The Detail

I was looking forward to this series because it was going to be groundbreaking: two female police detectives with a female as their boss. After about four episodes, I began to see a familiar pattern.

Where had I seen those details before?

It came to me tonight as I was trying to go to sleep…

Scott & Bailey

As someone who has lived in the UK, I am always interested in TV shows that get shown on PBS or TVO. This particular show was originally telecast on ITV. I watched it because of Suranne Jones, who used to be on Coronation Street as Karen McDonald.

She and another Corrie alumna, Sally Lindsay, thought up the premise of the show and pitched it to the network.

I wouldn’t have put two-and-two together except for an opening segment in the first episode.

The Restaurant Dumping

In The Detail, the younger detective has gotten herself dolled up to meet her lover in a posh restaurant, thinking that he was going to propose to her. The man, a lawyer, tells her its over, instead. She is devastated. She hands over the keys to their condo, and leaves.

Later, she uses the License Bureau to find out where he is based, goes to his upscale home and meets his wife, discovering that he has a child. She uses this information to blackmail him into signing over the condo lease to her.

Much Later in the series, pillow talk from their time together is used by him to undermine her court testimony at his client’s trial: it was what she was quoted as saying to her prisoner when he was first locked up in the jail cell at the police station that first made me go: “Where have I heard that before?”

The same setup, and subsequent events, played out in Scott & Bailey, although the restaurant wasn’t as posh, and he was a barrister.

Conclusion

I sincerely hope the producers of The Detail give a nod to the creators of Scott & Bailey in the closing credits of their show.

And I will look forward to how they continue to ‘translate’ a Manchester story to Toronto.

There really is nothing new under the sun.