The Broadchurch Brood

Pity the stranger whose casual raising of certain subjects at social gatherings within earshot of yours truly during the spring-summer of 2024 immediately resulted in me subjecting them to the following friendly but earnest interrogation:

“Have you seen Broadchurch?”

Anyone unlucky enough to mention topics concretely related to the British television show–like the names of its all-star cast, or any of the films they’ve starred in–were about to be trapped in a conversation they were not expecting. Anyone daring to ask, in the twilight days of the Biden Administration, if I “had seen anything good on TV lately?” might as well have just opened my jaws and crawled into my mouth without saying anything.

Even safer topics were triggering. To mention the subjects of music, writing, or acting in any context during this period was to tug on thin silk–I was in the corner with my finger on the line, waiting patiently to detect the vibration that would signal my attack.

I’m sorry, when you mentioned your overnight layover at Heathrow were you expecting me to ask about your overnight layover at Heathrow? Well then you shouldn’t have shone a flashlight directly into the eyes of the Mothman. Maybe it’s your fault.

But really it wasn’t and no one who fell into any of these traps should feel bad. There was nothing they could have done differently to avoid what happened, aside from not interacting with me at all, which, in my defense, I made quite easy to do.

From the moment you signaled a willingness to enter into conversation with me, I was going to find a way to talk about Broadchurch.

Your last chance to avoid my effusive babbling was when we found ourselves chatting in line for the buffet table at the farmhouse wedding reception, approaching but—and this is crucial—just prior to reaching the charcuterie display. It was at this moment when you needed to drop your plate, turn 180 degrees, and walk away from me. Otherwise, you were done for.

Here’s what happened, in case you forgot or were unable to keep up:

By the time you were retrieving your first helping of cubed cheeses and meat ribbons from plastic-chrome serving dishes and preparing to place them on your paper plate, my conspiracy—in which you were about to be enlisted—to steer the conversation towards the Jurassic Coast was already entering phase two. By then I had already carefully surveyed the labeled tent cards and was mentally crafting the prompt I could offer that would lead you to speak a specific incantation which opened my window of opportunity to change the subject to Broadchurch.

Under completely false pretenses and with feigned ignorance, I asked if you knew anything about “stilton cheese” or “if it were true that only American cheddar is orange”.

England.

The door opened and off we went. After safely landing our conversation on the island of Great Britain, we were almost there. A click-of-my-heels later and we were home, standing together on green cliffs–above the scene of a terrible crime–admiring the view of the sea; nibbling cheese and curled salami in the wind.

Don’t forget, it was you who cast the spell. All I did was carefully lay out the conversational conditions that would lead you, inevitably, towards uttering the magic word.

Honestly, you’re welcome. Because everyone should be watching Broadchurch and for various reasons that may or may not include diminished American taste, the show was not a hit in the United States as it had been in the UK when it was released in 2013, and thus never received the attention in this country it so richly deserved. As a result, I was forced to appoint myself personally responsible for handling PR on behalf of the showrunners, a pro bono position to which I am still deeply devoted.

Acting Beings

Some day, Broadchurch will be a key primary source cited in a doctoral dissertation that quantitatively proves something I have long suspected but have never been able to prove empirically, which is that to the extent that a generalization is possible, British acting is superior to American acting. Additional supporting evidence for this hypothesis can be found both in Graceland (the unspectacular American remake of Broadchurch), and in almost all other American television crime dramas, against which Broadchurch is simply in a category of its own.

(I mean it when I say I would take a bullet for you, Mariska Hargitay. I will not extend the same offer to Matthew McConaughey or Woody Harrelson.)

Olivia Colman and Jodie Whittaker are somewhat unique among the cast for having not graduated from either the Harry Potter or Game of Thrones schools of acting. Their performances are the two best, they aren’t compensating for anything: everyone on the show delivers.

People say they wish they could read their favorite novel again for the first time. I wish I could watch the season one finale of Broadchurch again for the same reason–watching the show is to experience excellent writing. The scene where Detective Inspector “DI” Hardy zeros in on the killer’s hideout is the most gripping 15 minutes of television (maybe it was only 3) I have ever seen.

