Marshall’s Comeback Series Coming Back

Here’s good news: the cozyish BBC-TV crime drama Beyond Paradise, a Death in Paradise spin-off, has been renewed for a second season.

This show debuted in late February on both BBC One and the international streaming service BritBox. It stars Kris Marshall as accident-prone Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, a role he originally developed over three seasons on Death in Paradise. The spin-off finds Goodman having departed the Caribbean island of Saint Marie and moved with his fiancée, Martha Lloyd (Sally Bretton), to her hometown: fictional Shipton Abbott, near England’s Devon coast. There she has opened a small restaurant specializing in locally sourced fare, while he’s joined the local police force, leading a quirky squad that includes Detective Sergeant Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), a single mother whose law-enforcement efficiency and general level-headedness have met their match in Goodman’s brilliant eccentricity.

Although I’d hoped Season 1 would extend further than six episodes long (Death in Paradise typically offers eight per season), those initial installments did yeoman’s work to establish Beyond Paradise as distinct from its predecessor. Yes, we are still given a compact contingent of small-town coppers—not just DI Williams, but also Dylan Llewellyn playing Police Constable Kelby Hartford and Felicity Montagu as Margo Martins, the cantankerous office support person with risqué doings in her past. However, slotting Martha and her prickly mother, Anna (Barbara Flynn), into the ensemble helps shake up the format that was established almost a dozen years ago, in Death, by series creator Robert Thorogood. It’s plain that Humphrey and Martha are very much in love, but equally obvious that they can go far out of their way to second-guess what will make the other happy, resulting in misunderstandings and too much left unsaid. This is still a largely lighthearted drama, but that relationship lends it modest depth.

Steve Barge (aka The Puzzle Doctor), who writes the excellent blog In Search of the Classic Mystery, carps that the crimes committed on Beyond Paradise are quite “small-scale … with not a lot of harm done by the end of things.” And he’s correct: there’s less carnage in Marshall’s new series than in the older Death. But that just adds a welcome—if hardly complete—air of believability to this program, and leaves room for more potential casualties in the future. The proliferation of homicides on Death in Paradise makes one marvel that Saint Marie still has any population left to finish off. One point on which I do agree with Barge is that the mysteries tackled thus far on Beyond Paradise haven’t been as challenging as those on the original series, though more than a handful of Death story lines over the years have been rather too convoluted for my taste.

One final structural modification is much appreciated, by Barge as well as yours truly. The tattered trope of gathering all of the suspects together at the conclusion of each Death in Paradise episode, and then unmasking the killer or killers, is certainly one of that show’s weaker elements. Beyond Paradise substitutes a re-creation of each plot’s offenses, with Goodman and Williams inserted into the crime scene as he explains who did the dirty deeds, and how. “It’s a really nice idea that works well,” remarks The Puzzle Doctor.

There is no information yet as to when Season 2 of Beyond Paradise, or the special Christmas episode planned in addition, will reach TV viewers. But filming is slated to begin later this year.