Depth 4 Acting 5 Aesthetic/Visual 5Plot 5 Originality 4 Production 5 Entertainment 5 Demand on viewer: mild to moderate - story line is easy enough to follow but it is thematically intense and the serial killer element may be too strong for younger viewers.
Overall: Highly Recommended
Five reasons to watch The Fall on SmittenByBrittain
The series departs from the norm in allowing us to get deeply into the life of the killer, as husband, father, and man with a kind of moral compass. His wife works in the birthing unit at the hospital (in diametric opposition to Spector's shadow career as a killer). His daughter can see things in dreams. She renders a drawing of a woman dying with blood all around her, and says she saw her above her room, where Spector keeps his murder diary hidden.
Sexual tension strides through every scene. There is the babysitter for whom
Eerily, Paul loves to steal into his victims' homes and savor the feeling of control he has by being there, being in the presence of his victim, taking pieces of her, clipping bows off her underwear. He masturbates to drawings and macabre scrapbooking of these images once he gets back home.
Quietness can sometimes hide a deep well of darkness. This is never more apparent than in Spector's
introverted, black-hole eyes. But the same face shows empathy in counseling and we see him in tender scenes with his wife. Is he only a force of evil? We are confronted with our own lack of understanding, even as detective Stella labors to understand his every motive and confront it.
It is a shame that many of the issues dealt with in this series would not likely find as much interest on their own. They have to be set within a crime drama, which makes it seem as though these problems only occur "on TV," or for those who lead lives of extremity.