'Suspect' Season 2 Will Debut on a Daily Schedule
As we've been covering here at Telly Visions, BritBox is on the up and up since being bought out by the BBC. Auntie Beeb needed a successful international streamer, and BritBox was ready-made, with nearly 15 million subscribers outside of the U.K. Thus far, the BBC brass has kept their word not to do a massive overhaul of the service or make significant changes to how it does business. All the new owners have done is push the service to release its highest-profile shows weekly instead of as binge-drops and then pour money into it so that BritBox can bring over more of what it was already streaming. However, BritBox isn't just doing weekly and all-at-once releases; it's experimenting as well, as with the new season of Suspect, which will be released daily.
American television rarely uses this type of release format, but in the U.K., this kind of "stunt release" happens more often than U.S. viewers realize. The one our readers are most likely to have heard about/remember is Torchwood, when the five-part "Children of Earth" miniseries, which was set over the space of a workweek, was released one episode a day Monday through Friday to match. This style is often used with reality shows, like The Great British Menu, which airs five 30-minute episodes over nine weeks. (Hence why, American Idol — which initially followed the Pop Idol model to the letter — aired two and three days a week every week.)
Suspect is a perfect show to test this release model on for BritBox, as with "Children of Earth," the show, a tightly paced thriller, takes place over just a few days. Star Anne-Marie Duff plays Dr. Susannah Newman, a woman trying to find a potential victim before they are murdered in a few days after being given no help by her former husband's boss, Detective Superintendent Richard Groves (Ben Miller). The show then turns into what is essentially a series of "two-hander" installments (episodes that only feature two characters) as she runs down the list of suspects, visiting and interviewing one per episode, each of whom is played by A-list British talent.
