Martin Clunes Shines in Acorn TV's Tense, Smart 'Manhunt'

British TV fans are generally used to seeing actor Martin Clunes in comedic roles, on successful programs such as Doc Martin and Men Behaving Badly. He tackles his first leading role in a more serious drama with Manhunt, a tense, intelligent series about the dogged hunt for a killer who murdered multiple young women in the early 2000s.

During its original U.K. airing, Manhunt was British network ITV’s biggest hit since the David Tennant-led drama Broadchurch back in 2013. The series has drawn comparisons to the megapopular BBC drama Bodyguard, though beyond being tense, dramatic stories about death, the two series could hardly be more different.

Whereas Bodyguard was a thrill ride of constant shocks, Manhunt tells the story of relentlessly regular people, doing the hard work of investigation in the aftermath of a gruesome crime. The story is based on the dedicated police effort that ultimately brought serial killer Levi Bellfield to justice, and it focuses heavily on assembling facts. There’s a lot of time spent on tracking nondescript vans and splicing together CCTV footage, rather than the more sensational sort of twists normally associated with dramas such as these.