When I say “that one scene with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct” or “that one scene with Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally”, everyone who has seen the films intuitively knows what I’m referring to. The season one finale of Broadchurch also has “that one scene with Olivia Colman”, in which a skilled performer uses highly-physical acting to stimulate unspeakable feelings in viewers. Colman’s scene is deeply unsexy and rather completely devastating. You won’t want what she’s having. First-time viewers won’t have a label for the stimuli Colman makes them feel, but they might experience a powerful desire to walk through their television screens into the interrogation room of the Wessex Police Department and embrace Detective Sergeant “DS” Miller in a great big hug.

Ultimately the acting in Broadchurch can only be given only secondary credit for the show’s enduring grip on my consciousness. The writing is fantastic, but tertiary. Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds’ outstanding original music doesn’t make the podium, but is still superior as far as television crime drama music is concerned.

It is the show’s exploration of the human condition—particularly the phenomena of human villainry–that I find myself returning to again and again, in conversations with myself, with you, and everyone else.

If you haven’t seen the show, that’s your chosen emergency and I can’t rescue you from your own circumstances. But to encourage you to put out the grease fire, I will not disclose the identity of the culprit. They will simply be the Broadchurch Butcher with they/them pronouns to preserve the anonymity of the very gender binary-conforming antagonist.

They Have a Name for What They Are

Some of the greatest villains of fiction welcome easy definition. Glancing at the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest cinematic villains we find many such examples: The Wicked Witch of the West (wicked), Disney’s Evil Queen (evil), Pazuzu (demonic; possessive), Norman Bates (psychotic), and Annie Wilkes (choose your preferred clinical term from the DSM-5) are easily categorizable.

Other villains, most notably Hannibal Lecter, resist easy definition. Despite being labeled as a monster and a vampire, ultimately “they don’t have a name for what he is” according to the person who knows him best.

The Broadchurch Butcher, who murders an 11 year-old boy (Daniel “Danny” Latimer) fits in the former category: they can be accurately described in a single word, banal. Boring, common, perfectly ordinary.

But don’t be fooled, some of the greatest villains are perfectly banal, in essence or thinking, if not in deed. For banality does not preclude evildoing.

It is for this reason that I consider our Butcher to be an exceptional study of fictional evil worthy of closer inspection: sometimes the greatest villains are simply ordinary, untalented commoners with otherwise sound interpersonal faculties. (A vicar, a plumber, a hotelier, a telco repairman, a dog-walker, a housekeeper, a captain of the Sea Brigade…)

Fiction gives us few examples of villains who are capable of both committing heinous crimes and passing (or failing?) psychiatric testing designed to detect psychopathic tendencies.

For the real deal we must turn to history.

Klement in Buenos Aires

Ricardo Klement lived an unremarkable life on Chacabuco Street. The type of life that consisted primarily of shuffling between a dull job and a dull home. For Klement, this meant riding the public bus back and forth between a menial desk job at a car dealership and his home in the Olivos District of Argentina’s capital where he had lived since 1950.

Klement’s life became decidedly less boring on May 11, 1960 when he was approached by a stranger on the sidewalk–on his evening stroll from the bus stop back to his dull home. The stranger called out to him, “Un momentito, señor!”

Spanish was not Klement’s first language and we can’t be sure if he understood what the stranger had said to him. But 84 seconds later, after he had been gagged and stuffed into the back of a getaway car, Klement must have known his dull life would be over before long. It was at this point when his abductor turned to the squirming captive and said, “Ein Laut und du bist tot”.

One word and you’re dead.

This he undoubtedly understood. German was his mother tongue.

A Traveling Salesman’s Problem

Ricardo Klement’s dullness had been apparent for years. He was born in Germany in 1906 under another name, which had been given to him by his mother who named him after his father. Klement had been a failure for most of his life, starting with his education–he was the only one of his five siblings who did not graduate from high school.

Eventually he found work as a traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company of Vienna, a job in which he did not excel. After five years, he was fired.

Klement did not end up gagged in the backseat of a hatchback in Argentina for failing to sell sufficient quantities of vacuum tubes for prices deemed advantageous by his employer. It was his later career contending with what mathematicians call the traveling salesman’s problem that landed him in hot water.

