It has Sean Bean but Tudor murder mystery is as slow as week in Tower

The Herald Scotland

09-06-2025

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ENGLAND 1536, and the forecast is for a dark and stormy night with a blizzard of introductory captions. King Henry VIII has broken with the Roman Catholic Church; monasteries are resisting reform; crows caw and swoop as a messenger on a horse thunders through the gloom. By 'eck it's grim out there in STV's new historical drama Shardlake.
I say 'new' historical drama but admirers of CJ Sansom's novels will know this period murder mystery has been this way before. It first aired on Disney+ in 2024, but after four episodes the show wasn't renewed; it can be grim out there in streaming land, too.
Welcome back, then, to a world of mud, candlelight, intrigue, religion, politics and Sean Bean. We'll get to the mighty Bean in a mo, but first, to the titular young Matthew Shardlake, here earning his crust as a Tudor lawyer/detective. Shardlake is disabled, which puts him at a disadvantage in a society that sees difference as a curse.
We know what Shardlake thinks of that, and much else, because he has a handy habit of talking out loud to himself. 'Ready Matthew, ready for what this day might bring?' he asks his reflection in the window.
The day has brought a summons from Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean). A commissioner has been murdered in a distant monastery and Cromwell wants Shardlake to have a gander. Since every Sherlock must have his Watson, Cromwell sends young buck John Barak (Anthony Boyle) to accompany Shardlake, much to our hero's annoyance.
Mark Rylance rather made Cromwell his own in Wolf Hall, so all power to Bean's elbow for taking on the gig. His Cromwell is more swaggering than quietly sinister. As for accent, Bean goes for a sort of posh Yorkshire compared to Rylance's soft, indeterminate burr. Either way, these are not men to be messed with.
The monastery lot are less than delighted to see the pair, with one brother (Paul Kaye) going so far as to call Cromwell the Antichrist, which rather puts a kink in dinner. But Shardlake has his orders and is determined to stick around and solve the case.
What his detractors don't realise is the power Shardlake derives from his disability. 'It is I and I embrace it,' he says in another one-to-one with himself. 'It's my disguise.' It also gives him empathy with society's weak and vulnerable, which in this case means women and a young lad being bullied mercilessly by a senior monk.
The attitudes toward disability, the attempts at witty asides, the empathy, makes Shardlake a modern affair, presumably to widen its appeal. But the more talk, less action approach also makes the hour seem as slow as a week in the Tower.
Shardlake also wants to have its period cake and eat it, which means lots of gloomy scenes where you can barely make out what is going on.
There is always Sean Bean, however, even if the glimpses of him so far have been few and far between, and when he is on screen you half expect him to start banging on about a certain brand of tea. You don't get that with Mark Rylance.