This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Television detectives often seem familiar. They are usually male, divorced and drink too much. They miss their kids. Sometimes they are alcoholics, battling to not even take a whiff of the hard stuff. Their ex-wives are attractive — much more so than their dishevelled former husbands — and happily coupled up with a much more stable/handsome/richer new squeeze. 

The tropes are popular, because they work. The challenge for writers is to make the cop in question sufficiently engaging and original within these creative confines. 

Rebus, now showing on BBC iPlayer, is the second outing for Detective Inspector John Rebus and, gosh, is it good. The first four series, based on the best-selling novels by Ian Rankin, were shown on ITV in the 2000s. The playwright Gregory Burke has reimagined Rebus as a younger officer. His stand-out script is leavened with a dry Caledonian wit. 

Richard Rankin (no relation) delivers a first-class performance as the brooding, haunted detective, with a sharp, sardonic sense of humour. The new series ticks all the above boxes, but this is a darker and more violent interpretation. The first episode opens with a useful scene of show not tell. Rebus has just arrested a gangster and is trying to throttle him to death inside an ambulance — until his boss opens the door and stops him. 

every good detective needs a sidekick. Rebus is paired up with Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke, engagingly played by Lucie Shorthouse. Clarke is a liberal middle-class graduate, on the fast-track scheme — never a path to popularity in a police station. Burke draws out the tension and rivalry but gives Clarke plenty of agency. 

There is no sexual tension between them, but then Rebus, already engaged in a passionate, especially deceitful affair, has enough on his plate. The look on his face when he asks Clarke what she studied at university and she replies, “anthropology” is so layered with meaning that he does not need to reply. She soon proves herself as determined and courageous as Rebus himself. 

The key cast is kept small with each character finely drawn. The main storyline revolves around Rebus’s brother Michael, an ex-army veteran who robs a gang of local drug dealers. Michael teams up with other former soldiers for more criminal escapades. But they are quickly out of their depth when they become entangled with Protestant paramilitaries from Belfast and things go very wrong indeed. 

The tension between the brothers and their mutual loyalty brings a powerful energy. Rebus is openly longing for his former wife Rhona, now shacked up with a super-rich new husband, and misses his young daughter Sammy. The series is definitely not a “cosy crime” show. There are frequent explosions of extreme violence, even torture. Gore and brutality aside, the lovely cinematography showcases Edinburgh at its most alluring. The grand Victorian terraces subtly glow in the sunshine or at dusk. When Clarke complains about having to climb yet another set of steep stairs — Edinburgh is a hilly city — Rebus replies, “You’re in the city of John Knox. Life is supposed to be difficult.” And for him, it certainly is. 

the veil, a spy thriller set in syria, Turkey and Paris is a slower-paced drama. The six-part series, showing on Disney+, was created by Stephen Knight, the man behind Peaky Blinders. The creative swerve into the espionage genre is an interesting one but Knight, a master of television drama, once again succeeds. 

Elisabeth Moss, probably best-known for her roles in Mad Men and the The Handmaid’s Tale, plays Imogen Salter, an MI6 officer tasked with bringing a woman called Adilah El-Idrissi out of a Syrian refugee camp. El-Idrissi may also be the Djinn al-Raqqa, a high-ranking ISIS commander. 

Salter’s job is to gain her confidence and trust, so as to extract information about a forthcoming terrorist attack. In an age when so much espionage is conducted electronically, Salter has to revert to good old-fashioned “humint”, gathered using her intuition and people skills. The two women set off through Turkey to Paris, where El-Idrissi’s ten-year-old daughter lives. The long road trip has echoes of Thelma and Louise as the two women bond — or appear to. I was also reminded of The Bureau — Salter is working with an officer in the DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service. The Veil is peppered with action, but Knight is confident enough to make the story character driven. It’s the ever-shifting, subtle interplay between the two women that intrigues the most. 

finally, a brief mention for the welcome arrival of season two of Tokyo Vice on BBC iPlayer. I loved this drama, which is inspired by the real-life memoir of Jake Adelstein, an American reporter in 1990s Tokyo covering the Yakuza, Japan’s mafia. 

The new series continues seamlessly from the first season with the same actors playing the key characters. Ansel Elgort gives another sterling performance as Adelstein, while Rachel Keller plays Samantha, a former Mormon who now runs her own hostess bar, with depth and nuance. Rinko Kikuchi returns as Eimi, Adelstein’s feisty, loyal editor. 

By now Adelstein is no longer a neophyte reporter, struggling with a new language and culture on a Japanese newspaper. He is thoroughly acculturalised, fluent in the language and brave enough to navigate some very dangerous people and places indeed. Season two cranks up the menace and picks up the pace. Here’s the Tokyo that the tourist board don’t want you to see — one drenched in blood and sake