The Jetty starts badly. There is a podcaster explaining the premise via a portentous voiceover (“I chase the darkness for a living”), a man and a can of accelerant silhouetted against the flames of a burning boathouse, and a painfully named heroine – detective constable Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman), recently widowed – being woken in the night and creeping round the house in search of an intruder, though we all know this is bound to be a false alarm (her daughter Hannah is sneaking a cigarette out the back). Our scene is set in a tightknit community in a fictional northern town. So far, so deeply uninspired BBC thriller.

But after this 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.

DC Manning – I really don’t want to call her by her first name, especially here – is assigned with her (younger, male) partner Hitch (Archie Renaux) to investigate the arson attack on the boathouse. It is assumed to be by someone who resents the new owner, a rich Londoner, who bought it as an investment opportunity instead of leaving it in local hands. The local crime family the Ashbys are the top suspects. Manning knows them, of course, because everybody knows everybody. Her husband also ran the boathouse before he died.

Filaments of connection build into threads, then webs, as we move deeper into the community and Manning becomes involved in the story behind 16-year-old Miranda Ashby (Shannon Watson), her unwanted pregnancy and subsequent attempt to kill herself. The pregnancy is far enough advanced for her to have been underage when she had sex, and the father is rumoured to be much older than her.

Podcaster Riz (Weruche Opia) further disrupts the town’s calm when she arrives to make a series about a cold case: the disappearance of schoolgirl Amy (Bo Bragason) 17 years ago, whose body was never found – perhaps because of the readiness of police to believe the rebellious teenager simply ran away. We see Amy’s story, including her relationship with older man Malachy (Tom Glynn-Carney) and twisted friendship with “good” girl Caitlin (Laura Marcus), unfold in flashback (a device that, for once, is used to good and moving effect), and the two timelines eventually begin to converge.

We learn that Manning’s husband, Mack, was also much older than her, and that she became pregnant with Hannah when she was 17. The more Manning learns about the town and what its men are capable of, the more she is required to interrogate and possibly recast what this meant and what it may mean. Her mother Sylvia (Amelia Bullmore) – scatty now, probably closer to neglectful then – is adamant that Mack was a good man and that everything was fine.

For all the drama’s intriguing mysteries,writer Cat Jones has really delivered a reflection on denial and delusion and how they can work at individual and collective levels. The Jetty becomes a study in power relations, exploitation, innocence, ignorance and the impossibility of ever breaking out of a social structure that has never been designed with your wellbeing in mind. Hitch’s continued association with the lads he grew up with, no matter which side of the law they are now on (and in a latter episode his public failure to back up his enraged partner) stands for all the times and ways the bonds of men and their interests override those of others and of the common good.

There are lines that make you laugh (when Manning pulls up in her police car alongside Hannah and her gaggle of schoolfriends and tells them she’s out “looking for your missing skirt, Jules”) and ones that almost make you cry. Visiting Miranda in hospital after her attempt to kill herself, Manning is initially hostile as she questions the teenager’s mother about it. “Do you think,” says the mother, turning on her, “that she’s any more than a baby to me?” It is as damning an illustration of the inability we have to protect our children against all the dark forces arrayed against them as you could want. The Jetty isn’t Happy Valley, but it is much, much closer to it than you might have expected.

• The Jetty aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.

• Television & radio
• TV review
• Television
• Jenna Coleman
• Drama
• reviews