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In the 2019 episode “Betrayal,” Nikki gives impassioned courtroom testimony that resonates especially now: “The opposite of truth is not just a lie. The show champions research and accuracy, even as it acknowledges that experts are fallible. But its rewards for the non-squeamish include a reverence for scientific rigor that I find bracing at a time when pandemic-related fears fuel baseless internet rumors. Skip it if you recoil at seeing a pathologist pluck out a stomach and empty its contents into a basin as if she were pouring afternoon tea. “Silent Witness,” however, is famously gory. And as an erstwhile fan of “House,” I was pleased when I guessed the genetic condition affecting a baby in “Trust” (Season 16), an episode in which Leo struggles to prove that the indigent mother is not an abuser. (Multiple pathologists serve as medical advisers.) I’ve been intrigued to learn how the smallest clues can indicate whether a death is a suicide or a homicide, an accident or not. Yes, the mortuary occupants in “Silent Witness” are well beyond help, but the series’s meticulous attention to anatomy and physiology still fascinates me. For shocking conclusions, try “The Prodigal” (Season 14), about what seems like an assassin’s attack on an embassy, or “Family” (Season 21), in which several members of a household appear to have been massacred by a gunman. In “The Fall Out” (Season 6), for instance, Sam is called to a horrific highway pileup involving the discovery of a severed arm that doesn’t belong to a crash victim (a development that’s quintessential “Silent Witness”).īut the drama’s writers know that the worst crimes often involve toxic family dynamics.
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The subjects run the gamut: human trafficking, biological weapons, drug cartels, serial crime, the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the occasional perplexing accident. Complex Mysteriesįictional suspense helps me flee the real-life variety, and this show’s longtime pattern of episodes that are divided into two one-hour parts has given me the equivalent of a gripping feature film every night.
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I would like to see Nikki accept his position and the series finally cast a person of color in a leading role. In that finale, “Silent Witness” also loses the Lyell Centre’s most recent boss, the levelheaded Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern).
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Never putting expediency over justice, Sam involves herself deeply in criminal cases, often to the consternation of the detectives who are her professional (and sometimes personal) bedfellows. The actress Amanda Burton makes this heroine - dogged, determined and, I’ll admit, self-righteous - wholly believable. Haunted by guilt, Sam devotes her career to investigating the deaths of others.
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When she was a teenager in Northern Ireland, her father, a Belfast police officer, stormed out of their house after arguing with her and started his car, forgetting to check it first for a saboteur’s bomb.
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In the first season, you meet Sam Ryan (don’t call her Samantha), a pathologist in Cambridge, England.
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Now, however, Seasons 1 to 22 are streaming free on Amazon Prime Video 22 and 23 are on BritBox, which will eventually have the entire series, as well as coming seasons. Without a cable service that offered BBC America, which ran the show from 2005-7, I lost track of it.
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I initially encountered “Silent Witness” in 1996, when A&E began to broadcast the early seasons. The BBC has announced at least two more seasons in which this show’s brilliant forensic scientists will toil over the remains of unlucky people. I refer to the many homicide post-mortems in the addictive BBC thriller “ Silent Witness,” which may be the only television drama whose title character is a corpse.Ĭreated by Nigel McCrery, a writer and former police officer, “Silent Witness” is also Britain’s longest-running crime series and one of the most enduring anywhere - at 23 seasons, it surpasses even “ Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Like that American production, “Silent Witness” features a central female character, has survived multiple cast changes and is not headed for the morgue itself. (At least a relentless person’s range is limited.) But these procedures have been the ultimate escape: Taking place in a distant, fictional environment, they usually involve an agent of death that isn’t a volatile, out-of-control virus but a volatile, out-of-control human being. It may sound perverse, if not masochistic, to say that I’ve spent weeks of quarantine watching autopsies.
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