Blood, episode 1 review: Adrian Dunbar's Irish whodunit makes a beguiling return
Mother of God! I didn’t float up the Lagan in a bubble! Brooding Irish family drama Blood (Channel 5) was back and Line of Duty favourite Adrian Dunbar launched into full Superintendent Ted Hastings mode, doggedly sniffing out wrongdoing. He even slipped in a stern warning of “Watch your mouth, fella” to appease those missing police anti-corruption unit AC-12.
However, Blood is very much its own beast and a mighty fine beast too. The 2018 debut series of this twisting domestic whodunit was a hit in Ireland before making its way onto British TV through word-of-mouth buzz. Channel 5’s steadily improving drama slate tends to get unjustly overlooked ratings-wise and this was no different, although it was critically lauded and hailed as the channel’s “first piece of prestige TV”. It’s still available on My5 and I’d heartily recommend catching up.
Creator Sophie Petzal’s taut, knotty scripts unfurled their mysteries slowly, with long-buried secrets, betrayal, denial and family dysfunction bubbling up at every turn. Its strong cast was led by two towering performances from Dunbar as seemingly genial local GP Jim Hogan and Unforgotten’s Carolina Main as his loose cannon daughter Cat, who suspected Jim had murdered her mother and set out to prove it.
The resulting psychological thriller was eerie, engrossing and packed a poignant punch. It was like a western face-off as father and daughter played mind games until a satisfying finale (all too rare nowadays) delivered searing emotion as well as solutions.
Now the Hogan clan were back for a second series, promising more dark deeds amid the handsome County Meath countryside. This time the focus shifted away from Cat, who’d returned to Dublin (for now, anyway), and onto eldest daughter Fiona (the quietly superb Gráinne Keenan, suffering etched on her face).
Disgraced patriarch Jim returned home after a year abroad – acquitted over his wife’s death but stripped of his medical licence – to find Fiona ailing with motor neurone disease, the same affliction her mother had suffered, and relations fraught with her resentful husband Paul (Ian Lloyd Anderson). Jim’s efforts to make amends with his fractured family seemed only to stir up more trouble. “Not everything can be fixed,” Fiona warned him.
This reviewer’s namesake, Michael Hogan (Diarmuid Noyes), thought his father should be in jail and hadn’t spoken to him for a year. Since we last met him, slobbish Michael had smartened up and become an estate agent. Talk about bringing our name into disrepute.
Things became even trickier when Jim turned vigilante and stumbled upon shady goings-on at the farm where Paul worked. Were the dodgy gangster types hanging around the barn into drug dealing, extortion or something even worse? Their nefarious activities were almost certainly connected to what happened next, as Fiona’s car veered off the road and crashed into a canal.
There was a viscerally claustrophobic scene as she struggled to escape from the submerged vehicle. While her family rallied around her in hospital, Detective Dez Breen (Sean Duggan) arrived with news of a disturbing discovery: Paul’s body had been found in the car boot. Fiona was promptly arrested on suspicion of murdering her husband.
This slow-burning opener unfolded over dual timelines, building an oppressive atmosphere of foreboding. The circumstances that led to Fiona’s crash and Paul’s death promise to be a tangled web. Pleasingly for those of us eager for answers, the six-parter is stripped across this week’s schedules, culminating in a climactic double bill on Friday.
It wasn’t all death and darkness, mind you. Petzal’s writing perfectly captured the intimate nuances of family life. There were wry asides and in-jokey shorthand between the Hogans. The scenes with Fiona’s nosy, niggling mother-in-law Marjorie (Bernadette McKenna) recalled a sinister Mrs Doyle from Father Ted.
The denouement of series one didn’t necessarily demand a follow-up but in TV nowadays, success inevitably leads to a recommission. This second run looks likely to broaden Blood’s scope from one family to three, from domestic thriller to pulpy crime mystery. Thankfully, it was still well plotted, meatily performed and highly beguiling.
Dramas set in small-town Ireland are having something of a moment, with the BBC’s Sligo-based Sally Rooney adaptation Normal People also receiving rave notices. Who needs Nordic noir when there’s Celtic cool?
