The Premise
Grace is an ITV procedural adapted from Peter James's Roy Grace novels, streaming stateside on BritBox. John Simm plays Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a Brighton copper still haunted by his wife's disappearance years earlier. Russell Lewis, the man behind Endeavour, does the scripts. Richie Campbell plays his DS, Glenn Branson. Each series adapts one novel per feature-length episode, so you're getting a self-contained two-hour case each time out. Series 6 aired in spring 2026, a seventh is already commissioned, and there are enough Peter James paperbacks left to keep this going until the actual heat death of the universe.
The Case For
Simm. That's most of it. He's a genuinely gifted actor doing a slightly weary, slightly obsessive middle-aged detective, and he sells the internal life of a man whose personal grief is bleeding into his casework without ever mugging for it. Campbell is warm as Branson and the double act has real chemistry. Russell Lewis knows how to build a two-hour whodunnit; the plotting is clean, the suspects are distributed fairly, the reveals land on time. Brighton itself photographs beautifully, all pebbled beach and gull-scream and Regency terraces, and the show actually uses it instead of just filming pretty establishing shots. It's a competent Sunday-night British procedural made by grown-ups.
The Case Against
Competent is the ceiling. There is not one formal risk in this show. The visual grammar is flat television lighting, the score tells you exactly what to feel exactly when to feel it, and the two-hour runtime means every episode has a saggy hour where the plot is stalling for a red herring. Grace's supernatural streak, he consults a medium, is played straight and mostly just sits there being a quirk rather than a theme. Character arcs move at a glacier's pace across series. If you've seen one ITV crime hour you've seen the shape of this one.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If your dinner-and-telly rotation is Vera, Shetland, Unforgotten, Endeavour, and Midsomer, Grace slots in without argument. If you came expecting anything like Mare of Easttown or the actual Dead City on Max, you'll be bored by minute forty. Anyone who needs formal ambition, a serialised puzzle box, or prestige-cable texture should quit before the first ad break.
The Ruling
SLOP isn't a moral judgment here, it's a tier for content that exists to fill an evening rather than earn one. Grace is well-cast, well-plotted TV wallpaper. Simm is good enough that you keep thinking he deserves the sharper writing he had in Life on Mars, and Lewis is capable of Endeavour-level work when the brief allows it. This brief doesn't. Every craft choice, the pacing, the lighting, the music cues, the two-hour structure that pads every case, is calibrated to soothe rather than surprise. There's no lecture problem, there's a texture problem. The show never argues for its own existence beyond "another Peter James book, another Sunday." Recommending it in the same breath as Dead City, as the algorithm keeps doing, is the actual crime. Watch it while folding laundry. Don't clear a night for it.
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