"Shetland" and Shetland: TV Crime vs Reality
Reconciling A Crime Show With Its Almost Crime-Free Setting
All during my three weeks in Scotland last month, people kept asking if I’d seen “Shetland”. I told them I had, having binged-watched the first five seasons last summer. Here’s what I wrote then:
Since my return, I’ve watched Seasons 6 and 7 which, like their predecessors, are a nonstop festival of murder. Bodies turn up in inlets, on beaches and in abandoned cars. Some of the murder victims are linked; others aren’t. A major plot point involves ecoterrorism, and not one but two fertilizer bombs. D.I. Perez (Douglas Henshall), Shetland’s head detective, is so busy solving crime that he doesn’t have time to mourn his parents’ deaths. Stoic and work obsessed, he blames himself for every setback in the labyrinthian investigation that ensues. Cora McLean (Anne Kidd), the local coroner, arguably has it worse: after conducting yet another after hours autopsy, she vows to stay up until she finishes her report.
Long before my plane touched down at Sumburgh, I knew that Shetland’s reality was almost completely opposite. Shetland, total population under 23,000, is the kind of place where people leave their doors unlocked and their keys in the car. In Lerwick, a missing car was recovered with an apologetic note and gas money inside: it was merely borrowed. My search for more recent crimes turned up a restraining order for a man who had stalked and threatened his ex-girlfriend, but nothing close to murder.
“Shetland”, like “Broadchurch”, “Father Brown” and any number of other crime dramas set in sleepy rural towns, is part of a great British tradition begun by Agatha Christie. Her Miss Marple, an intrepid sleuth in the fictional village of St. Mary Mead, made her first appearance in 1927. Unlike Perez, Miss Marple is an amateur detective, but no less driven or successful for her lack of credentials. And like the fictionalized Shetland, St. Mary Mead has far more than its plausible share of serious crime, including a ludicrous number of murders.
If Shetlanders are offended by “Shetland”, I haven’t heard of it. It’s probable that they’re happy for the attention that the show has brought to this long ignored island chain, and for the increased tourism it has brought. Still, the place I fell in love with couldn’t have been more different than the show’s bleak setting. The real Shetland is a green, peaceful, sparsely inhabited archipelago of firths and white sand beaches, whose residents are unfailingly friendly and helpful. Though my direct family left for mainland Scotland in the early 1870s, my trip there felt less like a visit than a homecoming.