Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I've come to really like BBC miniseries. Not that longer series don't have their charms, but with miniseries, three, four, maybe even six or eight episodes & the story's told. No need to keep watching year after year. The pithiness of it appeals to me.Another aspect where the BBC beats American TV hands down is their realism. There's a certain gloss to American series that just doesn't ring true; everybody's just so unnaturally good-looking it's hard to forget they're actors. BBC actors, on the other hand, look like... well, anybody. They're just so natural, so normal looking, it's hard to remember they're actors. And isn't that the way it's supposed to be?In this series, Kiri, a black child, is scheduled soon to be adopted by her white foster parents the Warners. Social worker Miriam however, in the interests of Kiri knowing her roots, approves an unsupervised visit with her birth mother & her grandfather Nate. But Kiri is abducted during the visit by her ex-con birth father Tobi & later murdered.At first, it's naturally assumed Tobi murdered her. Then comes a red herring episode in which Si, the Warners' sensitive but shy & somewhat peculiar son seems almost certain to be the killer. The culprit finally turns out to be the last person you'd ever suspect, the mild-mannered foster father Jim, who'd been so unfailingly patient, considerate & downright decent throughout.Ok, mystery solved. The fallout turns out to be far more riveting than the mystery tho.Hounded by the media, the dedicated Miriam is forced out of her job - her vocation really, the job she's dedicated her life to - by a cowardly bureaucracy all too ready to throw a scapegoat to the wolves at the slightest whiff of scandal. Her diligence, her compassion, her wisdom, her years of experience thrown on the scrap heap because of a single highly publicized error in judgment. The sheer injustice is thrown into sharp relief when grief-stricken self-reproaching Miriam, her life now ruined, is recognized by a compete stranger. This woman walks straight up to her, punches her in the face, then self-righteously stands over her, shouting "A child! How could you?" as if Miriam, who only ever wanted to do right by Kiri, had murdered the child herself.Kiri's father Tobi, the obvious suspect, is equally hounded - indeed tried & convicted - by the media. He has a history of violence & he's black: clearly guilty. His father Nate (a fine understated performance by Paapa Essiedu) at first believes him guilty & sets out to track him down. When Tobi convinces him he's innocent, Nate arranges with the police for Tobi to turn himself in. All he asks is a chance for Tobi to shower, change clothes & have a decent meal at home before doing so. Just as they're about to leave for the police station tho, the police renege on the agreement, burst in & arrest Tobi as a fugitive instead.The foster mother Alice, having come to believe her son Si is the real killer, gives damning false evidence against Tobi in order to protect Si. Si, the foster brother who genuinely loved Kiri, who was most distraught at her death, knows Alice is lying & correctly deduces why. Si's the one who figures out his dad killed her.He confronts Jim with a choice: Admit it now & it goes no further; deny it & he'll take his suspicions not to the police but - far worse - to his mother. Jim breaks down & confesses. He'd seen the girl as "new glue" to hold his failing marriage together. When she rejected the impending adoption to run off with her birth father instead, he killed her in a fit of rage.Si then explains his rationale for keeping Jim's guilty secret: Shaken & appalled by the public scrutiny his family has already endured, this shy sensitive boy can all too easily imagine becoming notorious as the son of "the monster family" whose dad murdered poor little Kiri. To avoid that, he'll let an innocent man to go to prison. He's a criminal anyway, isn't he? What does it matter? And this is the saddest most shocking part of all. Si isn't a bad kid, quite the opposite. Throughout, he's shown love & concern for his family, including Kiri, but his desperate need for at least the façade of white middle class respectability, no matter how sham, takes precedence over an unknown black man's innocence.What a truly horrible ending! But that brings us back to the realism of the BBC. No happy ending here. No justice. Anywhere in the white-dominated world, a black man, innocent or not, is five times more likely to be convicted of a crime than a white man & this series doesn't flinch from this ugly reality.

I watched after seeing the advertisements on Hulu. I love a good mystery/thriller. However, this is a terrible show. The little black girl is murdered and her biological father, who is innocent, is automatically thrown in jail. The one who actually committed the crime, the foster dad, goes unpunished and free. Little girl gets no justice and neither does the family of her biological dad. This is a terrible series.

Another magnificent performance from the peerless Sarah Lancashire. Finn Bennett who played the son Si, the tortured, confused, unloved, observant, awkward teenager who knew that his father had murdered Kiri but chose not to turn him in, preferring to punish him by condemning him to live alone with his bitter, twisted, unfaithful liar of a wife while he was dumped at an expensive boarding school to cure him of his bitterness. The drama ended suddenly, unsatisfyingly in a way, we were guessing what the outcome of the trial would be, might Si decide to contact the police and tell them the truth or would he protect his mother from prosecution for perverting the course of justice. We will nevr know, but one this is certain, our Social Service system is broken, and their methods of placing and protecting children in the care system needs to change, to allow foster carers and adopters to know the history of the damaged children they hope to provide a loving, stable family.

Over-written, over-contrived, overacted and over-wrought, this would-be realistic drama fell over itself at every turn. It started out as a whodunit concerning the disappearance and as it turns out death of a young girl of African origin, the Kiri of the title. Brought up in foster care by a middle class white family, she's encouraged by an experienced care worker to meet up with her black father at her grandparents when things go wrong.I suppose when see you names like Sarah Lancashire and Steven MacKintosh in the credits you know it's not going be a straightforward mystery and you can bet there'll be a fair bit of scenery - chewing actory moments for the so-serious cast to get their teeth into and sure enough there are bite marks everywhere as they each gets scenes of doubt, confusion, anger and despair to try to impress the BAFTA judges.I wasn't impressed at all. The characters didn't ever sound like "ordinary everyday folk" caught up in a tragedy, with all sorts of unnatural conversations going on amongst them pretty much all the time. Plus, there are scenes of embarrassing weirdness none more so than when the troubled teenager son of the foster family confronts his mother over her affair with the school janitor where she works by walking in on her having a shower and having his tete-a-tete with her standing dripping naked in front of him. Later he has a strange, metaphysical conversation with Lancashire's hard-working, working-class care worker whose original encouragement of the meeting between natural father and daughter precipitated the tragedy before his big underwhelming confrontation with his own dad, MacKintosh.Throw in an unsatisfactory miscarriage-of-justice ending and there really was very little to commend this mini-series. I came away not liking anyone in the whole four - part series apart from the doomed little girl and she was hardly in it anyway.This much-hyped programme proved to be a real let-down and is one box-set best left on the shelf, in my opinion.