Critics: The Jetty

“Amid the tennis and the football and Glastonbury taking up the schedules recently, TV has been crying out for a series like The Jetty – one the entire nation can really get stuck into and chat about at work the next day. I can’t remember the last time a BBC crime series gripped me this much.”Emily Baker, The i

“Cat Jones, the writer of The Jetty, has ladled many traditional ingredients into what on the face of it is yet another drama about a missing teenage girl. But her brew is pleasingly laced with something more socially urgent: the slippery problem of consent and the sexualisation of teenage girls.”Ben Dowell, The Times

“After an unpromising start, The Jetty becomes not only a very good thriller, but an unexpectedly attentive meditation on what it means to move as a woman through a world that is suffused with male violence in all its myriad forms. Some of them brutal, more of them insidious, embedded, rendered all but invisible by history and silent acceptance, and all the more powerful for that.”Lucy Mangan, The Guardian

“Series creator Cat Jones clearly wanted to write about grooming, blurred lines and the vulnerability of girls, about the secrets harboured by close communities, but it has ended up packaged in a drama that does all the wrong things. It fails on the basics, which isn’t Jones’s fault: badly lit and with dialogue that is sometimes hard to decipher.”Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The Jetty doesn’t reinvent the crime drama. In fact, it borrows widely from the BBC’s vast back catalogue. But the restrained and self-contained nature of the narrative, and its likeable protagonist, offsets most of that triteness. The result is a compulsive mystery that wears its politics confidently and opaquely.”Nick Hilton, The Independent

Whitstable Pearl, U&Drama

“It’s a bit of a jumble: an odd-couple comedy, an aspirational lifestyle product and a cosy crime drama, all with the look of an old Nescafé advert. This series opens with the Pearl of the title, played by Kerry Godliman, in a cream cable-knit jumper gazing contentedly over the harbour while sipping from a candy-striped mug. This is a show to be enjoyed in the same way one enjoys flicking through a copy of Ideal Home and fantasising about moving to the coast.”Anita Singh, The Telegraph