The Serial Killer's Wife review: Another British thriller in which a ...

The most exciting thing about The Serial Killer’s Wife (Virgin Media One, Thursday, 9pm) is its title. It suggests a pacy thriller ripe with murder and marital intrigue. There is some of both in the adaptation of Alice Hunter’s bestseller, which comes to Virgin Media following its debut on Paramount+, but not enough of either to rescue the show from a suffocating dreariness.

The story starts with upwardly mobile heroine Beth (Annabel Scholey) jogging along the beach only to come across a woman’s body. In a simultaneous flashback, she recalls her steamy first encounter with her GP husband, Tom (Jack Farthing) – a random meeting in a bar that ended with some not-so-random carry-on in a toilet stall.

Tom is clearly a bad ‘un. Not only is he habitually unfaithful to Beth, he records his (sometimes violent) assignations on memory sticks which he leaves around the house.

He also has what can only be described as “winner” hair. You’ll know the look: slicked-back, a bit wavy at the front – Lord Byron if Lord Byron worked for a multinational in middle management, wore his lanyard out of office hours and went to Leinster matches, but only for the beers and banter. Whatever about the murder of that woman on the shoreline, he’s certainly guilty of being a supreme rotter, and it’s hard to see what he and the seemingly grounded Beth have in common.

There is a specific British genre of thriller in which a woman’s middle-class life is ripped to tatters after she commits the unforgivable sin of being a bit smug. This genre typically involve vast kitchens, huge wineglasses, glamorous mistresses, and husbands who look like they spend their weekends at Leinster games, but only for the beer and banter. See Doctor Foster, Fool Me Once, etc.

The Serial Killer’s Wife belongs to the same milieu but feels second-rate. It isn’t remotely tense – and is often just ridiculous. Tom, for instance, is arrested at his 40th birthday party and marched straight to the police station in a scene so ripe you can almost smell it ponging up your livingroom.

Meanwhile, Beth is entirely sanguine about her husband being into some pretty extreme bedroom stuff – with both her and casual pickups. She is also surprisingly calm about him potentially being a murderer – another reason to skip an unlikeable drama piled high with unpleasant protagonists and which often gives the impression of wallowing in nastiness simply for the sake of it.