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Detective dives into the deep and meaningful

Suranne Jones as detective Amy Silva in “Vigil”

Streaming columnist NICK OVERALL goes beneath the waves and comes up with a real thriller. 

MURDER mysteries are often pretty good at instilling feelings of claustrophobia, but the new BBC series “Vigil”, set inside the confines of a submarine kilometres under the ocean, takes things to some Agatha Christie levels of genius in tension building.

Nick Overall.

When an officer aboard ballistic missile submarine HMS Vigil is mysteriously found dead, a Scottish and stoic detective named Amy Silva is sent beneath the waves to investigate.

But the stakes here are much higher than the standard whodunit affair.

With fingers hovering above the launch button for weapons of mass destruction, the truth behind the murder aboard holds all the more intriguing implications and charges the already thin air with an added layer of political tension.

“Vigil” can be streamed on Binge and is packed into six episodes that make great use of the limited-series format – meaning the entire story from beginning to end is contained to one season.

Limited series, also often touted as “mini series” or “event series”, aren’t quite as coveted as their lengthy television cousins whose stories are spread out over multiple seasons, but the format has certainly taken on its own pop culture gravitas in the last decade.

Take “The Queen’s Gambit”, a smash-hit for Netflix that made chess cool again thanks to Anya Taylor-Joy playing a young prodigy set on becoming the world’s greatest player, all set amongst a tense Cold War backdrop to top it off.

The mini series format has also become prime real estate for the adaptation of popular crime novels.

Take “The Undoing”, where Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant play a couple cast into the spotlight of a chilling mystery, or the Amy Adams-led “Sharp Objects”, about a reporter who unlocks a Pandora’s Box of psychological demons when she returns to her hometown to cover a murder, both of which can be found on Binge.

These are just two examples of how mini-series now have the budget, the stars and the promotional power to be “cinematic” events in and of themselves.

Netflix has another one just released called “Midnight Mass”, the story of a small, rural town that begins to experience strange and supernatural events after the arrival of a charismatic priest.

It’s another horror hit from the mind of Mike Flanagan, who gave Netflix subscribers 2018’s hugely popular “The Haunting of Hill House”. It would seem that with the success of this new series the director won’t be slowing down on the scares anytime soon.

But, while demons stalking a small town may be creepy, it’s got nothing on the terror to be found in “Chernobyl”, a five-part mini series on Binge telling the true story of a nuclear reactor explosion that devastated Ukraine in 1986.

So abstractly frightening were the events of “Chernobyl” that they feel like something from another world.

The explosion, estimated to have the force of around 300 tonnes of TNT, caused pieces of graphite to be ejected from the reactor core and land on the roof of the plant, meaning thousands of liquidators were ordered to clear the deadly shards by hand. 

Each person could take no longer than 90 seconds to remove their piece, for exposure to the radiation for any longer could cause death.

It’s just one of the events of the disaster that the “Chernobyl” mini-series recreates in hauntingly realistic detail.

Black rain fell from the sky. Animals had to be culled out of fears of spreading radiation they had been imbued with. Helicopters dropped more than 5000 tonnes of sand, lead and clay on the plant to put out fires still burning days after the explosion.

It truly is an example of truth being stranger, and scarier, than fiction and the five episodes give enough time to deeply explore the events that a two or three hour run-time of a stand-alone movie just couldn’t achieve.

“Chernobyl” may be the best use of the limited series format to date and with the battle for talent between streaming platforms continuing to heat up, one can only hope for more quality of this calibre to come.

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Ian Meikle, editor

Nick Overall

Nick Overall

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