Manhunt Season 2.3-4: Profound and Engaging Snapshot

I saw the conclusion of Manhunt Season 2 -- episodes 3 and 4 -- last night on Acorn on Amazon.  Colin Sutton and the police hunting the serial rapist of elderly women were in top form.

There's something about these UK police series that really get it right.   Maybe it's the pacing.  American police dramas move more quickly, which can be exciting, but that often happens at the expense of important little details.  Colin's conversations with his wife, for example, are not the most pressingly germane to the police story, but they help us understand how Colin can be so calm and understanding in the face of such human depravity.

It's also fun to see the technological progress and savvy the Brit police evince in 2009.   They understand DNA well enough to know that the rapist's attempt to implicate his son (a real piece of work, this guy) won't work, because although twins share identical DNA, fathers and sons do not.

The excellent finale, though, didn't answer every question.  How did the rapist, a man at least in his late 40s or 50s, manage to outrun the Brit copper who was in his 20s, and a marathon runner, no less? I'm also wondering how many of those exquisite coincidences really happened?  Did the elderly woman victim who was "interfered" with by the rapist really pass away an hour so before her daughter arrived from New Zealand to see her?   And was the rapist really caught on the day Colin took a day off to get some well earned rest?

But these are minor quibbles indeed.  It was a great pleasure to get to know Colin Sutton (wonderfully played by Martin Clunes) in this short but profound and engaging series, and I wish him the best in his post-police endeavors.

See also Manhunt Season 1 and 2.1-2

Manhunt Season 1 and Season 2.1-2

So, I saw I somehow missed the British Manhunt (2019, 2021), so I saw the first season and the first two episodes of the second season -- the rest of which will be available in the next two weeks here in America on Prime Video -- and here I am with a review:

Martin Clunes portrays the true story of DCI Colin Sutton, who took on at least two seemingly intractable cases.  The first took place in the early years of the 21th century -- 2004-2006 -- and Manhunt does a fine job depicting what police work was like in London back then.  Cameras that recorded the public were new and not everywhere.  Sutton is delighted to find that a bus was outfitted with some cameras.  Computers were a lot more recent than they are now.  Programming can be suspect.  And DNA, though reliable, was also not amenable to the level of analysis we have today.

I of course don't know what Sutton is really like, but Clunes does a great job in the role.  He's courteous, respectful, but tough as nails in following the evidence and the logic, and sticking to his guns when he knows he's right.   He almost has a touch of Columbo, which is fun to think, given that Sutton is a real DCI.  His relentless and ultimately successful pursuit of a serial killer must be a textbook on how to get that kind of job done.

The second season has Sutton assigned to a case in 2009 that started in 1992.  The crime would have worked perfectly as a case "ripped from the headlines" in Law and Order SVU:  the serial rape of elderly women.  Sutton has to enlist the aid of the mostly dedicated crew that has been pursuing the rapist with no success all these years.  His understanding of human nature once again is sorely needed.

Manhunt is a sophisticated, sensitive true-story police procedural, and I'm down with and up for watching the two episodes which are rest of it.