Critic Reviews
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The Jetty has all the ingredients of a forgettable British crime-by-numbers drama destined for the graveyard slot of Monday nights in July. Yet, clunky dialogue and comedy names aside, a parallel narrative charting two teenage girls’ relationship with wayward older man Malachy (House of the Dragon’s Tom Glynn-Carney) is intriguingly ambiguous, providing enough tension to keep viewers guessing.
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While there's much to appreciate about The Jetty, there are some elements that don't quite work. Riz has a parody-like quality to her, a consequence of how she is both written and performed, and the wider dialogue attempts poeticism, but falls flat in places, with characters sounding mannered or overwrought.
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The Jetty doesn’t reinvent the crime drama. In fact, it borrows widely from the BBC’s vast back catalogue. But the restrained and self-contained nature of the narrative, and its likeable protagonist, offsets most of that triteness.
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It fails on the basics, which isn’t Jones’s fault: badly lit and with dialogue that is sometimes hard to decipher. But the plot in the opening hour is such a mish-mash that I twice checked to see if I had started watching a later episode by mistake. Then there are the female-led drama tropes.