The Tower (TV series)

The Tower
Starring	Gemma Whelan
No. of episodes	3
Release
Original network	ITV
Original release	8 November 2021 (2021-11-08) – November 10, 2021 (2021-11-10)

The Tower is a British police procedural television series developed from the first of Kate London's Metropolitan trilogy, Post Mortem. Starring Gemma Whelan as an anti-corruption officer from the fictional DSI department, it is set in 21st-century London and tells the story of the aftermath of the deaths of a veteran Metropolitan Police officer and a young Libyan girl who fell together from the roof of a London tower block.

Kate London

Kate London was born in Staffordshire to a retired RAF officer and a nurse. A graduate of Cambridge University, she took up acting and played alongside Hugh Bonneville and Dominic Dromgoole. She travelled to Paris and attended the same clown school as Sacha Baron Cohen. She joined the Metropolitan Police as a uniformed PC in 2006 and left in 2014 as a murder squad detective in a Homicide and Serious Crime Command dealing with major investigations. in the Met before becoming a full-time author. She has also written for newspapers. She began to record the events of her working day, particularly the minutiae; she was especially interested in the bigger problems that could stem from tiny errors of judgement. In response to comparisons to the murder of Sarah Everard, London argues that, in a close-knit institution such as the police, officers often do not speak out, or criticize when they might otherwise do so, through fears of standing out as a troublemaker of rocking the boat. London notes that, in The Tower, this is at the root of the police's problem, and by extension the public's:

In The Tower people don’t speak up, they don’t say 'No', and we know historically, in any place where bad things are happening, good people need to speak up, and when they don’t, catastrophe ensues. The Tower is a story. Saying all police are like the police in The Tower is like saying all kings are like Lear. But there do need to be things in place to make it easier for people to speak out and do the right thing.

Although London lives and writes in Shropshire, her connection with the city of her work remains strong. She has said, "part of me needs the city too: its life, grit, energy and hunger. My novels are set in its streets. I once joked with my publisher that I could write a murder detective's guide to the cafes of London." Critic Joan Smith positively reviewed Post Mortem on its 2015 publication, arguing that London had "vividly recreates the everyday experience of uniformed police, for the most part avoiding the temptation to take sides. The result is a complex novel that offers rare insights into how the police operate."

Background

DS Collins—described by The Guardian's Hollie Richardson as "a heavy-sighing, perma-frown primetime detective"—from the Directorate of Special Investigations, is called in to investigate the deaths of serving Metropolitan Police Constable Hadley Matthews and the 15-year-old daughter of a Libyan immigrant. It appears that the only witnesses, who are still on the roof, are a five-year-old boy in a bear suit and PC Lizzie Adama. She is newly qualified, having been in the MPS for six months. She disappears soon after being brought down from the roof and so Collins' investigation becomes two-pronged: what happened on the roof, and finding Adama. Collins is accompanied by Bradshaw, her number two, who tries to get Lizzie's statement only to discover her disappearance.

Matthews, who is only seen in flashbacks, had recently been accused of racist comments—calling her Farah bin Laden, for example—by Farah and illegal entry by her father, Younes Mehenni. These accusations cause tension between Adama and her partner when Matthews urges her to change her statement to absolve him of the accusations, which she does not do. Mehenni, for his part, is involved with an ongoing dispute with a neighbour. He is in police custody as a result of this at the time of his daughter's death, having been arrested by Adama. Kieran Shaw is Lizzie's immediate superior with whom he has been engaging in an extramarital affair. His relationship with the DSI team becomes increasingly fractious, and Collins suspects him of knowing far more about Adama's disappearance than he is letting on.

Mangen describes the plot as being against a background of "racial tensions, bigger crimes, personal secrets and political arse-covering". Addressing the comparison of The Tower with Line of Duty, Ed Cumming suggested "there isn't much pure evil here, more opportunists and easy-life seekers".

Cast

• DS Sarah Collins (Gemma Whelan)
• DC Steve Bradshaw (Jimmy Akingbola)
• Lizzie Adama (Tahirah Sharif)
• Inspector Kieran Shaw (Emmett J. Scanlan)
• Younes Mehenni (Nabil Elouahabi)
• PC Hadley Matthews (Nick Holder)
• Farah Mehenni (Lola Elsokari)

Cast background

Gemma Whelan

Gemma Whelan is perhaps best known as her character Yara Greyjoy in the HBO series Game of Thrones, but also had parts in Gentleman Jack, Emma, Upstart Crow, Killing Eve, The End of the F***ing World, and White House Farm. Collins, Whelan's first primetime lead character has been described as "conveys DS Collins’s rigid attention to detail at work that masks a sadness in her personal life, which seems to be represented by a signature anorak that is the colour of a dying autumn leaf". Ed Cumming of The iNdependent, says Whelan is portrayed as "a single, gay, childless cop: it’s made to look like a thankless gig".

