It's just a pity the mortar on this second season is already seems to be cracking.
The soap operatics are getting sudsier by the segment and the contrivances are starting to mount up.
Read our review of the second season opener of Broadchurch here
Last week's exhumation of Danny Latimer's body for a second post-mortem was for nought, apparently, other than for a scene of graveside agony with grieving mother Beth tearing a strip off policewoman-wife-of-accused, Ellie Miller.
An angry encounter between the two women seems to becoming compulsory with each episode.
Last night the show again ended with one, the aggravation causing pregnant Beth's waters to break, a move that surely is an old soap trope.
At least Beth didn't go into labour in the witness box earlier in the day when so upset, she was forced to ask that age-old question - "who is on trial here?"- as her family life was picked over by defence counsel.
This time Beth was angry at Ellie because in giving her husband a good kicking at the police station after he confessed to the boy's murder in season one, she's effectively helped that confession being ruled inadmissible.
Beth made the point that as a copper Ellie would have known of the possible ramifications. That made me wonder, why didn't Charlotte Rampling's prosecutor Joceyln Knight suggest the same thing when the confession and beating question came up?
Too late. It's out and that brick wall has lost one of it cornerstones. And we're meant to be losing faith in wise old Jocelyn too because it's evident she's losing her sight and isn't telling anyone.
Meanwhile, there are hints that ruthless defence counsel Sharon Bishop (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) has her own background dramas too.
Oh and another thing, is having your QCs - a black one and a white one at that - named after chess pieces really that clever?
The rapidly progressing trial isn't the only storyline, of course.
The other involves DI Alec Hardy's previous Sandbrook case and Claire Ashworth, the wife of the acquitted killer he has put into unofficial witness protection in the seaside hamlet.
But with her estranged hubby Lee now hanging about the place and being a menace, Hardy has decided the best course of action is to let Claire and Lee have a face-to-face chat, hoping he'll confess ... er, what?
Matters of double jeopardy aside - if you put psycho-stalker hubby with wife who testified against him in a room together, isn't something bad going to happen?
Especially if the room is in Miller's old house where she's not been back since her own possibly psycho husband was arrested?
Fancy that. Something bad did happen. Lee abducted Claire - or she might have run away with him, having described the chap as "my drug" in an earlier conversation with Ellie.
And now Hardy's attempts to solve his career-ruining case have badly backfired on him, he might he about to lose another. And Miller is, of course, dreadfully upset again at how things are turning out.
Still, if Broadchurch is now gone from murder mystery with a heart - one which showed how such a killing could rip apart a small community - to a high-class soap, so far it's still compelling, if a much cheaper thrill than it was in season one.
Oh and the scenery is much nicer than Coro too.
