Season 5 of British murder mystery “Shetland” has been binged, or as near enough as can happen with the current routine. It’s from 2019, but anticipated 2020. Not the plague bit but the ‘wokeness’ one.
Yes, “Shetland” joined in and maybe even preempted the epiphany about the existence of people who aren’t white, although what it did with that information is hard to make sense of. It’s a show where if everyone were white, it would not seem that odd—I would assume people on islands somewhere between Scotland and Scandinavia would be even paler than I am. But it’s no longer tenable for a show with international (American) audiences to be about a bunch of white people, not since Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” How this manifests itself in British murder mysteries… varies. There’s the “Midsomer Murders” approach of suddenly having a multiracial cast but giving no or almost no cultural particularity to the characters (as in, Sir Hugh Pomposity IV of the manor house, engaged in a red-herring subplot about blackmail, will be played by a South Asian actor, which, why not?). At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Season 5 of “Shetland.” An overall compelling season of a worth-watching show, and yet.
The season begins with a young Black man whose existence is primarily that of a severed hand. (The rest of him, unsurprisingly, didn’t make it.) We later meet his estranged mother, a former teen mom with an abusive past, and his sister, a modern-day slave, some hybrid of a hostage and a trafficking victim. (It’s apparently “people trafficking” in British English, not “human trafficking.” Who knew?) The sister, plucky Zezi, almost escapes her captors on a couple occasions, but rest assured the final save is done by the blond man police detective (Jimmy Perez).
Zezi and severed hand’s mother, Olivia, gets to be flawed but not that flawed, signaling Complexity but never including her in the central emotional drama. There is some superficial gesturing at insider-outsider dynamics and police crappiness in that area. Olivia accuses Perez of only caring about the murders of (white) locals, and not about her missing daughter and dead son. He insists this is untrue, which—because he is a Good Cop—is accurate in his case. He overcompensates and basically any other death is fine (and murder is everywhere!) as long as he solves this one case. It’s not Black Lives Matter, as another Black body eventually appears and causes little stir. It’s literally all about Zezi and the mystery of her brother’s severed hand.
A lot, then, is gestured at but unexplored. Is this crime about race or not? A murdered white family, tangentially related to the central plot, have confederate flags on their car, which is clearly an Important Detail, but how so? Is there a lot of racism in Shetland, even in the apparent absence of Black people who are not related to those whose severed limbs have washed up on its shores? Unclear.
And then there’s the racism-in-policing (or just xenophobia) angle. Does Olivia maybe have a point, when she suggests a white cop on Shetland might not care about random dead foreigners, or is her skepticism of Perez just a sign that she’s a woman who’s been wronged by life and is afraid to trust? I think the show thinks it’s the latter.
And… is it representation when the paths represented are impoverished single mom, corpse, and slave? There are Black actors (even leaving the severed hand out of it), so points for casting diversity, and the viewer is encouraged to feel sympathy for their characters’ infinite tragedy.
I am arguing with myself here, because it’s a bit of a you-can’t-win. If “Shetland” stayed pasty, that’s no good, either, as in they’d get called out. If they cast non-white actors in random roles, maybe this is unrealistic for that setting. What works on “Midsomer,” with its lack of pretence to realism, may not wash here. And am I going to be that asshole who calls a show problematic for simply depicting the world as it is? One wants to congratulate “Shetland” for addressing Issues of the Day (and I recall that the show did address sexual assault pretty successfully in an earlier season), but I kept asking myself what this enslavement, torture, and dismembering situation was accomplishing, and for which audiences. Is it pandering? Trauma porn? Or merely… boring?
Which gets us to the human-trafficking plot. The whole season is about rooting out who is and is not involved with trafficking people for unpaid work at a fish processing plant and similar. Is it this lady? No. This dude? Maybe. That lady? Definitely. And so on, as in any procedural. But not to be all earnest and Sally Rooney about things but… isn’t everybody complicit in things like labor exploitation in the food industry? It’s not that a television show should concern itself with systemic critiques as if it were an academic monograph, but you’d think there’d be some offhand reference to the connection between individual sleazes-and-worse and, like, the price of fish.