Jenna Colemans DC Ember Manning isn’t alone in re-evaluating the past.
Warning: contains spoilers forThe Jettyepisode one.
One boy wore a tie and had his own car, wrote 13-year-old-her; another was a police officer.
Adult-Thorn does that queasy maths most women eventually do when revisiting adolescent sexual experiences.
New BBC crime seriesThe Jettyis a dramatization of the world contained in that line.
Mack was in his mid-twenties when he started having sex with 16-year-old Ember.
Theirs was a love story, Ember had always thought.
Yes, she was young when it started, but when you know, you just know.
Now with a daughter the same age as the missing girl, Ember is forced to re-evaluate her story.
The two timelines from writer Cat Jones and director Marialy Rivas are a dramatic coup.
(Embers father had recently died, while Amys adulterous parents were facing bankruptcy and neglecting her.)
Not enough, it concludes.
Another local schoolgirl anonymously shares with a podcaster her experience of being groomed and sexually and physically abused.
Its normalised, its appeased, and its not just happening in Embers hometown.
Its less poetic and less idiosyncratic than Campions series, but it goes to similarly uncomfortable places.
Queasily but boldly for a mainstream crime mystery,The Jettydoesnt deal only in absolutes.
The Jettyisnt a perfect drama.
But its boldness and empathy deserve more admiration than some reviews are giving it.
maths, either about their own experiences or those of friends and schoolmates.
We might, though, need mainstream dramas like this one to actually start talking about it.
The Jetty is available to stream in full nowon BBC iPlayer.
