Down Cemetery Road

 

Down Cemetery Road

I so wanted to love this: a thriller TV series with Emma Thompson as lead? You betcha. Spoiler alert: I found it frustrating as hell. And I know why. It's the same reason I didn't go beyond Season 1 of Slow Horses, not so incidentally adapted from a novel by the same author. Here's the core problem: I'm all good with government in thrillers being evil bastards (Ministry of Defense in this case, MI6 in the case of Slow Horses) but my suspension of disbelief is a little harder to keep up when they are utterly incompetent evil bastards, like in both of these series. Down Cemetery Road is held up by the really good acting of Thompson and Ruth Wilson and especially the magnetic presence of Fehinti Balogun who, I'm pretty sure, we'll see pop up in many more UK productions. But ultimately, saying it's not very good is charitable. Besides the hard to take in premise, it's riddled with plot holes and convenient strokes of luck. We would not have gotten to the end if the acting hadn't been as good as it is.