Brighton based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is a hard-working police officer who has given his life to the job, but his career is currently at rock bottom. He’s fixated by the disappearance of his beloved wife, Sandy, and running enquiries into long forgotten cold cases with little prospect of success. Following another reprimand for his unorthodox police methods, Grace is walking a career tightrope and risks being moved from the job he loves most.
I started watching this cop show under the misapprehension that Simms, who plays Roy Grace here, is the same actor who is a cop on the excellent Shetland. But no, there is a resemblance but they are different actors. (So how odd that this character’s wife is named Sandy, which is the cop’s name in Shetland.)
So anyway, I like this show. The plots, though sometimes darker, are also more complex than other police shows. That is perhaps due to the fact that unlike other shows like it that stray from the exact source material plots, every episode of Grace appears to be bas3d on one of the novels.
The writing is pretty strong. Oddly, they strayed a bit after the first series of his dealing with a psychic and visited that angle no more. My only gripe with the writing has to do with the ongoing subplot of Roy Grace’s long-lost wife, and this may be a bit of a spoiler, it seems the closed Roy gets to a romantic relationship building up, the more active the storyline about the presumed-dead wife becomes. It just feels predictable, like lazy plotting and writing to me. But the show is still well-worth watching.