It goes something like this:

Suppose Klement, from his operating base in Vienna (A) had vacuums to sell to purchasers in Salzburg (B), Innsbruck (C), Berlin (D), Hamburg (E), and Munich (F). What is the optimal route to travel between these six cities and back again in the least amount of time with the fewest number of stops? And given other considerations (passport controls, road quality, delays over price haggling), what route is the most economically sensible?

This is not so easy a problem to solve as it first appears. In fact, it has vexed mathematicians ever since it was first formalized (in Vienna in the 1930s) by Karl Menger. We may not have an answer until we reach general purpose quantum computing.

Thankfully for everyone, Klement did not have access to advanced computing capabilities during his next assignment. But he did his best and it turns out that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t half-bad at something: organizing transportation logistics.

Unfortunately for everyone, it was not the logistical challenges of delivering vacuum tubes to paying customers in a timely manner to which he put his average mind, it was the logistics of delivering human beings from transit points across Europe to designated killing centers in German-conquered lands. And it wasn’t passport controls or price-haggling that complicated his planning; there were other urgencies that strained the material resources he needed to do his job. After all, a train reserved for the purpose of transporting Jews and Roma north from Yugoslavia to the death camps in Poland could not simultaneously be used to ferry Wehrmacht armaments east from Germany to the Russian front.

Phenomenal People

Seven months after the birth of the Junior Ricardo Klement and 150 miles to the east, Johanna Arendt (named for her grandmother) was born in Hanover. Soon after her birth, her family relocated to Koningsberg, a Baltic Port on the eastern edge of the German Empire to which the Arendt family had long ties.

That German Koningsberg is now Russian Kaliningrad—located neither in Germany nor in Russia proper but sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania—emphasizes the dramatic transformations that took place in Europe during the lifetimes of Klement and Arendt, through which both differences and parallels between the two lives persisted.

They were not so alike, Klement and Arendt. He was born a Calvinist; she a Jew. He flunked high school and became a Nazi; she got a Ph.D and became the best-regarded intellectual of the twentieth century.

But beyond the contemporaneous circumstances of their births, the two lives share much in common. They both endured changes in living conditions thrust upon their ilk that would compel them to undertake dramatic escapes from Europe across the Atlantic. When conditions for Jews in Germany became intolerable in 1933, Arendt escaped to Paris, and then again to New York after her internment when the Vichy regime took power in France. When living conditions for fugitive Nazis in Europe became intolerable in 1950, Klement made his own dramatic escape across the Atlantic, via Italy, with the aid of a dubious Catholic Bishop.

Upon arriving in the New World, each took a new name. Arendt’s changed only minorly–she anglicized the German Johanna to Hannah, the name by which she has been known ever since. Klement’s name change was more drastic and ephemeral: he existed as Ricardo Klement only from 1950 to 1960. The name he used from his birth in 1906 to 1950 and again from 1960 until his death in 1962 has endured in the public consciousness.

Klement and Arendt were both accused of being something they fervently denied but obviously were. For Klement, it was being a mass murderer. For Arendt, it was being a philosopher–she rejected the label and maintained that her preoccupation was political theory. This distinction lay in her belief that philosophers were hostile to politics (she named Immanuel Kant as an exception) and concerned with nature, whereas a political theorist was concerned with “acting beings”.

On May 23rd, 1960 David Ben-Gurion made the following announcement to the Israeli Legislature,

I wish to announce to the Knesset that a short time ago one of the greatest Nazi war criminals…was discovered by the Israeli security services. He is now in Israel and will soon stand trial under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law.

Ben-Gurion had personally approved the Mossad operation to snatch Klement off the streets of Buenos Aires a few weeks prior. He later approved the decision to invite foreign journalists to witness the televised proceedings.

This is how, nearly a half-century after their births, name changes, and dramatic continental escapes, Klement and Arendt ended up back in the Old World–in the same court room in Jerusalem. Klement sat as a defendant charged with fifteen criminal offenses, including crimes against humanity. Arendt was attending in her capacity as a correspondent for the New Yorker magazine.

There is one additional shared trait to note, the one that will (I promise) bring us back to Broadchurch eventually: a lifelong fascination with the ideas of their fellow countryman; a philosopher of the Enlightenment—Immanuel Kant.

