sell out designed to set up a return rather than to service the story. For a show that wants so hard to talk about important matters to dilute the message with this stupid ending is an insult and completely lost my support.

Female characters in the first episode are terribly over-makeup'ed. Facial expressions of the main character are not convincing, might be due to too much botox. Plot holes, bad dialogues, stereotypish teenager outsiders... Barely made it through the first episode

Overpromised and under delivered - this had loads of hype and does not deliver. The writing is so poor. There must have been some great sales people at the production side to get this on screen. Avoid!