walterico

Where do we start? It's always possible that someone could just bump into the guy who killed her brother - as you do, in a supermarket car park - and then that you get more and more obsessed with messing his life up. He's "done his time" but that's not enough for Cathy... She has to ruin the killer's life.

The story-line requires that working people just take time of of work; Cathy just disappears for an hour or two and her husband accepts it; a phone gets stolen, with no induction how. The dialogue doesn't flow, the characters are two-dimensional and uninteresting. The story gets more and more ridiculous and the demands on the poor cast become overwhelming: at times, you can read it in the actors' eyes: "How did I get involved in this?" Fortunately, there are only four episodes to endure, although I suspect they planned for six and decided to cut and run after four.

After about the first episode, you start wondering: how did Annette Bening and Sam Neil get involved with this ... thing? The script was surely written by AI, being an amalgam of the hundreds of other similar series. The characters likewise draw from the cliché cupboard: the long-haired failure son, the goofy touchy-feely daughter, the gay girl with the unfaithful partner, the successful one who's actually a nobody. They wander around looking for their mum like something like the Scooby-Doos, without another care in the world. Dad ( Sam Neil) is the proverbial grumpy and potentially abusive paterfamilias, who just smiles when he knocks out the front teeth of his tennis opponent.

Thank goodness for Georgia Flood, whose mysterious character - Savannah - exposes the terrible truth about the conflicts within this seemingly perfect family.

One of those shows where you hover between "Surely it couldn't have happened like that!" and "How on earth can people be so incompetent?" It's a true story, though, and from what we know of other cases, the failings of the police and the demands of the criminal justice system damage far too many victims - which was Delia case.

Anne Maxwell Martin plays Delia with an extraordinary intensity, rarely making it easy to like her: she is irrascible, mercurial and unpredictable.

Shaun Evans is truly scary, switching from the quiet and self-effacing shy man Deliameets in a pub, to a furious and violent narcissist with a dark, dark past.

A very well-written, cleverly-paced and carefully directed short series.