Several members of the "Slow Horses" creative team have adapted another Mick Herron novel, about the detective Zoë Boehm. Emma Thompson plays Zoë, and Ruth Wilson portrays the book's other heroine, Sarha Tifford, in the "Down Cemetery Road" miniseries. And since these are two of my favorite currently working UK actors, there was no way that I was going to miss this.
A fiery explosion in a suburban neighborhood interrupts the dinner party that Sarah and her husband Mark (Tom Riley) are having a few streets away. Sarah becomes suspicious when one of the victims, a little girl, appears to disappear from media coverage and is refused all visitors at the hospital. She tries to investigate herself, eventually recruiting a private detective named Joe Silverman (Adam Godley), who is married to the much more skeptical investigator, Zoë Boehm (Thompson). Meanwhile, we learn that the explosion was an unauthorized action by people working for the Ministry of Defense. We follow a verbally abusive official known only as "C" (Darren Boyd), and his hapless underling Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), as they try to cover up what happened. There are various other figures in play, including dangerous men played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Pip Torrens, and Fehinti Balogun, whose motives are unknown.
The bumbling mismanagement of the Ministry of Defense characters are what are the most reminiscent of "Slow Horses," and they provide a nice counterpoint to the fairly typical mystery and conspiracy plots being unravelled by Sarah, and later Zoë. Ruth Wilson is in the fairly thankless role of an ordinary person whose obsession puts her into an extraordinary situation, and a lot hinges on her retaining the audience's sympathies while making foolhardy decisions left and right. Wilson's fine, but it often feels like a questionable use of her talents. Emma Thompson as Zoë is more fun, because she gets to rock a leather jacket and a cool haircut, and drop a few antisocial one-liners here and there. The show is at its most successful when the characters are the most in the dark, and the situation seems to be out of everyone's control. The best twists are the ones that are deployed the earliest, and Zoë gets a paltry amount of screen time despite easily being the most interesting character. Okay, the second-most interesting character after one of the villains, but that's a spoiler.
Once we actually get a better picture of what's going on, the story gets bogged down in near-misses and chance encounters, with the characters travelling to a Scottish island for a big, final confrontation. At eight episodes, the series doesn't feel too long, exactly, but the pacing could be improved. There are a wealth of promising minor characters who all needed a little more screentime, and the ending is very abrupt. I'm sure I'm not the only one who could have used another episode just to tie up loose ends and confirm that Zoë's hacker friend Wayne (Joshua James) is all right. Both of the heroines are going to have a rough time picking up the pieces of their lives that have been disrupted by the investigation, and there are a lot of the more personal questions that are left unaddressed. These are not the answers I'd be demanding of your usual mystery series, but they're ones that the show posed and that I was left waiting for. Since there are three other Zoë Boehm novels, this could be covered in a sequel series, but that's never a guarantee these days.
If this is your genre, "Down Cemetery Road" is worth watching, but it's not a series that I'd prioritize over the new "Department Q," or "The Lowdown," or any of the better mystery series that have come out recently. I wouldn't mind seeing Emma Thompson in another one of these though, but I hope she's actually the main character next time.
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