The Secret, based on a bizarre true story, is both painstakingly paced and a show in a hurry. The first episode rattles through a lengthy affair from spark to inflammatory conclusion so breathlessly you barely have a chance to absorb its implications. The second spends nearly its entire span on a single night.
Shockingly, its four episodes cover 20 years, so the pace is likely to lurch again as it winds toward a conclusion. The events it cover take place in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, commencing in the early '90s. The town was then part of the Troubles, visited by death and bombings, yet we open on a pretty vision of small town life, good-hearted people going about their business.
The town's dentist is Colin Howell, played by a menacingly impassive James Nesbitt. He develops a fixation on Hazel Buchanan, the wife of a fellow-Baptist church goer, and initiates physical intimacy in a skin-crawling scene at a public pool.
The pair commence a whirlwind affair, with Howell running through the night before appearing sweat-soaked and shaking at her kitchen window, while her police officer husband is out on patrol. Between the incident and the pool and his appearing unbiden at her garden by night it's clear we're dealing with, bare minimum, a dangerous and criminal stalker. But Buchanan, far from being repulsed, falls for his routine. The God so present in the families' lives, far from being an impediment, becomes an enabler - an entity who would not have brought them together without intending to. Within their addled minds, it's a short step to imagining a world without their spouses in it.
We follow Nesbitt's Howell for the vast majority of the show, which is predominantly shot with hand-held camera, a rarity in prestige drama. The intimacy it grants makes the idle domesticity of its early moments feel like a well-produced home movie. When Howell starts to turn that same closeness gives us an eerie proximity to his mental disintegration.
