Chasing Shadows

The trouble with Chasing Shadows' 'sort-of-autistic' hero
Reece Shearsmith plays a blunt, obsessive detective in ITV’s new missing persons drama, but this diagnostic vagueness does a disservice to people who really have Asperger’s

To the presumable bemusement of those affected by the condition, the autism spectrum has become a fashionable fictional accessory. The daddy of the genre, Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, remains a long-running stage hit, while a protagonist with something like Asperger’s features in another best-selling book, Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project.

Two of the most successful recent TV crime series – Sherlock and The Bridge – involve detectives who lack emotional empathy: Saga Norén, played by Sofia Helin in the Swedish-Danish co-production, is intuitive but rude, while Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s investigator seems to have a far more psychiatrically precise isolationism and obsessive compulsion than he had in the original stories.

And now, perhaps as a result of the obsessive list-making of previous hits to which TV executives can be prone, comes Chasing Shadows (tonight, 9pm, ITV), in which Reece Shearsmith is DS Sean Stone, a detective who, kicked out of the murder squad for foolishly telling the truth at a press conference, is transferred to work with a missing persons charity, identifying the vanished who are most at risk of being killed, where he ignores colleagues, obsessionally categorises case-files and, when asked whether he has any idea how the parents of a possible murder victim must be feeling, bluntly replies: “No.”

This is an extreme instance of the increasing problem in TV crime fiction of telling the murder cops and the murderers apart – and Shearsmith is perfectly cast to continue this narrative trend. Having appeared as the uxoricidal Malcolm Webster in ITV’s The Widower earlier this year, he becomes surely one of the few actors to have played a serial killer (or, as DS Stone would pedantically insist, “multiple murderer”) and a detective in successive TV projects. And Ruth Hattersley (Alex Kingston), the missing persons-searcher who becomes his sidekick, subliminally makes the connection when she tells her mother that Stone is “as close to an actual psycho as you can get”.

In common with Haddon, Simsion and the writers of The Bridge, Rob Williams’ scripts for Chasing Shadows never specify the precise wiring of the investigator’s mind. When Ruth complains to a police colleague of Stone’s that she finds him intolerably brusque, she is reassured: “I’m not entirely sure if it’s medical but it’s not personal.” Such diagnostic vagueness avoids the objection of trivialising or misrepresenting a specific condition, although it still leaves writers open to the charge of using sort-of-autism as a behavioural flavouring, like Morse’s taste in beer or Sherlock’s violin.

And, although the moment when Stone solemnly reassures Ruth that he does not find her at all attractive will be familiar to readers of The Rosie Project, at other times the script seems to give the character something more like Tourette’s Syndrome, as, apart from giving the journalists the truth rather than the official line, he also screams “Liar!” or “Stop Lying!” at suspects during interrogations and passes on to parents of missing children devastating guesses about their offspring’s history with drugs or sex.

Just as “consumption” became a general cause of weakness or death in Victorian novels, there’s a sense that writers of crime-fiction are trying to medicalise maverick individuality – always an important element of TV detectives – into a generically insulting but brilliant demeanour trawled from Google-searches on autism, Asperger’s, Tourette’s and anger management.

The other problem is that, if you make a character’s mannerism his manner, you are stuck with it in every scene. Whereas Morse could occasionally be shown sipping real ale or listening to Wagner LPs, thereby demonstrating his idiosyncrasies while also leaving time for cases to be investigated, DS Stone is permanently caught in his spectrum, which also never seems to vary in intensity. (Saga, in The Bridge, has a more nuanced and spasmodic disaffection.)

Nervously realising that no modern cop could possibly get away with this behaviour – unless, interestingly, he admitted to a diagnosis of Asperger’s, which the scriptwriter doesn’t want to give him – the show puts Stone up on a disciplinary charge in episode two, but has to have it thrown out with unconvincing rapidity in order to get back to the murder plot.

And, although Chasing Shadows is currently a one-off four-part drama – with a single continuous narrative, divertingly turning on the on-line risks to teenagers – all-new detective dramas have dreams of becoming a returning series and, in season two of Chasing Shadows, the only possibilities would be that Stone had been murdered by his colleagues or that falling in love with Ruth Hattersley had “cured” him, in which case there would be no character left for Shearsmith to play. Puppies are not just for Christmas, and the autism spectrum is not just a dramatic personality quirk.