“You must never forget that people want to be entertained.” That, in the words of producer Tim Key, is the lesson that Crime in Paradise to the rest of television. The British series has been a success for 13 years. It is not a thriller addictive and dark, it has no deep social reflection behind it, nor does it star Hollywood stars. It is perhaps not the title that first comes to mind when talking about BBC hits. And yet it is, and very much so. Crime in Paradise has been proving the effectiveness of its simple formula since 2011: a foreign inspector investigates a murder per episode on an exotic Caribbean island assisted by local agents. This combination of Agatha Christie-style cases, friendly characters and beautiful landscapes has already surpassed 100 episodes and is, year after year, one of the most watched fictions in the United Kingdom. It has even become a franchise with two more series in the works.
While in Spain, COSMO is broadcasting the final stretch of its thirteenth season (available on demand on COSMO ON), on the island of Guadeloupe, a French enclave in the Caribbean, the fourteenth installment is being filmed. Beyond Paradise (also available on COSMO ON and which Atreseries has broadcast openly under the name of Crime beyond paradise) have already recorded this year’s Christmas special and are about to film the 2025 one. The British public broadcaster has total confidence in the franchise, and with good reason: in 2023, the parent series was the second most-watched in the United Kingdom with 8.3 million viewers and audience shares of around 30%.
For Key, one of its producers, the key is not to lose focus on entertainment. “You must never forget that what you are primarily doing is trying to gather as many people as possible to watch something that they find entertaining. Sometimes the industry forgets that. Our main goal is to give people something they want to watch. The series that work very well on Netflix is because they are very entertaining. Series like Emily in Paris “They just want to be funny and nice, and they don’t want to be angsty or important. You have to give people what they want, do it with passion and with the ambition to entertain,” the producer reflected last week in a video call interview with EL PAÍS.
One of the reasons why Crime in Paradise The one thing that remains fresh after a hundred episodes is the replacement in the lead role. The episode broadcast this Sunday by COSMO (10:30 p.m.) marks the farewell of actor Ralf Little from the series, who for four seasons has played Inspector Neville Parker. The fourteenth season will be headed by Don Gilet in the role of Mervin Wilson. He will be the fifth actor to have led the series. The first was Ben Miller as the neurotic Richard Poole in the first two seasons, followed by Kris Marshall, who played the absent-minded Humphrey Goodman between the third and sixth seasons. Arda O’Hanlon was Jack Mooney between the seventh and ninth episodes.
“Each actor changes the energy of the series,” says Tim Key about these changes. “All the characters have one thing in common, they are men who are slightly broken inside, they are there like fish out of water and in the end that environment heals them all,” he continues. The main reason for these changes of protagonist is the long period of time that the actors have to spend away from home. Each season is shot between April and October on an island some 9,000 kilometres away from London, a job that is difficult to reconcile with family life. With each change of protagonist, the series takes advantage of the opportunity to close their personal arc and refresh the plots with new faces.
The departure of an actor does not have to mean his final farewell now that the series has expanded its universe. Beyond Paradise stars Kris Marshall and has allowed viewers to find out what happened to his character and his fiancée in a new destination. “We are very careful when we think about each new series, that the spin-offs of Crime in Paradise make sense on their own, not just imitations of the original,” says Tim Key, who is also responsible as producer of its derivatives. The other title they are working on is Return to Paradise, Set in Australia and starring a female lead, Anna Samson as Detective Inspector Mackenzie Clarke, the story follows the protagonist as she returns to her native home, a place she hated. According to the producer, there are no plans for further spin-offs at this time.
Filming on an island in the Caribbean may seem like the perfect setup for a production. “People always think it’s the best job in the world, that we’re on holiday all the time, but the distance is a huge problem,” Key says. “And then there’s the weather. It’s incredibly hot, which makes you tired. And then there’s the rain, and occasionally tropical storms and very occasionally hurricanes. When it rains there, it rains, and there’s nothing you can do,” he notes. Although they once considered filming the interiors in a studio in the UK, they ultimately scrapped the idea. “You need to believe that you’re in those places, that the hut is on that beach with that tree growing in the middle. It’s not a set, it’s a real place. Like the police station, you can go out on that terrace and see that landscape.”
Surviving this long in the age of platforms and rapid consumption, when dozens of series are released and cancelled every year and changes in television happen at the speed of light, seems almost a miracle. “Sometimes I think I don’t know what the secret is to have achieved this, that it is something magical, but other times I think it is simply because we offer an optimistic and fun experience. When the world is overwhelming and scary and becomes a very dark place, shows like this are there just to entertain you. We are not ashamed of trying to make people smile and solve a puzzle. There is a lot of television that is very dark, television that is important and that asks you to pay close attention. We do not set out to do that, we just set out to entertain.”
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