In my opinion, the BBC are the finest public broadcasters in the world. Creators of some of the best television ever made. Kiss Of Death, however, is rubbish and an example of an unfortunate trend in the BBC's output.
I can understand their desire to emulate the slickness and pace of U.S. television, in particular crime dramas and proceduals. The BBC try and import this style in Kiss Of Death and give it the Blighty spin, keeping the high-tec, super-slick, jump-cut, fractured-timeline, low attention span style of a show like CSI but managing, somehow, to lose all the qualities that make such shows entertaining. The style just doesn't suit British T.V. and often results in an embarrassing cross-culture mess. Like Kiss Of Death.
Casting in this was very questionable.
Louise Lombard (who has actually been in the aforementioned CSI) played the leader of the investigative team. She portrayed the role competently but flatly. The background story of her character was predictable cliché. Domestic tragedy, broken marriage, emotionally troubled blah, blah, blah. Me, I think she got the role because the producers wanted someone who offered maturity combined with a photogenic looks.
Danny Dyer played the second in command type figure, a role entirely unsuited to his style (which appears to be, er, playing himself). In the right role he can be pretty good, this isn't it. The thing is, to play the aggressively weary, experienced cop you need someone who doesn't look like a cheeky 12yr old delivering his lines like a school bully on an E-numbers rush. Oh, and what was with the ambiguosly framed shoulder holster? Gun? Mobile phone? Sandwich? Attempt to create a slight edge to his character which'll help foreign distribution deals? The (now essential in all crime shows) profiler was given some of the blandest dialogue you can imagine. "This is a message to us", "He's making a point" and so on. This poor fella's lines really exposed the biggest weakness of this opening episode; the script.
The plot itself was derivative and formula offering nothing new to the genre. This show also suffered from the terrible BBC 'in house' promotion that so much of it's recent output champions. The only news channel witnessed was BBC, the only O.B. news van at the crime scene was BBC... I know the unique nature of the BBC prevents commercial branding and product placements, which is fantastic and one of the reasons why I still believe in them and happily pay my T.V. license fee, yet they could easily drop in something fictional here and there. I'm just surprised they didn't nudge in a plug for the execrable Dr Who. Still, it was only the first episode.
In conclusion, this was a weakly made, terribly scripted, unoriginal, sack of crap that suffered hugely from style over content.
Harsh? Maybe, but as someone who champions what the BBC do and as a license fee paying viewer I find the increasing trend towards this kind of lightweight pap rather deppressing. The BBC can do drama very well, not in this case though.
