Usually, the return of Killing Eve would be pretty much guaranteed to provide the most unconventional, rule-busting TV programme of the week — where genres are mixed so thoroughly as to create a whole new one. This week, though, there were two new series that were even harder to classify.
One was ITV’s Wild Bill: a show so bonkers that the fact it stars Rob Lowe as the recently appointed chief constable of East Lincolnshire mightn’t be the weirdest thing about it. When the resolutely American Bill Hixon (Lowe) first arrived in Boston, Lincs, it looked as if we’d be in for a standard fish-out-of-water comedy, with the traditional differences between Brits and Yanks played for knockabout laughs. And for much of the opening episode we were. Bill tried his unavailing best to do irony. He failed to understand the words ‘marmite’ and ‘marmalade’. He gave a gung-ho address to a bunch of scruffy British coppers who seemed nearly as dumbfounded by Lowe’s presence as we were.
Yet, interspersed with this was the tragic story of a teenage girl who’d been beheaded ten years before, and of her grieving, guilt-ridden mother. Or at least her intermittently grieving, guilt-ridden mother — because, when the script required it, the woman turned positively jolly, scoffing pizza and chortling at the telly as she did a spot of babysitting for Hixon’s own daughter.
Nor is Hixon one of those chief constables (like, for example, all of them in real life) who leave the crime-solving to their detectives. On Wednesday he led the sleuthing himself, forming an improbable partnership with a young policewoman called Muriel, whose salt-of-the-earth, farming-background ways were constantly emphasised — especially by her.
And that was just for starters. Other elements included a bona fide Russian gangster, the traditional comedy pathologist, some slightly schmaltzy daddy-daughter issues and a gritty portrayal of the effects of Brexit in a Leave-voting town with lots of Eastern European immigrants.
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