Tahirah Sharif was previously seen in The Haunting of Bly Manor and minor characters in soaps such as Waterloo Road and Casualty. Jimmy Akingbola had roles in Kate & Koji and Holby City, Emmett J. Scanlan and Nick Holder were both in Peaky Blinders, while Nabil Elouhabi has had parts in Deep State, His Dark Materials and Only Fools and horses. The Tower was Lola Elsokari's first television role.

Jimmy Akingbola, as seen in Out of Darkness

Production

Patrick Harbinson, who had previously co-produced the Showtime series, Homeland was Executive producer, and directed by Jim Loach. It was developed for television by Sly Fox Productions. It was filmed in northwest England, including Runcorn Cemetery; Sharif later recalled the scenes filmed in Liverpool as particularly difficult due to pervavsive rain, which made her "emotional, heavy dialogue... challenging".

Episodes

#	Title	Directed by	Written by	Original air date	UK viewers (in millions) final ratings are sourced from BARB
1	"Episode 1"	Unknown	Unknown	3 February 2011 (2011-02-03)	5,566,745 (all episodes)
Detective Sergeant Sarah Collins is called to an emergency at a southeast London highrise building, Portland Tower, where she finds that a police constable and a 15-year old girl, Farah Mehenni, have fallen from the roof. She makes her way up, where she finds another police constable, Lizzie Adama, and a 5-year old boy in a bear suit, who Farah had kidnapped and taken to the roof.
2	"Episode 2"	Unknown	Unknown	10 February 2011 (2011-02-10)	5,566,745 (all episodes)
3	"Episode 3"	Unknown	Unknown	17 February 2011 (2011-02-17)	5,566,745 (all episodes)

Reception

The Guardian's Lucy Mangan considered the show's release timely, as "trust in officers is at an all-time low". She was generally positive about the first episode, writing that "the plot builds at pace but without inducing vertigo in the viewer". Writing in The Times, Carol Midgley identified an "aura of grim authenticity", which she put down to the original author's police background. Although she noticed a Line of Duty-style "what are all these coppers hiding?" trope, she considered the show to have done well in avoiding the tendency to focus on the rape and murder of females. She criticised the sound engineering, complaining that at times it was difficult to hear; "was it just my old ears or were the actors going for a mumbling level worthy of The Wire?" A similar criticism, of muffled—and also hurried—dialogue was made by Digitial Spy, who argued that this was a common refrain from viewers on Twitter. Anita Singh of The Telegraph also criticised dialogue which sounded as if some cast members were "mumbling at their shoes. ". She summed up the series, effectively, as "everyone is lying about what happened and Collins is here to find out why", although she disagreed that the series was derivative of Line of Duty: while the DSI might appear to be another A10, she suggested The Tower had a greater sense of day-to-day realism that the otherwise similar topics might imply. A similar note was echoed by Ed Cumming, who suggested that, thanks to Loach's direction, The Tower was a tighter script—less "flabbiness"—than many of its genre. However, he was overall critical, considering that Whelan is the only character to consistently hold the viewers' interest, and that, generally, the series could have "aimed a bit higher". The Guardian's Barbara Ellen was less enthusiastic, picking out the overuse of flashbacks as adding unnecessary confusion to an already complex plot, and the shoehorning in of too many themes. She was more positive of the dialogue and portrayals, summing up with "bring back the characters, please, but with a less chaotic story".

Although the original book was published many years before the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, the show's timing made the comparison obvious to critics. Paul Kendall, for The Telegraph, also placed the show in the context of contemporary police-public relations, particularly in the aftermath of the Couzens case.

Give them a second series, you fool

Due to the fact that Post Mortem was the first of three books—the others being Death Message and Gallowstree Lane—in a series, speculation mounted that the show would return to depict their stories, which particularly follow Collins and Adama. Tahirah Sharif believed that there was plenty of material to allow for the series' expansion, and Emmett Scanlan has pointed out that the later books expand the character also, particularly Bradshaw's.