The Real Manhunter

Watched from the start. First episodes are terrific and and go into a lot of depth and care. Thereafter it just goes downhill and they churn one uninteresting case after another. OK, Bellfield and Nightstalker are the biggest cases, but the rest are so badly made they could have told the stories in 15 minutes, not an hour and they repeat constantly to pad it out. It's a bit embarrassing for Det Colin Sutton as he's great in this role and brings fascinating insight on each case. I stuck with it until the first episode of series 2 but it just gets worse and worse. Sky Crime should be deliver a lot better quality British true crime than this...get your act together. Please, no more.

The first episode of series 3 is utter drivel. Constant repetition, often contradictory. Buck passing as standard because apparently none of them were at fault, barring the pathologist, even though it's obvious that the police did not do their jobs properly. Could easily have been told in 30-40 minutes at most. Most of the 'professionals' have trouble stringing simple sentences together properly so be ready with a pause button while you try to understand/finish laughing at what's just been said. A great shame because Colin Sutton is good at his job - it's the others who let the programme down.

This series is duller than dishwater, the people interviewed speak like monotone robots with zero emotion or charisma.

I've just watched the 1st episode of season 2c, it's gotten even worse!

The first few shows were good, exciting cases, and good stories. Then the shows went from about 90 minutes to about 45 minutes, and the stories became simpler and shorter.

As the stories got simpler, they seemed to begin taking a long time to state the same things over and over. The later episodes contained a lot of unnecessary script, said three different ways by three people, and that, if removed, would shorten the show to about 25 minutes.

I believe the star of the show had two or three really good landmark cases, but after presenting those, they decided to continue the series with all his lesser cases as well. They seem to need to refer to the previous landmark cases also, as they don't have any juicy cases remaining.

These documentaries highlight how far off track contemporary dramas about policing really are.

The level of detail that is required and the ingenious ways of compiling solid cases makes this an interesting series, if a bit repetitive and slow at times.