Coldwater review: This may not be true crime, but sure plays like it is

Why do we jibe with some genres and not others?

For every person obsessed with true crime is another who can’t stand it. Some like their comedies broad with clearly set up punchlines, others want it dry and wry.

Huge swathes of the audience loves nothing more than to be viscerally scared by a gruesome, suspenseful horror movie, others run (screaming) in the other direction.

Maybe you like your dramas overwrought with sweeping, over-the-top emotions, others prefer it grounded and restrained, where no one says what they mean.

As viewers, we’re an amalgam of tastes and distastes, and it’s not always clear, even to us, why we like something and not something else.

Me? I love a comedy, prefer subtext over text in dramas, don’t mind sci-fi or magical realism, prefer my romances more adult than young adult, musicals are real hit and miss, not a fan of high fantasy and can’t brook true crime.

Generally speaking, we should be open to different experiences of different stories in different genres. If we hem ourselves into only particular type of show or film, we risk missing out on something potentially special.

But there are definitely some things where, before it even starts, there’s a distance between you and the story, and it’s as if the series has extra legwork to close that gap. It needs to be extraordinary.

Coldwater is not extraordinary. It’s a British crime thriller set in a small town in the Scottish highlands that starts with a story about masculinity in crisis and devolves into formulaic beats stretched out for TV spectacle.

I bring in this idea about genres we do and don’t gel with because I wanted to acknowledge that there will absolutely be people who will be into this show – I can think of at least three friends – and to contextualise that sometimes, as we all like to say, “It’s just not for me”.

Because I hated this show. I hated it as much as I hate a bathtub in the bedroom in a semi-fancy hotel. It was gross, nasty and gnarly, and I felt incredibly resentful about spending five hours with some of these characters.

It’s a fictional story but there are tropes in this series that reminded me of lurid true crime shows that have this fascination with a binary view of good versus evil.

In this case, the evil is Tommy (Ewen Bremner) – and that’s not a spoiler because it’s quite clear from the first episode out of its six that there is something very wrong with this man. Obvious because Coldwater says everything out loud, it doesn’t do subtext.

The central character is John (Andrew Lincoln), a Londoner who moves he and his family – wife Fiona (Indira Varma), who is a successful restauranteur, and their two primary school-aged kids – to a small town in Scotland.

The catalyst was an event at a playground in Dalston, a cool but increasingly gentrified part of London, in which a father violently assaults a woman after she objected to the man hitting his son. John, in a moment of what we’re invited to perceive as cowardice, didn’t intervene, and instead ran off clutching his own son, but leaving his daughter behind.

He feels great shame and trauma, as if he is not worthy of the mantel of manhood, and the move to Scotland is supposed to be reset.

The couple next door are Tommy and Rebecca (Eve Myles), the latter the town’s pastor. John is taken in by Tommy’s confidence, and joins his neighbour’s bible group with other local men, although they are more taken by reading serial killer books than the lord’s word.

Tommy is an imposing figure, and soon has John doing “manly” things such as hunting and day drinking whisky.

Coldwater keeps positioning its characters as binaries. John is a “beta” male because he is the primary childcarer instead of his professionally more successful wife, he prefers to de-escalate when confronted with threats of violence, and has on occasion judged Tommy for being less educated.

That’s also the city versus rural divide, and the English versus Scottish dynamic. John is what the manosphere would’ve a decade ago called a “soyboy” or “cuck” – he had never held a gun and has friends who are vegan. The horrors.

But Tommy is harbouring a secret that was pretty obvious even before he professed a love for the works of Nietzsche.

The series is focused on the destructive friendship between these two men, although its female characters, both Fiona and Rebecca, are actually more interesting.

It’s not that we didn’t need another story that says “toxic masculinity is bad”, which, well, duh. But it’s that Coldwater isn’t even that interested in that after a while.

So you’re left in the company of two characters who are insufferable for different reasons, and without any new insights into the modern masculinity crisis.

Creator David Ireland is better known as a playwright who grew up in Northern Ireland but has more recently been based in Scotland.

It would be tempting to read into his background a certain hostility to a type of London Englishmen, but his stage productions, including The Fifth Step, are more nuanced in their considerations of relationships between men of different life experiences.

Coldwater doesn’t have that depth, and perhaps that’s due to the demands of TV for digestible spectacle. It has some decent performances, particularly from Eve Myles, but tonally, this show is not that different from all those forgettable and indistinguishable Harlan Cobden adaptations on Netflix.

But that’s all academic and doesn’t completely explain why I loathed this show.

That response was visceral, and maybe it’s as simple as Coldwater did all the things I hate about true crime in that anytime it had to make a choice, it chose the exaggerated, the macabre and the titillating, and put me in the world of someone so repellent, it made me hate the show.

Those instincts are classic hallmarks of true crime as a genre, and some people love the melodrama. Even though Coldwater isn’t even that, and at least isn’t exploiting real-life victims, it was adjacent enough that it is, emphatically, not for me.

But it might be for you - and I’ll only judge you a little if it is.

Coldwater is streaming on SBS On Demand