DVD Review: Shetland

I normally live by the 'you should always read the book first' rule. Let’s face it, there's nothing quite like immersing yourself in the world of a book. TV adaptations often lack much of the finer detail and in some cases leave gaping great holes in a good plot. With Shetland I decided to take a punt and ignore my own advice. I was not disappointed.

Series one is based on four of the award-winning crime novels by Ann Cleeves: Dead Water, Raven Black, Red Bones and Blue Lightening. They are set unsurprisingly in the Shetland Islands which lie between the Orkney Islands and Norway. It’s a wild, untamed and lonely sort of place and the landscape is like a character in its own right; stern, unforgiving and incredibly beautiful.

The storylines involve those living in the small tight-knit communities of the islands, the sorts of places where everyone knows your history and your business. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine the deep, dark secrets that could lurk beneath the surface of a place where people live in this sort of communal isolation.

Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (played by Douglas Henshall) has returned to the Shetlands, following the death of his wife, to bring up his teenage daughter. He knows the place and its people. The whodunit plots that he and his team carefully unravel are well thought out, the culprit never quite who you expect. They are in the "polite murder" genre that focuses more on the characters’ emotional motivations than on gratuitous action or scientific wizardry.

Interestingly, when reading some reviews from the Shetland Times, I discovered that many of the locals were a bit miffed with the series. The accents were all wrong, the ferries impossibly well-timed and apparently you cannot see the coast of Norway on a good day as suggested. Despite this quiet local outrage I would still rate the series highly. It’s smart, moving and has a unique sense of place. Perhaps it helps being halfway around the world and ignorant to the flaws. It certainly made me want to read the rest of Ann Cleeves’ novels before the next series comes out - I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Fiona Knudson  |  Lending Services Supervisor