Broadchurch (2013) Review: A Town Turned Inside Out

Is Broadchurch worth watching?

Yes. Broadchurch is one of the best British crime dramas of its decade, and its first season in particular is gripping, humane television. Its great strength is that it treats a murder as something that happens to a whole community, not just a puzzle for detectives, and David Tennant and Olivia Colman make an unforgettable double act. The reservation is that the two follow-up seasons never quite match the first, and the second in particular stretches credibility.

What is Broadchurch about?

In a small coastal town in Dorset, an 11-year-old boy, Danny Latimer, is found dead on the beach beneath the cliffs. Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman), a local officer who knows almost everyone involved, is paired with Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant), a brusque outsider who has just taken the job she expected to get. As the investigation widens, national reporters arrive, neighbours start eyeing each other, and the town’s small secrets begin to surface under pressure.

Broadchurch was created and written by Chris Chibnall. It is a British series in English and ran for three seasons and 24 episodes between 2013 and 2017. This review covers the complete show, which has ended: the first season tells one self-contained story, the second returns to its aftermath alongside an old case from Hardy’s past, and the third opens a new investigation into a sexual assault.

Tennant and Colman make it more than a whodunnit

The pairing is the show’s engine. Tennant plays Hardy as a man running on fumes, curt to the point of rudeness and plainly unwell, with an old failure hanging over him. Colman gives Ellie the opposite energy: warm, chatty, rooted in the town, and increasingly shaken as the case forces her to suspect people she has known for years. Their friction is often funny, but it also carries the drama’s central question of whether it is better to investigate a place as a stranger or as a neighbour.

The supporting cast is just as carefully used. Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan, as Danny’s parents Beth and Mark, give the series its raw centre, and the scenes of their family trying to function are more painful than any of the police work. The third season brings in a new ensemble, led by Julie Hesmondhalgh with Lenny Henry, Sarah Parish, Mark Bazeley and Georgina Campbell, and Hesmondhalgh’s performance is among the finest in the whole run.

Grief with the sea as a backdrop

Visually, Broadchurch is striking for a British procedural. The golden cliffs and wide beaches of the Dorset coast are shot like landscape paintings, which makes the violence underneath feel all the more intrusive. Ólafur Arnalds’s spare piano and strings score reinforces the mood of mourning rather than suspense, and the pacing allows silences to sit.

Chibnall’s writing is especially sharp on the media. Tabloid reporters, a struggling local paper and online speculation all push the town towards mob thinking, and the show asks how quickly a close community can turn on its own. The red herrings are plentiful, but each suspect is written as a person with something to lose, which keeps the mystery from feeling mechanical.

Where the later seasons wobble

The first season is so tightly built that everything after it has a harder job. The second season splits its time between a courtroom story and a second mystery, and the legal proceedings rely on shortcuts that viewers who know anything about British courts will find hard to accept. It remains watchable thanks to the cast, but the plotting creaks.

The third season is a real recovery, more focused and more serious in its handling of consent and trauma, even if it borrows some of the first season’s structure. Taken together, the show is best understood as a great first season followed by two worthwhile coda chapters.

Who should watch Broadchurch?

It suits viewers who like slow-burning mysteries where character matters as much as the solution, and anyone who wants to see Tennant and Colman at their best. The whole run is 24 episodes, but the first season stands comfortably alone if eight episodes is all the commitment you want. The subject matter is heavy, with the death of a child, grief, suicide and sexual violence handled seriously rather than graphically. Browse more crime series if the tone suits you.

Three comparable British dramas:

• Happy Valley for another grounded police story built around a formidable central performance.
• Line of Duty for procedural tension with a sharper, more institutional focus.
• Dept. Q for a more recent cold-case drama led by a difficult detective.

The verdict

Broadchurch is at its best when it lets a murder investigation become a portrait of grief and suspicion in a small town, and its first season is close to essential. The later seasons are uneven, the second especially, but the central partnership and the care taken with every family make the full run worth the time.

Rating: 4/5