Having appeared as the uxoricidal Malcolm Webster in ITV’s The Widower earlier this year, he becomes surely one of the few actors to have played a serial killer (or, as DS Stone would pedantically insist, “multiple murderer”) and a detective in successive TV projects. This is an extreme instance of the increasing problem in TV crime fiction of telling the murder cops and the murderers apart – and Shearsmith is perfectly cast to continue this narrative trend. The Bridge’s Saga Norén, played by Sofia Helin. Two of the most successful recent TV crime series – Sherlock and The Bridge – involve detectives who lack emotional empathy: Saga Norén, played by Sofia Helin in the Swedish-Danish co-production, is intuitive but rude, while Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s investigator seems to have a far more psychiatrically precise isolationism and obsessive compulsion than he had in the original stories.Īnd now, perhaps as a result of the obsessive list-making of previous hits to which TV executives can be prone, comes Chasing Shadows (tonight, 9pm, ITV), in which Reece Shearsmith is DS Sean Stone, a detective who, kicked out of the murder squad for foolishly telling the truth at a press conference, is transferred to work with a missing persons charity, identifying the vanished who are most at risk of being killed, where he ignores colleagues, obsessionally categorises case-files and, when asked whether he has any idea how the parents of a possible murder victim must be feeling, bluntly replies: “No.” The daddy of the genre, Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, remains a long-running stage hit, while a protagonist with something like Asperger’s features in another best-selling book, Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project. T o the presumable bemusement of those affected by the condition, the autism spectrum has become a fashionable fictional accessory.

Hero 3 shadow of death full