Stream It Or Skip It?

Emma Thompson doesn’t do a lot of TV, but we can imagine how quickly she signed on (and she’s also an EP of the series) when presented with her character on Down Cemetery Road. She’s the exact kind of tough, funny, take-no-BS, honest-to-a-fault character that Thompson usually plays with extra zeal, and that’s what we get on the series, which was developed by members of the team that brought us Slow Horses.

Opening Shot: A shot of a woman with magnifying goggles on.

The Gist: Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) works as an art conservationist at a museum in Oxford, and we see that allows her to see details in artwork when others don’t. She is reluctantly hosting a dinner party for Gerard Incheon (Tom Goodman-Hill), the biggest client at the bank where her husband Mark (Tom Riley) works. As a buffer, Helen invites a couple who are friends of theirs, but they cancel and their crunchy granola neighbors Wigwam (Sinead Matthews) and Rufus (Ken Nwosu) are invited in their place, which doesn’t play well with the gun-collecting, screw-the-poor attitude of Gerard.

As he lights a cigar, though, an explosion down the street shatters the windows at Sarah’s house. When they run to the scene, they see a body taken out and a child put in an ambulance. Sarah is pretty sure the injured girl, Dinah Singleton (Ivy Malaika Quoi) was the girl she encountered while riding her bike home from work that day, and when Rufus and Wigwam’s kids make her a get well card, she volunteers to take it to the hospital. Only when she gets there, she’s completely stonewalled and is ordered to leave. She encounters Gerard there and asks him to get the girl’s status. She then finds out that the police case file has been restricted.

In the meantime, a Ministry of Defense intelligence agent, Hazma Malik (Adeel Akhtar) is dressed down by his mysterious boss C (Darren Boyd) for the explosion, which shouldn’t have injured civilians or even caused a scene. “You need to get down on your hands and knees and mop up this piss fountain you’ve created before it becomes a piss geyser the size of Old fucking Faithful,” C tells him.

After her visit to the hospital, Sarah finds herself being followed by a man she saw at the scene of the explosion (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett). She finds the offices of Oxford Investigations, a two-person agency run by Joe Silverman (Adam Godley) and his wife Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson). You can tell the two of them have been married a very long time given how much they bicker, though Zoë wishes that Joe would collect on the invoices on his cases instead of letting bills pile up. Given Joe’s penchant for helping “doe-eyed” female clients, he takes the case when Sarah tells him she wants to find out what happened to Dinah.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Given the source material — Mick Herron’s novel — and the fact that Morwenna Banks developed the novel for television, it’s not a surprise that Down Cemetery Road has a similar tone and sense of humor as Slow Horses.

Our Take: As soon Emma Thompson shows up on screen as Zoë, complaining to Joseph that she seems to be the one bringing money into the agency, we know that she’s going to be the character we’ll want to see on screen as much as possible. And you have to remember, this is a show with the always-intense, always-watchable Ruth Wilson in the other main role. It will be delicious to see the two of them interacting as they try to figure out just what happened to Dinah and why her house blew up. But Thompson is going to be who we want to watch going forward.

We like the show’s very British sense of humor, which, like with Slow Horses mixes very well with the show’s more dramatic and thrilling moments. Lines like Zoë saying she would “fuck their handsy husbands” if she had women clients are so expertly thrown off that they made us laugh without feeling like everyone involved with the show is trying too hard to break the intensity with humor.

The side of the story which has Hamza trying to clean up the mess he created still makes us scratch our heads. We’re not told exactly why the Ministry of Defense was even involved in this incident, and we’re not sure if we’ll find out completely exactly why this location was targeted. At some point, Hamza will encounter Sarah and Zoë, and that will hopefully give us some more information.

We’re not sure if Wilson’s character Sarah is so intent on finding Dinah for personal reasons or just a sense of justice. But she certainly feels like she’s working against a lot of forces that don’t want her to know what’s going on, including the mysterious and assholish Gerard. But what we want to know is what’s motivating her to push so hard. By the end of the first episode, we know why Zoë gets involved in this case, but it’s still hard to fathom what’s propelling Sarah, given the fact that she barely even knew Dinah or her now-dead mother.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Sarah gets a shock when she goes back to the Oxford Investigations office to follow up with Joe.

Sleeper Star: Tom Goodman-Hill is gleefully evil as Gerard, especially as his character calls himself things like “Osama bin Businessman.”

Most Pilot-y Line: “Philip Marlowe, I’m not,” Joe says to Sarah. “But who is?” She replies: “Well, no one; he’s fictional.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Thompson is definitely the main draw on Down Cemetery Road, but good performances all around and a sense of humor that makes us snicker makes up for a mystery that might be frustratingly slow to develop.

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How To Watch Down Cemetery Road

Apple TV+ comes with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers and has just one ad-free streaming plan available for $13.99/month.

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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.