Collateral - BBC Four.

Happened upon this last night whilst trying to find out how to spell the word Collateral!

Lucy Mangan calls it  "lucid meditation on contemporary Britain", and bemoaned the fact that it started out as CSI. For my part, I kind of like the fact that it started out as CSI and then drifted into a political drama, which gradually became less and less interesting. 

You start with a nice twisty mystery with a strong desire line, "will they catch the killer?", only for that to dissolve quite quickly once the killer is revealed; then we're left with why they were killed and then after that's explained, and all the players are revealed at the beginning of episode 3, I really don't care anymore. 

Carey Mulligan isn't in the middle of episode 3, presumably because she has very little to do. Her character is also perhaps not knotty enough to be a decent detective. 

The narrative drive drops so quickly that Gentiana started to bemoan how complicated it was and found it difficult to follow.  

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