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For 29 seasons over 30 years, the BBC’s Silent Witness has tested viewers’ gullibility with a premise that involves a succession of police pathologists getting embroiled in escapades usually reserved for detective inspectors. It has become a bit of a joke, on that show, with the glamorous doctors tackling international deepfake conspiracies, underground tombs and campus shooters. It is a joke that ITV are apparently keen to borrow for their upcoming series, Winter, which tries to give a new lease of life to that preposterous premise.
Based on the popular French series Balthazar, Winter follows the exploits of forensic pathologist Ethan Winter (Richard Armitage). Winter is that rarest of things in a police procedural: a reclusive maverick who doesn’t play by the rules! He looms over a succession of corpses, deposited in his mortuary outside of Bristol. “Hello Julie,” he purrs at one, while Irma Thomas croons on the stereo. “I’m Dr Winter.” Thankfully, he’s hot, so this all seems less weird. Now, however, he has a new detective inspector, Lauren Bell (Annabel Scholey), who must adjust to his methods. She’s been transferred from the Met and seems somewhat aloof (“a bit frosty,” in the words of Jamie Kenna’s DS Daldry) but develops a formidable partnership with Winter. Yet behind their easy, flirtatious rapport, she has questions about the pathologist. Not least: what really happened to his murdered fiancée, whose ghost keeps appearing in the flat where she died?
Structurally, Winter operates as a series of standalone mysteries. The first episode starts with a frozen corpse and becomes a hunt for two missing children. But running through the series is the puzzle behind Winter’s own tragedy. Clues about the fate of his photojournalist fiancée Simone (played by Carlotta Banat) start appearing in cases that get passed to the forensics team. And so, each episode features Winter and Bell working at the day job, neatly wrapping up a case within the hour, while unpicking the longer mystery. As a bifurcating format, it works, offering the simple pleasure of a classic whodunnit (the race towards a solution that audiences used to love on Morse or A Touch of Frost) with the longer (personally traumatic) character arcs, often borrowed from Nordic noir.
In this sense, Winter is totally competent. The mysteries are silly but not excessively confusing. But it is also remarkably unambitious. The writing is plodding (“what is this?” Bell asks her sceptical husband, “guilt trip Tuesday?”) and the performances are delivered with a brisk, impersonal efficiency. Armitage – who has anchored four different Harlan Coben series since 2020, as well as other shows on Netflix and ITV – is the definition of a safe choice. “He can read a body like other people read a book,” McKenna observes, yet the series isn’t interested in Winter’s weirdness. Instead, he growls seductively, broods with a perfectly furrowed brow, and arrives, inevitably, at a brilliant realisation. His relationship with Scholey’s Bell is treading the equally well-worn “enemies to friends” pathway. “He’s a handsome guy, your doctor friend,” her husband (Jay Taylor) observes. “I’m more likely to kill him than screw him,” she replies. Oh really…
In the British examination system, students have the option to sit a Foundation Tier paper. In this tier, the questions are easier, but the grade is capped at a C (as it was, now a 5). You can perform perfectly on the page, and still only achieve a middling result. And this is essentially the position that Winter is in. Assembled from simple, familiar components and with no aspirations towards shows like The Killing or True Detective, which have elevated the genre, Winter is aiming to be solid fare. It is drawing heavily from the premise of Silent Witness while injecting some of the tone of Department Q (albeit without any of the eccentricity). Writers David Allison and Mark Greig appreciate that there is an appetite for undemanding television, capably executed, and with a bunch of recognisable actors playing familiar archetypes. If it’s done impeccably, you end up with decent TV.
Unfortunately, Winter is a bit too stilted and unconvincing to achieve perfect mediocrity. As a thriller, it is painfully short on thrills. Both Armitage and Scholey play their characters as cadaverously cold ciphers, and it leaves the central dynamic desperate for an injection of energy. As a result, the show feels lifeless, ready to be slid back into a drawer at the morgue for disappointing telly.
