Jasper Tempest (Miller) is a professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge, noted equally for his brilliance as for his abrasiveness and eccentricity. One day, his former student, Detective Sergeant Lisa Donckers of the Cambridge Police (Emma Naomi), asks him to assist on a violent rape case on the campus, which she believes resembles a cold case from years before.
The series has run for two six-episode seasons on ITV since 11 July 2021 and has been renewed for a third. It is in syndication in the United States on PBS.
Tropes:
- Adaptation Name Change: Most of the major characters were renamed in the Setting Update from Belgium to England. Jasper Teerlinck became Jasper Tempest, Annelies Donckers became Lisa Donckers, Daan de Winter became Dan Winters, Christina Flamant became Christina Brand, etc.
- Chekhov's Classroom: The series often opens episodes with Jasper delivering a lecture to his criminology students that is inevitably applicable to the case of the week. Exaggerated in "The Trial", where he openly uses a murder case presently being tried as a case study because he wasn't involved in the investigation, before taking the stand himself and getting the defendant acquitted.
- Dirty Cop: Dan is having money problems in season 2, which leads to him getting approached by a buddy from training who is working "private security" on the side. Dan is initially pleased with the extra cash, but soon gets suspicious and blows the whistle to DI Rabbit, who goes to Internal Affairs and arranges for Dan to become The Mole in the smuggling ring his buddy is working for.
- Honey Trap: A detective who starts romancing Christina in series 2 turns out to be a Dirty Cop using the relationship to steal police information for a smuggling ring.
- Imagine Spot: The show often lapses into Jasper's fantasies, either to depict how he's perceiving events or to show his mental state which he keeps covered with a Stiff Upper Lip.
- Limited Wardrobe: Jasper only ever wears a blue three-piece suit with a white shirt and reddish-brown tie.
- Meaningful Name: Jasper's surname is "Tempest". Like a tempest, Jasper causes uproars through his insights into murder cases — which upend the tidy theories the detectives come up with — and by his tendency to ruin the mood through his abrasive nature.
- My Beloved Smother: Adelaide fusses over Jasper, to his distress and displeasure. No matter how much he exhorts her to leave him alone, she just keeps barging into his life to nag.
- Neat Freak: Jasper has severe OCD, with autism as a comorbidity, and is obsessively tidy and Terrified of Germs.
- Obsessively Organized: Due to his OCD and autism, Jasper seeks control and order in his life. If he's forced to deviate in any way — such as needing to wear a patient gown while in hospital or experiencing complete loss of control in prison — he will exhibit extreme discomfort and struggle to hold his mental state together.
- Pater Familicide: Discussed in "The Family", where Jasper opens his weekly lecture with a discussion of familicides, just as one is discovered. Jasper proves that the daughter first tripped and fell down the stairs and broke her neck during an argument with the father over her music irritating her autistic brother, which caused the father to crack and try to kill himself and the brother with exhaust asphyxiation in the garage. The son escaped, only to be overcome by cooking gas from a stove that had accidentally been turned on during the earlier altercation, and the mother committed suicide when she came home to find her family dead.
- The Perry Mason Method: Jasper takes the stand as expert witness for the defense in "The Trial" and is able to prove that the defendant couldn't have done it: he was trying to take the fall for his wife.
- Race Lift: In the original, Annelies Donckers was played by the Caucasian Ella Leyers. In this version, D.S. Lisa Donckers is played by black Emma Naomi.
- Sadistic Choice: Discussed. On one of his oral exams, Jasper poses a hypothetical asking whom the student would save from a fire: either their mother, or a cancer researcher. Jasper's boss comes to him later to tell him to redo the exam because several students filed complaints about the off-topic question, but Jasper is impressed with his answer: "Well, my mother, of course. ... Because anybody who would leave their mother to die in a fire doesn't deserve to be cured of cancer."
- Servile Snarker: Ingrid Snares, Jasper's assistant. She ably and loyally helps him at work while pouring out a neverending stream of vitriol.
- Shown Their Work: The first episode recreates a common training scenario for criminology students, where a ringer rushes into the classroom and steals Jasper's bag, and Jasper then has his students try to describe the assailant. They fail miserably, an object lesson in the relative unreliability of bystander testimony.
- Stern Teacher: Jasper has little sympathy for his students and no patience for those who can't keep up with the pressures of his coursework. When administering oral exams, he's shown failing students after just a couple of sentences because he thinks none are showing any real insight into criminology. He is, however, legitimately impressed when one student changes her textbook-style answer to tell a more personal story about an acquaintance's fall into crime and tries to draw insight from it, and passes her.
- Terrified of Germs: Jasper wears latex gloves at all times to avoid touching germs with his bare skin. He even applies hand sanitizer to his gloves to be extra careful.
- Unresolved Sexual Tension: Jasper and Christina are former lovers, and still clearly have feelings for one another throughout the series, but his OCD makes him very difficult to deal with so they remain apart.
