3. Apr, 2019

Bite Club

This shark infested crime series from Down Under is as fresh as a surfer’s toothbrush. The lead detectives, although seriously damaged by said sharks, are perkier than Skippy on his good days, even when they’re still a tad traumatised and working through stuff.  Nothing stops their perfectly toned and slender bodies from being enviably desired by other people they encounter.  There’s a love triangle.  This is between blonde Dan, mostly chipper but slightly brooding when gazing out to the sea where he lost the lower half of one leg saving his affianced; the aforementioned affianced (now his ex) brunette Zoe or 'Zo' (who is either yearning for newly returned Dan or pissed off with him and trying to remain devoted to her new partner); and her new partner, a police psychologist who bears a distractingly close resemblance to the singer Peter Andre and is thus hard to take seriously.  Even when deeply piqued, all three seem happily good natured at heart and are very boy and girl next door in their moral reactions.  A kiss with Dan is a guilty secret tantamount to being caught in flagrante delicto in the mind of the affianced, teetering as she is on the brink of new wedlock with Peter Andre, who after his experience with Katie Price (aka Jordan), is perhaps understandably wary throughout.

The serial killer in ‘Bite Club’ started life most innocently as Hetty Wainthrop’s currant bun faced young sidekick, and you really can’t get more innocent than that, can you?  He’s now an Aussie police dog handler and an aspiring detective on the investigation.  No wonder he looks so smug.  Nobody’s going to suspect him coming from that background, are they?   He’s only been and gone and set Dan up as the fall guy, hasn’t he, leaving poor Dan, usually given to either chirpy flirting or supportive work with fellow bitten people, well, pretty much gobsmacked really, even to the point of almost losing it, which, with that effortlessly cheery smile of his, has proved difficult for him to date.

It’s now de rigueur for a police procedural drama to have a woman as the head honcho, inevitably feisty and with a tangled love life.  This is the case here, too, partly and she’s having an affair with a married detective in her team, as you’d expect.  Only, contrary to type casting, she’s a heavily mumsy woman of genial disposition and he’s a crumpled, thickset bloke with no particular disappointment in life bothering him, both of which are definitely unusual in the genre.  They’re a resignedly realistic couple of ordinary folk, whose disorganised midlife crisis seems a bit out of place in the glossy land of eternal youth surrounding them otherwise.

It’s nasty, ‘Bite Club’, don’t get me wrong but it’s kind of upbeat as well.  I can’t think why exactly.  Maybe it’s all the sunshine, summery clothes and an irrepressible air about people, mostly relating to Dan and Zoe, whose real fight, let’s face it, is more about custody of the dog than being seriously jealous over each other's new love interests.  You know they kind of get it that they are both still a couple but it wouldn't be nice to upset Peter Andre too much.  Murder will out, though and this killer likes to take teeth, but even the dead in Bite Club, fittingly, have perfect dentition to begin with.