I’ve never written a piece about a television show before but I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to start with some disclaimer about there being spoilers. Don’t worry, Broadchurch doesn’t need any spoiler alerts, last night I witnessed the worst ending to a series for god knows.

Let me say that I definitely consider myself a bit of a TV snob, I like Breaking Bad, The Wire, The Sopranos etc. I actually started watching Broadchurch at the start of the second season because I’d heard such great things about the first. How wrong I was. Starting at the second season, I naturally had questions when watching for the first time. Who is that? What did they do? What is happening? In short, it’s a police drama about a boy that was murdered. The twist (which we find at the end of the first season) is that the man suspected of killing the young boy, is the husband of the police woman investigating the whole case.

Here is my issue surrounding the whole show however. While this case about the murdered boy is going on, there’s a completely separate and different story happening at the same time. A case of two murdered/missing girls. When I started watching I was naturally intrigued to see where the show was going. Three dead children, one person claiming ‘not guilty’ and lots of suspects. Last night we, the audience, found out who killed the two missing girls (just as a heads up, there was literally no surprise at who killed them, it was who we thought it was all along). This leaves the case of the police woman, her maybe guilty husband and the dead boy.

Let me say that I wasn’t expecting to find out who killed the boy in this episode, the writers have to fill another season of Boredchurch (a much better name) but I shall say this. If you’re going to set up a police/murder drama and have two murder cases running side by side, please make them link somehow. I cannot quite believe that for this whole time the show has just been about two completely different murder cases. The minimum I expect from a drama like this is for the writers to cleverly link the murder of the boy to the murder of the two girls. Nothing, no big twist ending where these cases come together and there’s a big revelation that what we’ve been watching this whole time is actually related. Look at a show like Happy Valley (if you haven’t watched it, that’s real British crime drama), the two subplots come together perfectly and you’re left happy with the subsequent ending. In Broadchurch the fact that we’re watching two separate cases makes it feel like you’re just watching two completely different shows and I’ve just been left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I finished the show frustrated, not frustrated because I really wanted to find out ‘who did it’ and I was left on a cliffhanger, frustrated because I realised that I’ve wasted my time watching this poorly written crap.
The only thing that I can say is that this ending is worse than the ending to How I Met Your Mother, but that says a lot.