bionic820-1 Very well done. Don't compare to everything else you have seen out there. More to come...

fiona_r_lamb I so wanted to like this. And I am so disappointed that I did not.And I didn't like the way the film was edited at all. For me it was too choppy, and lacked cohesion. The characters were all very unlikeable. Just did not work for me. It had promise, a good idea but it just was not fleshed out properly.Shirley Henderson used to be a good actress - what happened? The scene where she enters what she thinks is a brothel was just AWFUL.But most of all it just wasn't believable. For example - and MAJOR spoiler alert - the two men who assaulted Stephen, the gunman, and who provoked him into killing got away with it. The story should have revolved around their guilt and shame and even though the show touched upon it with the younger man trying to kill himself a year later, it was not nearly enough.The only good thing is it's 4 x 45 minutes long so not too drawn out.

brendanofarrell-14941 A bereft husband walks along the bank of a quiet river until he comes to his wife curled on the ground, crying for their deceased daughter. He doesn't run to his wife. Instead, he only picks up his pace slightly as he takes off his coat and puts it over her crumpled body. He helps her up and looks over the marsh as a gentle wind blows the reedy grasses haphazardly about. "I'll take you home," he says. "Okay? I'll take you home." The husband's gesture is rooted in futility and pain, beauty and kindness. As Thomas Wolfe once wrote, "You can never go home again." This is particularly true when you live in Southcliffe--a quaint but provincial town set in gloomy, fictional England. A lone gunman has gone on a killing spree, murdering a number of community members without ceremony or fanfare. One neighbor is working in her garden. There are no witness to her murder. Only a single bullet from afar. The husband and wife crying along the river bank are just two more of town's victim-survivors, grappling to come to terms with what's left of their life. The mass shooting and the murder of their daughter took place more than a year ago when the scene is presented. You can never go home again. This is how the four-part miniseries unwinds for its viewers. It is a slow and patient drama that jumps from past to present and back again. It is a masterpiece of pace and elliptical pauses. The acting is heart-wrenching and brilliant. The script soars with unadorned language in which some of the most vicious and touching lines unfold in the spaces between words.You can never go home again. For T.V. Journalist David Whithead (Rory Kinear), who has been sent back to his hometown to cover the unfolding tragedy, this statement means something entirely different. As a boy growing up in Southcliffe, he was routinely bullied by the townsfolk in the wake of his father's sudden and unexpected death. He knows Southcliffe to be a brutal and unforgiving place wrapped in the niceties of dishonesty and pretense. Yet, at the command of his manager, return he must. In the year that follows, we watch him--and several others in the community--struggle with the tragedy's psycho-emotional aftermath: Were the shootings really random? Did we, as a community, do something to deserve them? The husband's gesture to take his wife back to their home is beautiful and kind--not because things are going to be any better when they walk through the front door--but rather because the husband is committed to suffering eternally with his wife and the town of Southcliffe.

paul2001sw-1 Sometimes, stuff just happens, and it's not always pretty. 'Southcliffe' fictionalises rare but real stories when a loner has flipped and gone out and shot up his not so loving local community; and as such, it's quite realistic. The problem is, there isn't any real narrative here (at least, nothing sufficiently meaty to justify the happenings); and although in part this is the entire point of the series, it's also a slightly self-defeating point to make in a drama. It's hard to feel too involved when there's no underlying cause to events: the story of a journalist caught up in events has a similar, believable but essentially arbitrary feel. I often like series that give us no easy answers; but in the absence even of any real questions, this one didn't do it for me.