And so it came to this. After five weeks (or five hours if you’ve been watching it on the BBC’s iPlayer streaming service) of strangeness, Top Of The Lake: China Girl came to a close. Like any good finale, we were asking ourselves whether there would be a satisfactory conclusion to a series that started – lest we forgot – with the body of a young, Thai prostitute called Cinnamon, bundled into a suitcase and cruelly cast out to sea. Would Cinnamon get some form of justice?
NB: Spoilers inside Continue reading Review: Top Of The Lake: China Girl (S2 E6/6), Thursday 31st August, BBC Two
Despite it being frustrating and hard going at times, I’m greatly enjoying the third series of Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s cross-dimensional crime drama, which finishes with a two-part finale on Monday 4th September. Throughout the 16 parts so far, we’ve caught up with old favourites, found out how they’ve been created, met new characters and have been plunged into new mysteries. One of the absolute delights, though, has been spending more time with FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (Lynch) and FBI Special Agent, Albert Rosenfeld (the late, great Miguel Ferrer). They’ve crucial roles as the the splintered personality of Agent Dale Cooper has slowly resolved itself, and the more I’ve thought about it the more a spin-off series featuring these two would make sense. So David Lynch, if you’re reading… 
UKTV – home of channels like Alibi and Drama – is a pretty good network if you’re struggling for a crime drama fix, and today it announced a brand-new, 11-part series that takes us back to the so-called Golden Age of crime fiction – the 1920s. Not only that, but Frankie Drake Mysteries introduces us to Toronto’s first ever all-female detective agency. 
It’s a busy-old day here at The Killing Times with three new shows having their transmission dates confirmed today. We’re two episodes into the first BBC adaptation of JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels, and now the BBC has announced when the next story will be. 
September is going to be a big month for Harry and Jack Williams, the siblings behind BBC One’s The Missing. They have a new, ITV series is called Liar starting up in a few weeks and again it sounds intriguing. I think the Williams brothers have now patented the word intriguing when it comes to crime drama. 
It’s going to be a big week of crime drama action in the a few weeks’ time, with a couple of primetime series kicking off. One of them is Rellik, an intriguing new six-parter from the minds of Harry and Jack Williams, the sibling showrunners of The Missing. Indeed, that very same week, the Williams brothers have another new series starting on exactly the same time over on ITV. You won’t be able to move for them in this week. 
It seems that every subscription service, every streaming site and every TV network is picking up new content at the moment and it’s difficult to keep up with what’s going where and how you can watch these things. Netflix? Amazon? iPlayer? Now TV? Apple TV? The list goes on. Not content with being left on the sidelines, cable operator Virgin Media is now firmly in the game with its own on-demand service, having signed up Ash vs Evil Dead and Imposters. Now it has snapped up a US crime drama. 
This third series has been a sometimes thrilling, sometimes viscerally terrifying and sometimes infuriating journey. Throughout 15 episodes we’ve waited and waited until Agent Dale Cooper – our beloved FBI man – snapped out of his fugue and take back the identity that had been locked away for so long. No question about it: we’ve all needed saintly patience to get to that point. Ultimately, this is what this third series has been about – the search for identity. It’s been so different in tone and structure to the first two series that I know many friends have been turned off by it, but I’ve seen this as another detective story but not in any traditional, rational or step-by-step procedural sense. No, this series of Twin Peaks has, among other things, been about shattered identities and characters searching for who they used to be. And, after so many false dawns, Dale Cooper – the Dale Cooper we knew and loved – looked for all the world to have found himself again. 
We’ve recently said farewell to Kit Harington in Game Of Thrones after the stupendous finale of series seven, but fear not – the bearded one will be back on our screens soon in the BBC’s three-part series that will chronicle the 17th-century attempt to blow up Parliament. Harington joins Liv Tyler, Mark Gatiss, Peter Mullan, Tom Cullen, Edward Holcroft, Shaun Dooley and Robert Emms in a good-looking cast, and now there’s a trailer. 
The Killing Times 