Anna Friel carries this ITV noir as Marcella Backland, a London detective whose husband Nicholas Pinnock walks out after fifteen years, pitching her back into the Grove Park murders she abandoned a decade earlier. Each blackout she suffers leaves bloody gaps in her timeline, and the first series keeps both Marcella and the audience unsure whether the killer she seeks is herself. The show films around Docklands towers and Dover’s white cliffs, giving the Thames-side rain-soaked palette Rosenfeldt imported from his Swedish hit The Bridge.
Series two widens the nightmare: a child-killer case drags in a washed-up 1970s rock god, a tech millionaire and witchcraft sigils, while custody lawyers pick apart Marcella’s sanity and her ex’s new fiancée moves into the family home. The blackouts intensify, memory loss becomes evidence tampering, and Ray Panthaki’s long-suffering DI Rav Sangha watches his boss unravel in real time.
By series three, Marcella has faked her own death, resurfaced in Belfast as Keira Devlin and infiltrated the glossy, brutal world of the Maguire crime dynasty. Shot in Northern Ireland and released worldwide by Netflix, the final run turns the psychological screw further: undercover work doubles as self-erasure, and the same dissociation that once endangered her children becomes her only cover. Friel’s Emmy-winning performance holds the centre as the plot loops through identity swaps, plastic-surgery clinics and shipping-container body counts, ending on 16 March 2021 with Marcella walking away from both her names.
Production Details
ITV1 / 3 Seasons / 24 Episodes / 2016
Created by: Hans Rosenfeldt
Writer(s): Hans Rosenfeldt, Nicola Larder, David Allison
Producer(s): Andrew Woodhead
Cinematography: Kate Reid, Sam Care
Main Cast
Anna Friel as Marcella Backland
Nicholas Pinnock as Jason Backland
Ray Panthaki as DI Rav Sangha
Sinéad Cusack as Sylvie Gibson
Nina Sosanya as DCI Laura Porter
Jamie Bamber as DI Tim Williamson
Harry Lloyd as Henry Gibson
Ian Puleston-Davies as Peter Cullen
Robert Whitelock as Guy Roberts
Laura Carmichael as Maddy Stevenson
Charlie Covell as DC Alex Dier
Jack Doolan as DC Mark Travis
