Must Watch reviews ‘The Jetty’

Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.

This week, Hayley Campbell and Scott Bryan join Gethin Jones to review ‘The Jetty’.

The Jetty is a four-part crime drama starring Jenna Coleman.

Detective Manning (played by Coleman) investigates a fire in a holiday home in a Lancashire lakeside town and whether or not it connects to an old missing person case, which potentially involves a man in his 20s who had relationships with underage girls.

Her discoveries lead to her questioning her own past, and the gap between her late husband when they first met.

Gethin: “Hayley, is it a Must Watch?”

Hayley: “Well, I want to say: sort of. It’s a bit lightweight and jokey to start of with and it’s full of cliches and the kind of police work – I sound very judgemental now – but it’s full of the kind of police work that you get from watching police shows, rather than doing any further research into what detectives do other than walking around in big coats.

“It feels a bit more ITV than BBC sometimes and it’s slow to get to the point and there’s a true crime podcast character that is quite cringey.

“But it eventually becomes a bigger story about consent and the blurry lines between consent and abuse when there’s a big age gap.

"I thought it was interesting that it ends up being a detective interrogating her own life and what she believed was true at the same time as investigating someone else’s possible abuse of young girls.”

Hayley: “I’m sitting on the fence because it’s not amazing. I think they’re trying to do a post MeToo reframing of sexual politics by having that whole reckoning happen in one person, who has to mentally reconfigure her entire life.

“But it doesn’t wholly work because the cliches kind of detract from anything deeper they are trying to achieve. But if you fancy watching a silly thriller with the psychic in it then I’ve got one for you, it’s called The Jetty.

"Don’t expect it to be deeper than that, but they are trying quite desperately to make it deeper than that.”

Scott: “I don’t think this is a Must Watch either, however, I do think there are many good points in it. I am more positive than Hayley.

“I think Jenna Coleman is fantastic, I think she has got real depth of character, you’re trying to figure her out, you’re seeing her trying to figure herself out during the course of this overall series.

“I think also it’s the themes that it manages to look into, surrounding misogyny, peer pressure, coercion … is great too. It feels considered and well handled.

“The performances are great, the look of it is great, the cinematography, but where it falls down, I agree with Hayley it’s the cliches.“

Scott: “I find it miraculous that this week we are reviewing two shows that have a lot of establishing shots of woods with a kind of spooky intro theme, it’s the same case with this and ‘The Good Girl's Guide to Murder’.

“I also think that it feels a bit like a box ticking exercise for some of the conventions that come through that you see many times before in BBC and ITV thrillers and the twists and the turns.

“But I do like the interplay between the podcast hosts and Jenna’s character.”

All four episodes of the Jetty are available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.

Must Watch is released as a podcast every Monday evening on BBC Sounds and all other podcast providers.

This week the team also reviewed ‘Supacell’ and ‘A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder’.