Death Valley

Death Valley pairs Timothy Spall’s John Chapel — a retired actor who once played a television detective, and who has some difficulty telling the difference — with Gwyneth Keyworth’s DS Janie Mallowan, solving murders across rural Wales. The six-part BBC One series became one of the channel’s most-watched new titles.

The joke at the centre of the show is that Chapel’s expertise is entirely fictional. He reasons like a character rather than a detective, and the series lets him be right anyway.

The title sequence takes that literally. A doorway opens onto the inside of his head: a graphic world assembled from clues, suspects and half-remembered scenes, built from unit stills and reworked into flat, bold compositions.

The palette does the tonal work. Crime drama convention would push grey and rain-soaked; this leans saturated and slightly off, signalling comedy before a line is spoken.

The series more than earned its place: Episode One drew 2.9 million overnight viewers — the biggest overnight audience for the launch of a UK comedy in five years, and the largest for any new or returning BBC scripted comedy title in that time (BBC audience reporting).