Arendt in Dorset

Arendt’s famous essay subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil is often misinterpreted. It is more than likely that I myself have fallen into that trap, but I’m in good company–lots of people far smarter than me continue to analyze her words and reach wildly different conclusions even now, fifty years after her death. (She did herself no favors by later admitting that “behind that phrase, I held not thesis nor doctrine”.)

Her concept of banal evil was less concerned with the ordinariness of any individual evildoer and more with the behavior of populations living within a very specific political context: totalitarian dictatorships. Arendt believed that totalitarian environments warped the human mind by collapsing the distinction between political and personal. Under such a system, political fervor enters into the homes, minds, and hearts of people, and–crucially–the bureaucracies which underpin society.

Broadchurch does not offer a critique on totalitarianism, but it does explore how individuals and communities are warped under an intense cloud of hysteria. In Broadchurch, the murder investigation collapses the separation between the public and private lives of the townsfolk. (A vicar, a plumber, a hotelier, a telco repairman, a dog-walker, a housekeeper, a captain of the Sea Brigade…)

The show’s flirtation with these ideas arrives near the end of the pilot episode, when it becomes clear that the murder of Daniel Latimer has ignited a mass panic in a small town on the English Channel—opposite the beaches of Normandy—from which the television show gets its name. The two bureaucracies with the most agency, the press and the police, feed into this hysteria. At the end of the pilot episode, DI Hardy initiates a witch hunt on live television,

I’d urge anyone: don’t hide anything, because we will find out. If a member of your family, a friend, or neighbor has been behaving differently in the past days or weeks, please tell the police immediately. There will be no hiding place for Danny’s killer.

Soon after, residents begin approaching the Detectives in public asking if their children are safe. Family and friends point fingers at one another. Neighbors appear outside the homes of suspects ready to commit acts of extrajudicial violence. At one point, DS Miller mentions off-handedly that every home in Broadchurch will be subjected to door-to-door police canvassing.

The press are also caught up in the hysteria. Jonathan Bailey plays a junior reporter (horny, heterosexual) from the local paper, the Broadchurch Echo. Harry Potter school of acting alumnus Carolyn Pickles plays his (less horny, less heterosexual) superior, the lead editor for the paper. It is she who formalizes the joining of police and press into a singular apparatus, with full confidence and without any second thought, declaring, “The Echo works with the police”. In the course of pursuing their Kantian duties—just doing their jobs, looking for the next big scoop—reputations and lives are ruined.

Broadchurch has plenty to say about the lies and betrayals and subsequent truths and reconciliations that emerge from warped human behavior under the pressure of mass panic—again, a challenge that ordinary “whodunit? “ series rarely take on. Between lovers, between teachers and students, between people—both criminal and non. (A vicar, a plumber, a hotelier, a telco repairman, a dog-walker, a housekeeper, a captain of the Sea Brigade…)

Hannah Arendt knew this all too well. She survived the holocaust, but many of her close personal and professional relationships did not—most notably with her mentor and former lover, Martin Heidegger, a noted philosopher of ethics. Heidegger exchanged his dalliance with Arendt for a dalliance with fascism. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, the same year Arendt fled for Paris.

The pair corresponded again after the war, but Arendt never publicly forgave him for the betrayal.

Kant in Jerusalem

Immanuel Kant had been dead for a century and a half before Klement repeatedly used his ideas on the witness stand to defend his actions. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, published in 1785, outlined the categorical imperative, Kant’s framework for a universal moral law in two parts: first, that people should judge their own behaviors based on the theoretical acceptability (and legality) of everyone else doing the same. If you are tempted to steal someone’s purse on the bus, ask “would I accept a world where everyone can steal everyone else’s purse on the bus?” If that world where everyone does what you are contemplating doing is unacceptable to you, then that act is immoral.

Second, that people possess intrinsic value and are always an end and never a means. In other words, don’t use people for personal gain–that’s immoral.

After taking the witness stand in Jerusalem, Klement insisted that he had never done anything wrong. He claimed his work as a middle-tier floor manager for what Arendt called “corpse factories” was perfectly in line with the principles of Kantian ethics: he was simply doing his duty; he was just obeying the law; he did his job as best he could.

