From the creators of The Missing. The premise to this is great.
True Detective, Luther, The Bridge, Dexter, The Fall, Hannibal, The Killing, Top of the Lake.
There’s no denying that we’re all utterly gripped by murder mysteries, but the BBC’s newest serial killer show, Rellik, aims to flip the genre on its head.
To make things even better, the show is the latest feature from the creators of one of the best shows to air on the BBC in recent memory, The Missing.
Rellik (that’s killer spelt backwards) aims to answer a very complex question, what are the events that form a person into the human being they will become – killer or cop?
The events start at the very end because we get to see the ‘suspected’ killer as they’re caught. The show then moves backwards in time to the very beginning, but everything with this murder isn’t as it seems.
The search for the killer provides the main narrative, but the damaged and disfigured Met detective, Gabriel Markham (Richard Dormer from Game of Thrones, Fortitude) is at the centre of the piece.
The way in which Gabriel’s professional and private life unravel as the clock ticks back shows us a damaged and compromised cop who, like the best hunters, is willing to go to the depths of his humanity in order to solve this mystery.
What drives Gabriel’s obsessive hunt for this serial killer? Well, the killer has already left his mark on Gabriel, both physically and mentally. We’re told by the creators that Gabriel “was himself a victim of an acid attack, a victim of the killer our cops are chasing in the series.”
Joining Gabriel on this twisting and dark pursuit is his partner Elaine, played by Jodi Balfour (The Crown, Bomb Girls).
If you’ve seen The Missing then you’ll know that its creators, Harry and Jack Williams, are incredibly talented at crafting superb drama that pushes the boundaries.
Speaking about their new show, they said: “We actually started writing Rellik while we were filming and editing The Missing series 1. Playing with story and structure and trying to find new ways to tell stories is something we’re fascinated by so it started there. But we didn’t want it to be a technical exercise so we had to ask ourselves why you’d tell a story that way. It became clear quite quickly that it was all about motive. That things happen for a reason and those reasons lie in the past. So – what happens when you start at the end and find your way back to the past sounded like an interesting thing to explore..”
Rellik airs on BBC 1 on 11th September.
