On the face of it, the BBC’s new crime series The Jetty might feel like another police procedural. It follows an effective yet flawed detective as she investigates an arson in a foggy lakeside Lancashire town.
But just like the cold, ominous lake waters at the show’s heart, The Jetty contains much more depth, and its core mystery quickly ripples out to include a missing person cold case and a sexual predator grooming underage girls in the village. As these three seemingly disparate crimes tumble into each other, Detective Ember Manning, played by Jenna Coleman, is forced to confront questions about her own past.
“It’s complex and sits in the grey area,” says Coleman over Zoom. “It doesn’t tie things up in a neat bow, and I really love that. It’s not trying to solve anything. It’s trying to ask questions.”
Coleman is best known for playing a young Queen Victoria in the period drama Victoria and companion Clara Oswald on Doctor Who in the early 2010s. She says she wanted to be involved with the show as soon as she read the script.
“I instantly saw her and that’s always the telltale sign of if the part is right for you,” she says. “But also, reading through, I really felt uncomfortable. I found it very probing. It raises a lot of questions and leaves them there on a plate for you. As the audience, you have to do a lot of the work yourself.”
It’s not surprising Coleman had such a visceral reaction. A preview of the first of its four episodes shows The Jetty is incredibly cinematic. A grim beauty shimmers on top of the lake and its murky secrets and a foreboding mood ratchets up the tension.
The nature of her investigation leads Manning to have a personal reckoning.
“What’s interesting about Ember is that she doesn’t want to look in the mirror, but the story she’s investigating forces her to. She’s someone who wants to live in the dark and doesn’t want to come into the light,” Coleman says.
“But each step she makes on the case, it’s getting brighter and brighter, and she’s being forced to look. As a character, it brings up a really interesting energy as she tries to remain ignorant until her past totally unravels.”
This aspect of the show was fascinating to Coleman. Nostalgia is usually associated with warm fuzzies, whereas on The Jetty, those reflections almost cause a crisis of identity. When asked if she has personally questioned past decisions, she laughs and says, “Of course! Who hasn’t?
“I think everyone has those moments – from the small scale to the big scale. You know, you have your own lens on your life and what’s so interesting about The Jetty is that for Ember, suddenly the lens changes position and reshifts and then she sees herself in a completely different perspective. That’s a really interesting thing as a human. It’s that constant reshifting and reframing, which I think will feel very familiar to people.”
Coleman is the star of The Jetty, and an executive producer, but she hasn’t yet seen a completed episode. Although that may be by design.
“I haven’t seen a finished episode yet,” she says. “I’m going to watch it with my granny when it goes out on screen.”
The Jetty begins on Sky Go and Neon on tonight (Sunday, July 21), with new episodes weekly.
