Tin Star starring Tim Roth is brimming with dark secrets

With the capable and eminently watchable talent of Tim Roth in the lead role of this crime/spy drama, you’d really expect it to have better ratings. That, and the fact that it is rather excellent; and since the first season aired in 2017, and the second in 2019, it’s virtually vintage by today’s standards.

Nevertheless, Season 2 is on DStv Now, via BBC Prime, with new episodes every Tuesday. There are nine this time, as opposed to six in Season 1. The crime drama is a British/Canadian series, and sees former London Metropolitan Police Service detective Jim Worth (Roth) taking up the position of chief of police of a Canadian town, Little Big Bear, in the Rocky Mountains.

Jim is a bit of a hooligan, as far as cops go – especially the chief kind. He has violent tendencies, tends to drink a bit too much, and has blurry vision when it comes to the law. (These are understatements, in case you were wondering.) There’s a past he’s running from in them-there mountains, and it’s catching up with him.

In Season 1 (trailer above), the scene is set with the murder of Jim’s little boy, with a bullet meant for Jim. Everyone – Jim, his wife Angela (Genevieve O’Reilly) and teen daughter Anna (Abigail Lawrie) – goes a bit off the rails, understandably.

Hold that up against a town pretty much surviving by the grace of a big oil company, with local head of public relations, Elizabeth Bradshaw (Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks), wavering between ethics and criminality against a backdrop of rough oil workers and bikers, and you have most of the Season 1 plot.

The shocker, however, is that Whitey (Oliver Coopersmith), who has ties to Jim’s past, is the one who pulled the trigger – something that Anna doesn’t know when she falls for him.

Tracking Board’s review of the first three episodes of Season 2 (where we are right now in South Africa) explains the second season picks up right where the last season left off, “and that’s too bad.” A jump in time or space could have done this series wonders, it continues, “but instead the action picks up right back where it ended, with Anna shooting her father, Jim Worth, after witnessing him kill her boyfriend Whitey, who also just happened to kill her baby brother after taking the long journey from Britain to Canada to kill Jim over abandoning him and his mother after Jim’s undercover operation went sideways years before.”

Okay, so we’re all caught up.

At first it appears as if Jim will die, but where would we go from there? It also looks like Anna is going to take her own life, and the reaction is the same. Why on earth would the writers kill off two main characters in the first five minutes? The answer, of course, is they don’t. We TV viewers are wise to these tricks.

The whole oil company angle seems to have been swatted off the table, the way a cat would toss your remote control. Elizabeth and Angela form a bond of sorts, while Anna is saved by a young Ammonite (similar to Amish) girl, whose family takes her in.

Jim survives being shot in the leg and left for dead, and he’s on a quest to get his daughter back – whatever it takes. Apparently this religious community has a few dark secrets of its own, which will be revealed later in the season.

To make things more fun, Jim has an alter-ego who comes out to play when he’s had enough whisky: Jack Devlin, who is even worse than Jim.

Which could explain why Financial Times review is headlined “ludicrous, incoherent, excellent fun – Tim Roth returns as rogue police chief Jim Worth in a crazed ballet of blood, fire and ice”.

The third and final season was filmed in July 2019, slated for a 2020 release. It will have six episodes, and relocates to Liverpool. We can’t wait.

In the meantime, Season 2 is now streaming on DStv Now.