The Children ITV

We know how the story end's but how did we get here?

Over the past two weeks I have been mesmerized by ITV drama, The Children starring Kevin Whately, Geraldine Somerville and Lesley Sharp. This thriller depicts several relationships between step families and in our modern lives, how the children can through emotional turmoil. From the off the premise was surrounding the death of an eight year old girl, Emily, what happened to her on that day and how killed her? Like several popular shows recently, The Children, has used time to it's advantage by travelling back to the past and to the lead up of these events to piece together the jigsaw of who killed her.

Lucy Gannon (Servants, Soldier, Soldier, Peak Practice, and Bramwell) says: “Every person who loves this little girl, lives with her, cares for her, could have killed her. I hope we’ll all have our own theory about who did it, and that the theories will be different.

“This is a challenging and provocative drama about what can happen when children become displaced from family life by the divorce of their parents.”

At first, each character seems to be able to cope with the breakdown of one relationship and the establishment of another but as the story continues we see that Jack and Emily fall foul to their self indulgent parents. This is in no way a jibe at divorcees or step families but instead an insider view at the psychological damage that can go on and how the children within these families may find themselves caught in the middle.
Although Jack and Emily have been thrown together due to their parents relationship, we also discover what happened to their other halves. Whether it be Emily's father who has a new wife and baby or Jack's mother who has realised she wants a life of free and fancy- none of them follow or start to comprehend the damage their children are receiving.
Over this three part drama, we start to piece together what happened in these relationships and how the ultimate death of a little girl can be resolved. Full of amazing acting, brilliant scripts and interesting turns, this drama is one of the best ITV has turned out in years.
Highly recommened and look out of the final resolution tomorrow night (15-9, 9pm)