As long as there are real-life crimes, television writers will never run out of miniseries material.
And that’s okay, whenever the miniseries is as well told as A Confession, which becomes available Tuesday on BritBox.
A Confession, which is based on a real-life case in the U.K., aired there last year. It stars Martin Freeman (top), which is always a good beginning, as Detective Superintendent Stephen Fulcher.
Fulcher catches the case of a young woman, Sian O’Callaghan (Florence Howard), who seems to have gone missing. Her live-in boyfriend, Kevin (Charlie Cooper), and her family asked for police help after she went out for an evening and never returned home.
Once the police have exhausted the usual explanations, like Sian having too much to drink and sleeping it off at a girlfriend’s house, they quickly begin fearing the worst.
Meanwhile, in another part of town, Karen Edwards (Imelda Staunton) is also looking for a missing daughter. She’s been looking for years but has never notified the police because she fears her daughter is simply avoiding her by choice.
We see these two parallel stories develop, and we sense before Fulcher or any family members that they are likely to come together, compounding everything. Including a terrible feeling of sadness.
Writer Jeff Pope and director Paul Andrew Williams tell A Confession as a linear story, following all the players as they wade through and try to sort out the unknown.
That includes Fulcher’s police team, with its computer geniuses and ground team. It also includes Sian’s family, led by her prickly mother, Elaine (Siobhan Finneran).
Elaine can be irritating, which works well in the story because most of the other family members are what we would expect in this situation: mostly just anxious and afraid.
Because of the structure, A Confession is easy to follow once we see the connection between the two cases. It’s also well-paced, as we hop around among the various theaters of action.
We get some backstory as we go along, and naturally, several characters are forced to spill secrets, some involving Sian. Pope also drops in a couple of apparent subplots, including one with Fulcher’s police buddy, Ray Hayward (John Thomson).
A Confession breaks no new ground and isn’t heavy on social messaging. It spends its six episodes delving into two things: the nuts and bolts of a police investigation and the suffering of people caught in the purgatory of not knowing what happened to a loved one.
What elevates A Confession above a routine procedural is the way those two elements come together. Fulcher, well played by Freeman, becomes increasingly torn between the protocol of the job and what he sees as another part of his job: making a terrible situation more bearable for the ancillary victims.
A Confession does what limited series like this can do best. It lays out a story, pulls us into it, lets us watch professionals try to unravel it, and with a few unexpected dramatic flourishes, brings it to a conclusion.
The Brits do this sort of thing well. Freeman, Staunton, and Finneran lead a cast that does it well here.