British television has a peculiar obsession with picturesque villages where everybody knows everybody, nobody tells the truth, and the local police are forever dragging corpses out of places that look like postcards. Cooper & Fry, Channel 5's adaptation of Stephen Booth's crime novels, embraces this tradition with the enthusiasm of a gravedigger who's just discovered a fresh patch of earth.
Set in Derbyshire's Peak District, the four-episode first season (now streaming on BritBox) introduces DC Ben Cooper (Robert James-Collier), a genial local detective whose knowledge of the community is matched by the emotional baggage of his father's unsolved murder, and DC Diane Fry (Mandip Gill), a guarded newcomer transferred from Leeds who'd apparently prefer to keep the entire population at arm's length.
He's the hometown boy who knows everyone's business. She's the outsider who doesn't particularly want to know it. Naturally, they're partners.
The central dynamic is familiar, but it has potential. Cooper's local knowledge makes him sensitive to the relationships and grudges that shape the community. Fry's distance gives her a different perspective, allowing her to question assumptions that Cooper might take for granted. Their contrasting approaches provide the show's most promising source of tension.
James-Collier gives Cooper an appealing warmth, while Gill plays Fry with a defensive intensity that hints at a complicated personal history, including an abusive former partner. Unfortunately, Fry's guardedness sometimes feels more like a permanent setting than a fully developed personality. The show establishes the differences between its detectives more convincingly than it develops their relationship.
The investigations provide plenty of atmospheric murder-and-moorland entertainment.
The opening episode begins with human remains discovered on a remote farm, including a headless body. The investigation draws Cooper and Fry into a mystery involving local history, rural traditions, and unsettling folklore.
Episode two combines the disappearance of a teenage girl, Laura Kirkham, with the anniversary of Cooper's father's unsolved murder, bringing his personal grief into the professional investigation.
In the third episode, a man is beaten to death at a disused quarry, leading the detectives into a conflict over the future of Withens, a village threatened with demolition by a water company seeking to redevelop the area.
The season concludes with the murder of photographer Jenny Westlake among the stones of the Nine Virgins, a tourist attraction whose picturesque setting becomes another backdrop for rural darkness.
The Peak District is the show's most dependable asset. Remote farms, abandoned quarries, and ancient landmarks give the mysteries a distinctive atmosphere. But British television has spent so many decades suggesting that beautiful countryside conceals terrible secrets that the mist occasionally feels like a contractual obligation.
Ultimately, Cooper & Fry is an atmospheric, occasionally compelling detective drama that hasn't quite figured out what makes its central partnership distinctive.
The ingredients are there: a compelling landscape, two contrasting detectives, unresolved personal histories, and enough suspicious locals to populate a small encyclopedia of criminal behavior.
But atmosphere isn't character development, and a gruesome discovery isn't automatically a gripping mystery. And the first season establishes a promising foundation without consistently rising above the conventions of British rural crime television.
The hills are beautiful, the dead keep turning up, and Cooper and Fry have plenty of work ahead of them.
The real mystery is whether their partnership can become as compelling as the crimes they investigate.