Gracepoint 1×01 Review

Gracepoint’s premiere episode falls flat

Gracepoint is a new murder mystery drama from FOX and remade from the UK version of the show Broadchurch. This now-American whodunnit comes from Chris Chibnall, the creator and writer of the first episode that he hopes to change to fit American audiences. Gracepoint is set in a seaside town in northern California and the show focuses on what happens to the town of Gracepoint when the unthinkable happens: a young boy is murdered and left for dead on the beach. The story follows mismatched detectives, Ellie Miller (Anna Gunn) and Emmett Carver (David Tennant) as they work on the murder of a local boy and Miller’s son’s best friend, Danny Solano. The case explores how this young boy’s life and death touched so many lives and how everyone in the town is affected in one way or another by his death and the subsequent investigation. Anyone could have done it, and in a small town like Gracepoint, how long will it take before everyone’s secrets are uncovered? Let’s discuss what we know so far from episode one.

Unfamiliar family members

When the show introduces the small beach town of Gracepoint, they really go all out in illustrating this to their audience. We meet the Solano family, the parents of Danny who don’t know their son is dead yet, but they already seem like a rather disjointing family unit. The mother, Beth (Virginia Kull), and father, Mark (Michael Peña), already don’t seem like they know each other or have a chemistry beyond two people that share a house. Their connection resonates something closer to roommates and their daughter, Chloe, a stereotypical teen. The first problem with the family’s initial scene in the kitchen, aside from lack of chemistry between the adults, is when Chloe sits down at the kitchen table claiming she has a fever. No teenager, no matter their age or gender, will get out of bed, get dressed, put on full makeup, and then claim they are ill. That is just illogical and already bothersome in this stereotypical set-up of a suburban family.

“Watch them. Everyone in the room, every movement, anything doesn’t make sense, tell me.” ~Det. Emmett Carver

Let’s pretend that our willing suspension of disbelief is still in tact and move on to Mark Solano making his way through downtown Gracepoint. As much as the show tries, it still seems like a Dawson’s Creek-esque perfect, small beach town where everyone knows each other and involved in one another’s lives, except they try a little too hard the whole set up seems forced and unrealistic. The murdered son, Danny, goes wildlife viewing in the morning before school and yet they don’t even specify what wildlife they’re recording, they just keep using the same general term and assume that it’s perfectly normal for a twelve year old boy to just go to a water-related activity group in the mornings before school.

Everyone grieves in different ways, but…

The acting is rather overdramatic and trying too hard as well. The only convincing characters who have more than one defining trait are Emmett Carver (David Tennant), Ellie Miller (Anna Gunn), and Owen Burke (Kevin Zegers), but perhaps that’s because they’re the only ones not playing tropes or caricatures of people instead of real humans with rounded out lives. Over the course of the episode, some of the actors settle into themselves a bit more like the father, Mark Solano (Michael Peña). Once he saw his son’s dead body, he had a heartbreaking scene unable to touch or hold him in his grief, though his scene before featured him not reacting at all to the news of his sons death.

“I feel so far away from myself.” ~ Beth Solano

Additionally, Virginia Kull’s performance as Beth Solano was rather over the top in both seeing her son’s body on the beach as well as her reaction to the confirmation of her son’s death. Kull did, however, play the mixture of anger, guilt, and grief quite well once Beth was asking her husband why he didn’t check on Danny like he always did. Her character’s portrayal was further strengthened by a scene with Gunn at the beach where she talked of memories of her deceased son and it was a very touching look at Beth’s connection with her son. This scene at the beach was, by far, more moving than the rest of the families scenes combined and it would have been nice to see these deeper, more realistic feelings in reaction to Danny’s death rather than the previous scenes that lacked emotion and connection for the viewer.

Cagney and Lacey

Hopefully in further episodes, the show will delve deeper into these characters to allow us to attach more emotionally to them and relate to what they’re going through. In attempting to cover the whole town of characters, the introductions fell short at times, so very few characters are actually identifiable to us at this point. The most notable characters, as mentioned earlier, are the leads, Ellie Miller and Emmett Carver, and thankfully the show has already given us a good insight into what defines each of them. Ellie is clearly a loving mother who is very close to everyone in the town and almost too close to Danny Solano to detach and investigate, but her occasionally over-emotional attachment to the case might be what balances the duo she makes with Carver.

“I came here to do a job. Rosemont doesn’t make me vulnerable, it makes me the best cop you could hope to find” ~Det. Emmett Carver

Miller and Carver create this dichotomy that isn’t necessarily good cop-bad cop but more attached versus detached. Carver is already a bit of an enigma as the city man who stole Miller’s job, but the added mystery to him is his pithy manner with his coworkers. As a man of few words, he often says them gruffly, yelling at reporters and even Miller throughout the episode, it already raises question as to what he’s so angry about. Multiple characters mention a case from his past, ‘Rosemont,’ though we have yet to discover what went wrong there, it like has something to do with why he’s in Gracepoint and why he’s ever so grumpy. Miller and Carver couldn’t be more different, which is why this unlikely and cantankerous duo might be so amusing to watch on screen together. As many times as Carver put Miller down and said ‘no’ to her, she still stayed strong and fighting through the episode, while also dealing with the burden of telling her son his best friend was killed. Miller is sure to be one of the strongest characters on the show and very well portrayed by Gunn. Hopefully her character will bring a bit more happiness into Carver’s world and rub off some of her good, strong attitude off on him. The pair are definitely one to watch in the coming episodes, provided the most comical of exchanges even in the darkest of circumstances.

FINAL VERDICT

It’s a shaky first episode with quite a few falters in terms of believability, but the set up is there for a promising mystery. It may take some time for the show to find its footing and for the actors to settle into their characters more comfortably, but there are already a few suspects everyone surely has in their mind. As the story continues, there will likely be a few more shifty and exciting scenes to watch such as Tom Miller erasing his hard drive and deleting texts from Danny. If the show continues to try to prove it’s small-town vibe, though, the mystery is going to fall flat just like the emotional aspects of this episode. In attempts to introduce everyone and everything at once, the performances came out a little hollow and not as moving for me personally. Something about the scenes fell flat and some of it could have to do with the rather odd music set to the backdrop of these intentionally moving scenes. What I’d like to see more of are raw emotions getting the better of characters, more suspense, more lingering shots in order to allow the audience to breath in some of the emotions we are supposed to be feeling. In attempts to fit everything in, the timing and pacing of the dialogue and some scenes felt too quick and didn’t have time for the audience to react to before moving on. Pilot episodes can always have shaky starts, but there is definitely potential for things to get far more exciting and high-strung as the episodes go on.

Questions, Comments, Concerns…

• David Tennant’s accent isn’t actually that bad
• Who does everyone suspect so far?
• $20 says Danny’s dad is having an affair
• What the frick is Tom Miller deleting from his phone and hard drive???
• Why the hell did that female reporter take Danny’s monkey from the beach memorial??????
• For a small town, there are a lot of sketchy people in it