The British detective drama has a comfort food problem. Familiar ingredients, familiar rhythms, a damaged investigator in a grey/black/ coat standing in the rain outside a crime scene. Ellis, from the beginning, has been something different, and while the coat might be familiar, Series 2 confirms that the first run was not a fluke.

Sharon D. Clarke remains the show’s engine, and it would be difficult to overstate how much of the series rests on her performance. DCI Ellis is not a complicated person in the way prestige drama usually demands. She is not haunted, self-destructive, or morally compromised. She is simply very good at her job and refuses to pretend otherwise. In a landscape of tortured investigators, that directness is quietly radical, and Clarke plays it with a blunt, watchful intelligence that the camera (and audiences) finds endlessly interesting.

The second series structure, two distinct cases across the North of England, allows writers Paul Logue and Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre room to breathe in ways a single-mystery format would not. I’m all for a self contained mystery, but here each investigation has its own texture: one rooted in community grief and long-festering resentment, the other darker, more systemic in its concerns. Neither outstays its welcome, and the pacing is tighter than many comparable shows manage across a full run. Crucially, both cases feel like they matter. The writers trust the audience enough not to oversell the stakes, and the restraint pays off in genuinely surprising ways.

Andrew Gower’s DS Harper continues to function as a quietly effective foil, less sidekick than counterweight, and the working relationship between the two has settled into something natural and watchable without tipping into cliché. The supporting casts across both cases are strong, drawing on the kind of understated regional character work that this genre does well when it remembers to. Several of the guest performances here are genuinely memorable in the way that good single-episode television used to produce as a matter of course.

What Series 2 gets right, above everything else, is tone. It is not a grim show, and it is not a cosy one either. This It sits in an uncommon register, warm but precise, humane but unsentimental, and it holds that register across the four episodes without wobbling. That said, should there be a series three (shockingly it has yet to be renewed), a six episode run would be most appreciated.

Ellis series 2 is out now on Digital and DVD.