The Jetty may be just another crime thriller, but it’s also so much more. In fact, I’ll say it — British television is a little oversaturated when it comes to crime thrillers. There are a lot of them! But every now and then, a new crime series stands out from the crowd and simply demands to be watched. The Jetty is one of these shows.
The show follows Ember (Jenna Coleman), a detective from Lancashire, who finds herself looking into the decades-old cold case of a missing girl. When she learns that her own may be wrapped up in her disappearance, she is forced to re-examine her own teenage years. “She starts to question whether some of the things she thought were normal and okay back then actually were, in retrospect,” said series creator Cat Jones to the BBC.
An exceptional thriller, The Jetty manages to use the classic crime thriller blueprint to explore the complexities and intricacies of sexism and misogyny in modern Britain: it confronts everything from passing “joking” sexist comments to violence against women and, in a rare feat, actually manages to show exactly how these seemingly harmless comments are directly linked to violence against women and girls. As Jones puts it, “one can be an incubator for the other.”
Ben Blackall
What happened in The Jetty season 1?
Season 1 sees Ember learning about her late husband Mac’s past. She discovers that he might have been connected to the disappearance of a local girl 17 years ago. Meanwhile, she and her daughter, Hannah (Ruby Stokes), are still grieving Mac’s death. It’s emotionally complex and difficult and confronting stuff.
In the very dramatic conclusion to season 1, Ember finally learns what happened to Amy Knightley the night she went missing — without giving it all away, it turns out that she was even more involved in the mystery than she knew.