Gracepoint: Episode 5

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David Tennant and Anna Gunn in FOX Television’s “Gracepoint”

We said we’d check back with this show once it started diverging from the original Broadchurch series it’s based on, and while the story beats are all largely still the same, the feel of the show is evolving into something slightly unlike the original.

We should say that whether or not Gracepoint is different enough from Broadchurch isn’t really a valid criterion for judging it in a lot of ways. A piece should be able to stand on its own and be received on its own without comparisons.Regardless of whatever minor shifts are made in acting or stylistic choices, or even if the narrative diverges, Gracepoint was always going to be nearly indistinguishable from Broadchurch because there are only so many ways you can tell the tale of a child murder in a small town where everyone has secrets and everyone is a suspect. Certain stylistic choices have made it impossible to separate the two shows, however; not least of which is casting the same lead actor to play the only slightly differing versions of the same character in both shows. In a lot of ways, the creators really shot themselves in the foot with the casting of David Tennant. No matter how good he may be in the role, it’s impossible for anyone who’s seen Broadchurch to not experience this odd form of deja vu, where events repeat, but with slightly different people each time. Defenders, including Tennant himself, have likened it to performing the same play to different audiences, an analogy that never quite worked for us because of the change of setting and renaming of all the characters.

No, the point isn’t to critique the series for the ways in which it replicates the series that inspired it. The point is to look at the choices made (as to what to change and what not to change) and determine if they work for the series. Whether you’ve seen Broadchurch or not, we think most people would agree that the relationship between the two detectives investigating the murder at the heart of the story is central to its success. If those two people don’t click, you don’t have much of a story. This, more than anything else, is where Gracepoint fails. Anna Gunn’s performance as Ellie is so vastly different from Olivia Colman’s BAFTA-winning take that we spent the first several episodes deciding this failure was all her fault. And while it’s true she’s making some odd choices, not the least of which is the extremely mannered way she’s portraying her character, there’s enough blame to go around on this one. Ellie is remarkably inconsistent as a character. We’re meant to see her as warm and emotional when it comes to dealing with people on her job, but she seems strangely disconnected from her marriage and family. There are times when she’s meant to come across inflexible and rigid, but we’re also supposed to accept that she’s an occasionally sloppy and inexperienced detective. It’s almost impossible to get a handle on her and she’s supposed to be the audience surrogate, for the most part.

In addition, and it pains us to say this, David Tennant simply cannot portray an American believably. He doesn’t talk like one; he doesn’t act like one; he doesn’t even look like one. If we may lapse into some Broadchurch comparisons, his character in the original was an outsider to the town, which was evidenced every time he opened his mouth and his Scottish accent came rolling out. It was an integral part of his interactions with the townspeople. The floppy boy-band hair, black trench and unshaven face all combined to give that very British sense of outsiderhood. They costumed him exactly the same way for Gracepoint, but took away any sort of distinguishing accent to peg him as an outsider. Instead, he’s just some dude who happens to talk in a really clipped manner and hit his Rs too hard. In other words, he looks and even sometimes acts like an outsider, but everyone’s pretending he doesn’t. It’s a very weird take on the character, and like Ellie, it tends to keep a wall up between the character and the actor. They should have just let him play a Scotsman again, or at least an Englishman. He wouldn’t seem so ill-at-ease in the role, the characters would all have reason to treat him like a weirdo, and the audience wouldn’t have that uneasy feeling that happens when a character is miscast or poorly conceived.

Unsurprisingly, because the two leads are so problematic, they have absolutely no chemistry with each other at all. And we’re just going to say it: the original leads of Broadchurch were so fascinating because he looked like an aging drunken pop star and she looked like a frumpy housefrau.There was an inherent tension between the two of them based on the differences in their looks – and there was absolutely zero sexual tension because of it. Anna Gunn is a statuesque blonde with great bone structure, which makes all of her interactions with Tennant vastly different in tone. We’re now watching two tall, thin cops with great hair and great bone structure bicker. It doesn’t feel remotely the same. It just feels generic.

We will say, in all fairness, the rest of the cast is doing good, if not necessarily great work. And it took us a while to come around on the setting, but the show has done a great job of treating the town like a walled-off compound full of secrets. There’s a sense of claustrophobia that permeates the series. Count the number of ceilings you see in scenes, giving you that closed-in, oppressed feeling.  The writing is tight and the directing is low-key enough for consistency, but doesn’t get ambitious enough. We don’t hold out much hope that the mystery will resolve well. Even the original had a problematic ending. What bothers us is the idea that they’ve changed the killer without changing the story significantly, which means the question of who killed Danny doesn’t even matter to the story that much if you can just insert any random character into the Clue envelope.

It’s not a bad small-town murder mystery, if you’re coming to it clean. It does nothing to distinguish itself from a whole bunch of other ones, though. That’s where the disappointment comes in. We wouldn’t expect this to be exactly like or too different from the original. We just expected smart changes to be made for good reasons in order to tailor the show to an American setting. So far, we’re not getting that. If it didn’t have the Broadchurch parentage, we’d probably feel no need to watch or write about it.

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