Six Four, ITVX review: surprise, surprise – another crime thriller about a missing girl

There are two schools of storytelling. First is the show and tell kind: this happens, and then that happens, and we all follow what’s going on. Then there is the kind we get in the opening episode of Six Four, the latest crime series from ITVX.

It’s all about withholding information. Why does a police officer run away from her husband, a fellow detective, in the opening minutes? Why does she check into a hotel and start calling herself by another name? Who is the man she meets in a pub? Do we care enough to watch another episode in order to find out?

The answer to the last question is probably: no, not really. The series is aiming for bleak but it comes across as dreary. Kevin McKidd is reliably good as the lead character, Chris O’Neill, and any TV appearance by the mighty James Cosmo is welcome. But the plot is only worth a shrug: a missing girl, her disappearance linked to the case of another missing girl. There are so many crime thrillers about missing girls. With thumping inevitability, there is a scene in which a young woman is abducted by a man who grabs her from behind and clamps his hand across her mouth to muffle her screams – the go-to scene for lazy (male) writers and directors.

Chris and his estranged wife, Michelle (Vinette Robinson), are the parents of missing girl #1. Both broken by her disappearance, we see them summoned in the opening scene to identify a body which, thankfully, does not turn out to be her. Chris rings his daughter’s phone even though it’s there, in front of him, in the bedroom she never came back to, just so he can hear her voice again.

He still has a job to be getting on with, though. He’s a detective constable, working on lowly cases, while his brother is a high flyer in the same force. Then Chris learns that his brother may have been involved in covering up the kidnap of missing girl #2. Cosmo plays the girl’s anguished father, who claimed she was murdered because he knew about the mysterious “Six Four”. There is a slick SNP politician who is involved in this somehow and (topical!) is making a leadership bid.

The show has been adapted from an acclaimed novel by Hideo Yokoyama, moving the action from Japan to Scotland. It makes decent use of the location but the whole thing is dragged down by the character of Michelle. Robinson is a fine actress – see her performance in Boiling Point – but she’s saddled here with a thankless role which requires her to give a one-note performance of tearful misery. After four episodes of this, you may feel the same.