Yes, there are too many crime dramas, but this one is as good as Broadchurch

Under Salt Marsh ★★★★½

There are too many British crime dramas. I know it, you know it, and almost certainly the people who keep on commissioning them know it. But if there’s an unending flow of six-part series about grim discoveries, dogged investigators and what they uncover about troubled communities, that also means the best entries can’t help but stand out. That’s what Under Salt Marsh does. Set in rural north Wales and made with exquisite care, the show is exceptional. Put it alongside season one of Broadchurch.

Created and lead-directed by British filmmaker Claire Oakley, Under Salt Marsh captures harsh, striking beauty: the storm-wracked ocean off the isolated town of Morfa Halen, cloud-covered valleys and the face of Kelly Reilly. The Yellowstone star plays Jackie Ellis, a school teacher whose pale skin and red hair stand out on her nocturnal travails like a beacon – whether it’s help or a warning is unclear. When she discovers the body of a student in a ditch, her suffering is amplified. Something similar happened three years prior.

As a mystery, the show is measured and sombre. Information about the case and those involved, including Jackie, is parcelled out carefully. You will see the reaction before discovering the cause, as is apparent when Jackie discovers that the district police have dispatched Eric Bull (Rafe Spall) as the lead detective. Their history is fractious, but their familiarity is obvious. Close proximity, whether as colleagues, friends or family, is always a double-edged sword here.

There is a great deal of threads tangled together, but the show can hold them all because it delivers a palpable sense of community, geographically and socially. I can’t remember a British show that looked this evocative – colours carry a deep resonance, while the landscape has a panoramic heft. The traditional folk instruments in Ben Salisbury and Suvi-Eeva Äikäs’ score bestow a suitable menace to a locale where outsiders are treated with suspicion and the town elder, Soloman Bevan (Jonathan Pryce), marshals the residents.

Even as they’re torn apart by the child’s death, Morfa Halen is preparing for a destructive storm crossing the Atlantic. The town’s hope, despite expert advice, is that an under-construction seawall will protect them. It’s a telling reflection of the barriers individual characters put up, whether to hide from the truth or intimacy.

Reilly and Spall give lived-in performances that are opposed but complementary: Jackie is an exposed nerve, Eric tamped down. Getting the answers they need might destroy them. Those are gripping dramatic stakes.