Yahoo News ITV's The Bay is a crime drama like Broadchurch but with a major twist
ITV's six-part crime drama The Bay has already drawn comparisons to Chris Chibnall's award-winning Broadchurch with its idyllic beach backdrop hosting a gruesome discovery, and a fraught family at the centre.
The series follows Morven Christie's Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong – also acting as a Family Liaison Officer – investigating two missing teenage twins. But she soon discovers she has a horrifying connection to the case as she attends to the distressed mother and father.
Set in the unique coastal town of Morecambe Bay, and among a close-knit community, Lisa tries to bury her regret and get justice for frightened mother Jess (played by This is England's Chanel Cresswell) and her seemingly untrustworthy husband Sean (Troy's Jonas Armstrong).
While juggling a demanding and challenging work-life, Lisa is also dealing with a troubled teenage daughter Abbie (Imogen King), and a sullen and simmering teenage son (Louis Greatorex), who both may know more about the missing fraternal twins than they are letting on.
Lisa's link to the case also threatens to compromise the investigation, her job and her personal life, as the series – from award-winning writer and playwright Daragh Carville – spans genres, moulding a crime thriller and police procedural into a family drama.
Lisa's fallibility and complex nature is what drew Christie to the role, telling Digital Spy and others at a screening of the first episode: "It's quite arresting being introduced to the leading character while she's making dramatic mistakes.
"She has to unpick things, unravel things to cover up the things she's done. Alongside that, she's really good at this job, but I also found her believable. A lot of the time with leading characters there's a legend created around them in the script that [makes them] not that believable as human beings, and I just bought this person. This is someone I believe as being real."
The Ordeal By Innocence star also said it was refreshing that the series represented working-class families, which rarely dominate TV dramas.
"I think what I loved about the script is that it wasn't about middle-class people, that this was about a different community that we weren't seeing on TV all of the time," Christie continued. "And she as a character has grown up in that community and it means a lot to her and the people mean a lot to her."
Alluding to Lisa's mistake, Christie added: "It's about a real human being that messed up and gets some things really right and some things really wrong and is trying to make it better, while also trying to hide what she's got wrong and I think that's a very human story.
"This whole thing being parallel between Jess and Lisa, and how similar their lives could have been and that appealed to me. It was a believable world about people I recognised."
The Bay airs on ITV soon.
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