Review | What to stream this weekend: Nicola Walker finds the bodies in Annika, BBC First’s Scottish police action series
- Nicola Walker plays Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed of the Marine Homicide Unit, investigating murders around Scotland’s waterways, in Annika
- Meanwhile, on Disney+, My Home Hero stars Kuranosuke Sasaki as Tetsuo Tosu, an Agatha Christie fan and family man who kills a gangster
Whatever production she is in, Nicola Walker has a way of owning it. Whomever the character, Nicola Walker seems ultimately to play Nicola Walker: a watertight cornering of the market.
Walker’s being Walker is a Good Thing, because she effortlessly carries a show. She can also do this by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, establishing an intimate connection whether we feel comfortable about it or not, as in Annika (BBC First).
Leading a team from the newly assembled (and, strictly, slightly misnamed) Glasgow-based Marine Homicide Unit of the Scottish police force, Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed is stranded in more ways than one: socially awkward and with a sense of humour so dry it could mop up the River Clyde, she is also a single mother who feels especially vulnerable where rebellious teenage daughter Morgan (Silvie Furneaux) is concerned.
Her philosophical asides to camera are often swathed in sombre cultural terms borrowed from her native Norway; nevertheless, the audience makes a better confessor for her insecurities than most of her unit, who, other than professionally, don’t understand her.
That unit also features Katie Leung as Blair Ferguson, its designated hacker and technology expert; and blunt leading diver Michael McAndrews (Jamie Sives), who, as Annika’s former beau, is in for some unsuspected personal tumult in this six-part second series.