This defense represented a gross misinterpretation of Kantian philosophy, and no one attending the trial was more suited to the task of pointing this out than Hannah Arendt. In her mind, the argument only held under a twisted definition of Kant’s ideas present under the conditions of totalitarianism:

Act in such a way that the Fuhrer, if he knew your action, would approve of it.

Pity the philosopher who does not live to see his name invoked in defense of atrocities on live television.

Thoughtless Evil

Klement and the Broadchurch Butcher do not represent culpability in equal crimes. He was never accused of direct personal responsibility for the entirety of the holocaust, but Klement was a willing participant in a system that carried out the murder of at least 1,499,999 more children than the Butcher ever did.

What they shared was the inability to reflect thoughtfully on their actions, and the ability to shock viewers who were expecting cunning villains with clear motives and outwardly aberrant souls.

Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Klement as clinically average and fit for trial. “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” said one of the medical examiners. Another had found that Klement’s whole psychological outlook, including his relationship with his wife and children, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters and friends, was “not only normal but most desirable.”

Before trial in Jerusalem, Arendt half-expected to find a criminal mastermind and fully expected to find someone whose actions were driven by a hatred for Jews. Instead she found a dull technocrat and argued (controversially) that his actions were more attributable to his conformity to law and the thoughtless mechanics of a cog-in-a-fascist-machine—not dyed-in-the-wool antisemitism. Her reckoning with these facts is worth quoting at length,

I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontested evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous but the doer…was quite ordinary, commonplace and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or specific evil motives and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial throughout the pretrial Police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.

Before trial in Broadchurch, DI Hardy interrogates the suspected Butcher expecting to find a sinister paedophile. That may be the most likely explanation, but the showrunners present little evidence to support it. When pressed for details, the suspect shouts “If I can’t understand it, why should you?”

Later, Danny’s Father pays the Butcher a visit in custody, speaking to them through a viewing hatch in a prison cell door. The exchange is as follows,

Butcher: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Mark Latimer: You didn’t have it in you to kill your own kid, eh? You had to take mine?

Butcher: It was an accident. I put him on the beach so you’d know. I could have left him at sea!

Mark Latimer: Can you even hear yourself? Do you hear what you’re saying?

Butcher: He only came to me in the first place because you hit him–you were no sort of parent!

Mark Latimer: You did things to him, didn’t you? I know that they say you didn’t, but you must have.

Butcher: I swear, honestly, I never did. That’s not me, I only ever cared for him. You have to believe that.

Mark Latimer: I thought I’d hate you. But seeing you in here, you’re not even worth that. I just pity you, because you’re nothing.

From apology to inculpability to generosity to blame to denial in less time than it took me to get from cheese to England to Broadchurch.

Mercifully, the Butcher abandoned the boy’s body on a beach so his family would find him. Surely Danny’s father should be grateful to his son’s killer for sparing him the agony of a long search for a body at the bottom of the English channel?

It is clear from Arendt’s reporting that had she been given the chance to address Klement in his prison cell, she would have asked him the same question Danny’s father asks the Butcher, “Can you even hear yourself? Do you hear what you’re saying?” Arendt never expressed pity for Klement’s predicament, but in a way she seems to feel bad for him:

…everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.

Sins of Omission

We did not care if we died today or tomorrow, and there were times when we cursed the morning that found us still alive.

So said Ricardo Klement, describing the indifference to their own existence he and his Nazi collaborators experienced when surrounded by death at every turn during the height of their grave crime spree.

But these words could just as easily be attributed to Mark and Beth Latimer, whose all-encompassing grief in the aftermath of losing their son is a central focus of all three seasons of Broadchurch. Survivor dynamics and indirect victimhood are key to the brilliance of the show’s narrative and a key reason I find the Butcher such a compelling character. Their crime of commission (actively doing the murder) is bad enough, but through their omission–their passive silence during the course of the murder investigation and subsequent proceedings–other acts of evil are enabled, including the death of a stalwart community member who is harassed by a capricious tabloid press.

There they were all along, right under the noses of the Detectives, watching from the shadows as suspicions fell and accusations were hurled at one person and then the next as the season progresses.

