At a time when U.S. television has been taking a small breather, Acorn steps in with new episodes of the breezy police procedural London Kills.
Season 2, which consists of five episodes, becomes available Monday on the streaming service and picks up where the first season left off.
That doesn’t present any complicated continuity challenge. All the viewer really needs to know is that the wife of London Detective Inspector David Bradford (Hugo Speer, top) mysteriously disappeared before the show began and no one, including Bradford, has been able to find her.
That mystery deepens as Season 2 rolls in, and some of the mystery involves following the trail of a few small hints that were casually dropped in Season 1. Those sniffing around primarily include Bradford’s two main deputies, Detective Sgt. Vivienne Cole (Sharon Small, left) and Detective Constable Rob Brady (Bailey Patrick, top).
Still, the wife thing is not the focus of London Kills. It’s more like an interesting backdrop, making it a rather common add-on for a cop show. In terms of screen time, these three and their delightful Trainee Detective Billie Fitzgerald (Tori Allen-Martin) spend most of each episode solving regular old murder cases.
The first episode revolves around the death of a young man, Freddy, who was driving his rental housemates crazy because he was bipolar and sometimes off his meds.
They tried to find ways to make him leave, coming off in the process as a rather cruel lot. So when his body turns up in a basement, largely decomposed, the police have no shortage of suspects or potential motives.
As in most good police procedurals, it takes almost the entire hour to figure out those motives, tackle them one by one and finally, by process of elimination, discern what really did happen.
It’s a bit of a treat for fans of British drama that the victim’s sister Karen is played by Sophie McShera, who will be back in September as the kitchen maid Daisy in the Downton Abbey movie.
While London Kills deals with some gruesome crimes as the new season progresses, it sticks to international rules of mainstream police procedurals. The language and action never become too graphic, and the story moves along at a brisk clip.
Speer, nominally the central character, often underplays Bradford, a nice touch that makes the mystery of his wife’s disappearance more intriguing.
Small’s Cole wears her ambition on her sleeve without letting it turn her into a schemer we don’t trust.
It’s a good bet for a couple of summer evenings.