Anyone who’s read this blog for a while will have noted my antipathy to some of the default settings used by lazier thriller writers.  I’m thinking here of the sort of characterisation that says giving your protagonist a hobby and a preferred type of food counts as three dimensional.  And that serial killers are a hyperintelligent breed akin to cryptic crossword setters, who leave behind a trail of clues for their nemesis to collect after three ad breaks and a couple of red herrings.

There’s too much of that lazy contrived crap out there, and I can’t be the only one who’s tired of it.  I’m more than sure of that, having watched the concluding episode of the Sally Wainwright scripted ITV three parter Unforgiven.  This was simply superb television, that substituted the convoluted machinations of unbelievable bad guys for the messy interactions of credible and flawed human beings caught up in a situation that reached from the incomprehensible violence of the past to mess up the lives of people here and now.

Unforgiven was chaotic in all the right ways.  The poltergeist storyline set up in the first episode turned out to be nothing of the sort, a lovely counterexample to the general rule of thumb that a gun seen in the first act will be fired in the third.  There was no room for the supernatural here; no need to call on forces beyond purely mortal and fallible ones.  Tonally though, the non-poltergeist was right, setting up a sense of wrongness echoing through the years in the farmhouse where a teenage girl and her younger sister had been expelled by police and bailiffs fifteen years before and responded with lethal violence.

Sally Wainwright’s script was brilliant in its sense of life as lived, and not as conveniently plotted.  Sure, different strands of the story did get to have their varied resolutions, but it was all done in an understated and natural-feeling way miles removed from the generic contrivances of most screenwriting.  The man who wanted revenge on Suranne Jones’s character for killing his father exacted his retribution by kidnapping the young woman he believed to be her sister…but snatched the wrong girl.  And he was driven not just by whatever purity of motive might exist in avenging your father’s death, but equally by the feelings churning in him after catching his brother in bed with his wife.  That kind of complication didn’t confuse matters, it just made them feel more real.

The business of the two sisters reconnecting after all this time — the letters sent from prison had never reached the younger sister in her new home — was handled expertly.  Suranne tracked her sibling to university, and built up a picture of her by listening to her play piano and interact with friends.  All from a safe distance.  Contact was inevitable though, and was forced by a third character when vital information was needed from the music student and Suranne had to confront her to get it.  Any number of other writers would have pussyfooted round that scene, but the aspect of being forced into it worked a treat, and made it natural for the two women to communicate, however awkwardly, thereafter.

It’s rare for television to reach the heights that Unforgiven attained, and it’d be unrealistic to expect something just as strong to follow it.  The omens are not promising: the forthcoming Whitechapel promises — guess what — a serial killer reenacting the Jack the Ripper killings.  Ho hum.  I shall endeavour to contain my excitement.  It’s safe to say there’s a market for such guff, and from time to time it can be watchable, in the same way that the occasional burger in your diet does no harm.  But, as the saying has it, why have burger when you can have steak?