It is only after the final unmasking of the criminal that viewers understand the extent of the damage caused by their cowardly attempt to evade justice through silence. In Season Two, the Butcher’s plea bargain falls apart, forcing the town into a grueling trial in which many of the already-suffering town residents are forced to testify to their own horrific experiences–traumatizing them and further straining marriages and friendships all over again.

This domain of character study is rarely attempted by other crime dramas–another example of the singular ambition of Broadchurch.

Arendt notes a similar phenomena occurring at trial in Jerusalem, describing witnesses (survivors of starvation and camp depravity) who were unable to provide coherent testimony having been overcome by the emotion of their ordeals. The courtroom itself became a place where suffering was reenacted rather than adjudicated. In the words of his state-appointed defense attorney, Klement “acknowledges guilt before God, but not before the law”. The mere fact that the Latimer case moves to trial is evidence that the Butcher shared this perception of their own crimes.

Aside from the millions who survived the killings in Europe, Klement had other indirect victims. Victimhoods he–and the other A-list Nazis who escaped to South America–created by the mere act of existing in exile.

Pity the blameless and blue-eyed sunburned Schneiders of Cochabomba, of whom the neighbors have been a little suspicious ever since.

Noumenal People

Where Broadchurch and its Butcher remain quiet on Kantian ethics, they offer a great commentary on Kantian epistemology. Kant believed that humans make sense of reality through perception: the five senses, and our experiences of space, time, and causality–all filtered through the human mind. These observations and experiences represent what Kant calls phenomena, a word we use much in the same way today: things that happen; people and events we can observe.

But Kant believed in another side of reality, in which things have an essence–an objective state of existence that we cannot perceive or experience or put into words. These inner essences (or “things-in-themselves”) he called noumena, a word no normal person will ever use in conversation. (If that happens you’ll want me there; it reminds me of a great television show I’ve been meaning to tell you about.)

Why do killers kill? Why does anyone do the things that they do and make the choices they make? When we ask and they answer, should we believe their stories? Will the story they tell us be different than the one they tell themselves, and would it be any more or less true?

Kant believed answers to these questions of the noumenal self—the believability of stories told to ourselves and others–would forever elude outside observers. Maybe we tell ourselves stories in order to live, to help us understand our own inner worlds, to find meaning in the chaos of our lived experiences. But sometimes we tell other people stories also with the expressed purpose of living: Klement tried this on the witness stand and it didn’t work. No one believed his stories; he was found guilty on all 15 counts of his indictment and hanged a year later.

The Final Resolution

The Butcher ends season one not as a killer-on-the-loose but as a taciturn, wimpy loser awaiting Her Majesty’s justice. Their decision not to invoke Kantian ethics at any point during legal proceedings gives viewers of Broadchurch far less material to work with than Klement–who seemed to never shut the fuck up–gave Hannah Arendt to aid in her deduction of the villain’s underlying motives and inner world.

But the Butcher tells a few stories of their own. “I wanted him to love me”. “I wanted something that was mine”. “I felt like he needed me”. “I only ever cared for him”. “It was an accident”.

Viewers are left to contend with these matters unresolved.

But the Broadchurch showrunners never promised we would see the inner workings of evil; they never promised their villain would be interesting or easily definable. In fact, they suggested that we not ask at all.

DI Hardy: Why do you need a category?

DS Miller: Because I need to understand.

DI Hardy: We’ll never be sure…People are unknowable. You can never really know what goes on in someone else’s heart.

[Disembodied voice of Kant]: The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.

What are people, really?

The vicar is an alcoholic insomniac. The plumber is a poacher and the hotelier an adulterer. The telco repairman? He pretends to be a clairvoyant and pretends not to be a grifter. The dog-walker and the housekeeper are the same person, but whether we call her Susan or Elaine changes from episode to episode. The Captain of the Sea Brigade has a history with underaged girls, but he may not be what he seems. People rarely are.

Labels and categories help us understand, but they aren’t the whole truth–they can’t explain with any satisfaction what drives people, what motivates them, and why they may or may not have committed murder—we’ll never know for sure.

As for Broadchurch, what is it really? It’s a British television show. And an English crime drama. An Old World mystery. Original. Captivating. Bingeworthy.

A thing-unto-itself.