MURDER, THEY WROTE (THE DECEIVED)

 

Great murder mysteries keep you on the edge of your seat from the off.

They make you care about the characters and speculate as events unfold.

They scare you and often surprise, as you piece together a messy jigsaw of clues as to who the culprit may be and how he or she may cover his or her tracks.

They even send you down the wrong path.

'Derry Girls' creator Lisa McGee and her husband Tobias Beer clearly had high hopes for their Channel 5 miniseries 'The Deceived'.

Broadcast over four consecutive nights, the TV channel had high hopes too that it could be a ratings smash and take its place as a great murder mystery.

Riffing on classics such as Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca,' the Gothic thriller is a particularly bold change in tone for McGee whose Northern Ireland Troubles sitcom has wowed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

It also had the fortune of having the next screen appearance of Paul Mescal, the Emmy nominated star of one of the most talked about TV dramas of 2020, the BBC and Hulu's 'Normal People'.

So, why does it feel so flat throughout its four episode run?

Emily Reid plays Ophelia Marsh, a Cambridge student who goes all googly-eyed over Emmett J Scanlan's twinkly eyed, early Ronnie Drew lookalike Michael Callaghan during lectures.

One minute she is thinking "dingy dongy doo" as she ogles the bushy beardered tutor and the next minute she's being flirty with him.

Soon, they are having sex in his office - even though she knows he is married to a successful novelist, Catherine Walker's Roisin Mulvery.

Her path crosses with Roisin on campus in the ladies loo at a faculty event and, before we know it, Michael and Roisin disappear.

Ophelia, who is pregnant, is determined to find out where her brooding lover, an aspiring writer, has gone.

She turns up at the couple's house only to find a grandad from 'Derry Girls' lookalike - okay, it is Ian McElhinney whose character Hugh Callaghan is also occasionally shouty.

Before he can roar in his Ulster accent the magic words "Tangerine Tool," Ophelia is off to the northern most county of the Irish Republic on her mission to destroy Michael and Roisin's marriage.

However when she arrives in Co Donegal, she discovers in the local pub that Michael is burying Roisin in a local graveyard unbeknownst to most of their Cambridge friends.

To make matters worse, there has been a mysterious fire at the Manderley-style country retreat that they own, Kocknadara according to the locals.

Those locals include Paul Mescal's quiet, smouldering firefighter Sean McKeogh who doesn't appear to even own a neck chain.

Improbably posing as Roisin's literary agent, Ophelia the Home Wrecker ingratiates herself into Michael's already wrecked, badly charred home, with the path now clear for them to marry.

While Roisin's mum, Eleanor Methven's Mary Mulverry is initially hostile to her, she seems awfully forgiving when it emerges Ophelia is pregnant.

But what is the tapping noise coming from the house's locked rooms?

Why is the summer house on the Knocknadara estate locked?

And why does Michael look too shifty to have been a member of The Dubliners?

Directed by Chloe Thomas, 'The Deceived' not only borrows heavily from Du Maurier's 'Rebecca' and 'Don't Look Now' but has elements of Gothic classics like Charlotte Bronte's 'Jane Eyre,' Emily Bronte's 'Wuthering Heights,' and George Cukor's celebrated 1944 psychological thriller 'Gaslight'.

That Oscar nominated film featured future 'Murder She Wrote' star Angela Lansbury, whose crime writing, murder mystery solver Jessica Fletcher in the hit series would inspire McGee and her 'Derry Girls' alter ego Erin Quinn.

But even that infamously hammy CBS  murder mystery series manages to seem more convincing than McGee and Beer's effort which is more 'Scooby Doo' than Alfred Hitchcock's 'Marnie'.

The problem regrettably lies with the husband and wife team's script which never really convinces from the off and has characters you can't even be bothered to care about.

Nothing comes as a surprise and so the audience are not led down any stray paths.

A key plot development involving a missing person's backpack almost being discovered during the Knocknadara fire is poorly executed and a scene where a dead body is disposed of from a murder scene is so unconvincing, it bizzarely lacks any of that nasty blood stuff that tends to make crime scenes so messy.  

The discovery of an ear ring on the doorstep of Michael and Roisin's Cambridge home also makes you wonder if anyone has heard of Specsavers.

Beer and McGee's characters are also so thin, you could thread them through an eye of a needle.

Ophelia comes across as a spoilt little rich girl turned marriage wrecker and unfortunately Reid's tear stained performance is so wooden even when she rants and rages, you suspect there might be dry rot.

You cannot help wondering why she bothers to remain in Co Donegal obviously lying about being Roisin's agent and why she is so dim when it comes to Michael's increasingly erratic behaviour. 

Michael flops about looking shifty as if he has been secretly pooing in Ophelia's handbag and it doesn't help that Scanlan has an annoying habit of muttering through his teeth for much of the show.

Fans of 'Normal People' should be outraged that Mescal has very little to do apart from being a rather obliging young, brooding Donegal lad who says "no bother" a lot. 

Sean's like a sleepier version of the county's favourite goalkeeping son Packie Bonner or Connell on sedatives.

Walker flounces about like some cartoonish idea of a successful novelist, while Methven tries and fails to channel a little of Mrs Danvers.

Shelley Conn turns up as Roisin's rather annoying campus friend Ruth, Dempsey Novell appears as Michael's mate back in Cambridge and Lloyd Everitt as Richard, the brother of a missing student.

And when McElhinney turns up and his fellow 'Derry Girls' cast member Louisa Harland, who plays a spacy local medium Cloda O'Donnell with a pierced nose, it unfortunately serves as a reminder of just how rich McGee's Channel 4 sitcom 'Derry Girls' is compared to the slim pickings in this humourless, over egged joint effort with her husband.

By the time 'The Deceived' reaches its hysterical, hackneyed conclusion, you feel it was three episodes and three hours and 55 minutes too long.

And when it dangles the prospect of a second series, which it may well get after commanding decent ratings on Channel 5, you may even find yourself screaming "no" at the telly.

We know McGee, in particular, is much better than this.

Maybe, if there is to be a second series, she and her husband could have a Jessica Fletcher style figure turn up after the first minute to spare us all the wasted time and wrap it all up before we have to endure any more murder mystery cliches.

Or better still, she could turn it into a 'Private Life of Sherlock Holmes' style spoof .

If there is a second series, just give us something, anything to avoid a repeat of this dour corpse of a psychological thriller.

That would be the kindest cut of all.

('The Deceived' was broadcast on Channel 5 in the UK from August 3-6, 2020)