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A man runs alone, staring intensely into the cold rain, alongside a barren, wind-beaten Welsh shoreline, finally stopping at his rusty, off-kilter trailer. The runner is Detective Chief Inspector Tom Mathias (Richard Harrington) of the Western Wales Police Department, formerly a decorated member of the London Metro Police. He’s moved to this Spartan land because of some unnamed tragedy. Mathias is intense, insubordinate, and a terrible communicator—a formula guaranteed to alienate his staff and superiors alike. Yet he’s also brilliant, and his uncanny ability to see situations through the eyes of both victims and perpetrators—and using it to solve cases—earns him grudging respect and forgiveness.
The stories seem, on first glance, to make little sense: a quiet elderly woman who cleans the local church is brutally murdered in her home. A well-liked young man from a close-knit community is drowned in a quarry. And a pretty young girl, perfectly dressed, is set upright in the middle of a marsh. You’d expect the locals to pull together to solve these cases, but digging up the truth about the murders also threatens to dig up everyone’s past—along with secrets that people prefer to leave behind.
Hinterland is a series in which the land is as powerful a character as the people in it. In developing the stories, the producers and writers started with the culture and topography of West Wales itself, visiting the wild shoreline, the forests, farmland, hills, waterways, and villages to see what ideas they suggested. The result is spectacular scenery, along with events that spring from the interaction of people with the natural world.
This approach creates stories that are complex enough for Sherlock Holmes, the truth buried in a web of intricate, interwoven layers. Because everyone in this land is related to each other somehow, with a shared history dating back many generations, unraveling any mystery can demand a set of skills that goes far beyond a routine set of interviews.
The cast is entirely Welsh, and their roles reflect the real struggles of the people as they try to eke out a living in a harsh land. The stories are told in wind, rain, snow, and darkness; sunshine is rare. Members of the investigative team have their own personal stories, and secrets are revealed very slowly and subtly over the arc of the entire season, but much is left untold.
Ultimately, Hinterland is a set of stories that explores the deepest reaches of the human heart—the places within us that we rarely visit. The conclusion of each story has a sudden twist or two that you’ll likely never see coming—one that makes a heartrending statement about the human condition.
The BBC produces many very good detective series, but I like this one the best of all I’ve seen. The interweaving of the land and the people—victims, perpetrators, and investigators—into each story sets this work apart. In the end, the wisdom of this series is in its ability to evoke compassion: to make us aware that everyone carries deep, searing secrets, and those secrets often blur the line between friend and foe, victim and criminal.
