The Bay: Another Stylish, Moody British Crime Drama... Worth Your Time (TV show REVIEW)

For anyone who’s been jonesing for a Broadchurch replacement since that series ended back in 2017 (and honestly, who *hasn’t* been missing it?!), I’d urge a look at the six-episode season of The Bay (available to stream via Amazon Prime channel BritBox).

_______________ 

At first, The Bay feels like it’s shaping up to be a standard missing-persons story, when a pair of teens—twins Dylan and Holly Meredith—vanish from a youth center in the coastal town of Morecambe, Lancashire. 

Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong, a Family Liaison Officer, is assigned the case, and given a still-wet-behind-the-ears Detective Constable, Ahmed Kharim, to shadow her. Begrudgingly, Lisa drags Med along with her to question the twins' family, where they're greeted with fear and no small amount of hostility by the extended Meredith clan: pregnant stay-at-home mom Jess, trawler stepdad Sean, two younger children, as well as Jess’s loud-mouthed mother and shifty younger brother, who works with Sean on the boat.

There’s a pretty big kicker, though (which, since we learn it during the first ten minutes of the first episode, isn’t a spoiler): the previous night, when Lisa ended her day off out on the town with her gal pals, doing some barhopping and drunken karaoke-ing, her evening concluded in a quick, back-alley shag with a guy she met at the last bar… a guy who turns out to be none other than stepdad Sean (with whom, unsurprisingly, she hadn’t gotten around to swapping names). 

Right away, we (the viewers) have questions. What kind of lout is Sean Meredith, that he’d be picking up strange women while his (very) pregnant wife sits at home, taking care of the family? And, why doesn’t Lisa immediately head back to the station and recuse herself from this case, since there’s so clearly a conflict of interest?

Turns out there’s much we don’t know about Sean—or about the rest of the family—all of which needs to play out over the remaining five episodes. As for Lisa’s decision, though, I think it probably boils down to embarrassment, which is easy enough to understand; who’d be keen on telling their new underling or their boss they’d recently spent ten minutes having frantic sex against a brick wall in a dingy alley with the victims’ parent? (Yeah, not so much.)

Besides a gradual unveiling of the many secrets in the Meredith household—and, obviously, finding out where the missing twins are—a couple of additional subplots go on under Lisa’s roof, with her own teenage children: Abbie, the 15-going-on-20-year-old, who finds herself in way over her head when she nurses a broken heart with an older guy; and Rob, who yearns to break out of the good-son mold, and does so by taking part in a dangerous and cruel online game.

All those threads--and more--are eventually resolved, giving us a pretty satisfactory payoff. 

_______________

Admittedly, The Bay doesn’t quite fill the hole left by Broadchurch (the absence of David Tennant and Olivia Colman pretty much assures that)… but the tone and the twisting nature of both the main plot and all the smaller subplots also aren’t that far off. The first season of The Bay delivers a riveting, well-told tale, and Morven Christie (among others) gives a nuanced, believable performance of a real person trying to balance the demands of job, home life, and some sort of personal life. 

With any luck, we’ll get a second season, to find out what happens next.

~GlamKitty