Shetland, review: this season’s clear, pacy plot is almost as elegant as Ashley Jensen’s knitwear

A strong start for BBC One’s popular drama after the last series was let down by outlandish plots about Satanic sheep slaughter and incest

4/5
I always make time to read the comments under Telegraph TV reviews, and would like to thank a reader named John Lewis for his unimprovable description of Douglas Henshall in Shetland (BBC One) as “a grumpy potato in a pea coat”. 
Mr Lewis was thus in favour of Ashley Jensen’s arrival as Henshall’s replacement last year, and here’s hoping he enjoys the new series which started this week. Jensen plays DI Ruth Calder, a native Shetlander who had a spell in the Met but is now back for good. While she’s no grumpy potato, she isn’t exactly brimming with good cheer. But TV detectives never are. She does have good hair and some lovely jumpers. 
Anyway, in the last series she was let down by an over-complicated plot. One thread was about satanic sheep slaughter and another about incest, which covered most of the clichés about remote rural communities being populated by weirdos. So let’s give a cautious welcome to series nine, which appears to have a strong but more simple storyline. 
The episode opened in dramatic style, with Calder in a hostage situation with a young man who had just killed his brother. In parallel, a friend of Tosh (Alison O’Donnell) disappeared with her young son, hours after she was seen arguing with her estranged husband. It didn’t take long for a link to be made between the two cases. 
The writing was clear, the pacing was good, and my only dislike was the use of a traumatised child as a plot device, which is a lazy way to inject drama. If the last series established Calder as the lead character – back story, personality, difficult relationship with her church-minister brother – then this series is more of an equal pairing between Calder and the newly promoted Tosh. 
It’s a dynamic that works well, although you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for the male officers, Sandy (Steven Robertson) and Billy (Lewis Howden), whose roles consist of little more than chipping in now and again with offers of assistance or tea. Still, there are two promising guest roles: Vincent Regan as a craggy fisherman and Ian Hart as a new arrival whose reason for visiting the island doesn’t quite ring true. There are six episodes; let’s hope they don’t lose the plot again.