Winter review – Richard Armitage’s new cop drama is as ferociously watchable as it is daft

Sometimes you want prestige drama that roils with nuance and complexity. And sometimes you want Armitage shouting in a cagoule Dr Ethan Winter is a maverick, a wildcard, a lone wolf who won’t play by the rules. “Winter!” gasps DI Lauren Bell as the muscular outsider bursts into a police interrogation room and proceeds to subject a tremulous pensioner to the full force of his waxed cagoule. “You can’t do this!” But he can do this. And he will do this. Why? Because he’s Dr Ethan Winter, dammit, one of the greatest forensic pathologists of his generation; a bearded genius whose approach to obstacles is as uncompromising as his approach to tremulous pensioners. And yet. Dr Ethan Winter is troubled. We know this because Winter – the new six-part ITV police procedural that shares his starkly unseasonable surname – keeps cutting to scenes in which our protagonist paces silently around his fashionably underlit Bristol flat while scowling into the middle distance. Has he misplaced the keys to his vintage sports car? No, they’re over there, next to the gruesome autopsy photos he keeps on the kitchen table in the hope they’ll prompt visitors to ask what made him want to be a forensic doctor (“I became a forensic doctor … to mend sores”). Could it be, then, that the source of his malaise is … complicated? That it could in fact have something to do with the murder, a decade ago, of his fiancee – a case which, though ostensibly closed, continues to raise enough questions to provide the series with its narrative backbone? While leaving sufficient time in each episode for the agitated hunk to solve a new, self-contained crime? It’s certainly possible! Continue reading...