The follow-ups will flop, and hardly any- one will notice. But while books fail in private, television fails in the spotlight. The BBC’s thriller Hunted was the most cynical piece of writing I have seen on television, and a great warning of the dangers of faking even trashy drama. The producers and writers thought they could confect a hit by stealing other people’s ideas and get pouty actresses to strip on camera and muscular actors to play moody killing machines. Trying to ex- plain their plot is like trying to explain the ramblings of a drunk, but I suppose I need to try. The heroine works for a private security company. As has been the case since the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, the villains are enemies within: shadowy corporations that murder to make money.

The good or goodish guys in the security firm learn that their employers are in the pay of the evil corporation. At its behest, they are targeting an East End gangster, who has moved up into the big boys’ league—think of Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday. The director uses hand-held cameras to create an air of realism—think of the Jason Bourne trilogy. The writers use political correctness to cover a piece of work that is cheap, derivative and sloppy. (The villains gassed peasants in Pakistan so they could flood their villages and build a dam, they reveal, as if that was meant to make all that follows fine.)

In truth what followed was not even comprehensible, let alone fine. Good thriller writers go to some trouble to explain why the police don’t intervene to solve the crimes early in the story. In police dramas, the police are the heroes, and their bafflement is the readers’ bafflement too. From Conan Doyle onwards, others have made their mysteries credible by showing the police as plodders, who do not know what to do. In the Bourne trilogy and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, malevolent cliques in the security services control the forces of law and order, and prevent an early solution to the case. Other writers from Alistair MacLean to Lee Child have tried a different tactic, and set their stories in remote places, where there are no gendarmes to hand.

Hunted made no effort and thus made no sense. Bodies piled up across Greater London and the Home Counties, and the indifferent Metropolitan Police barely showed its face. By the final episode it became clear that no one else was going to explain what had gone before either. The writers left so many questions unanswered they displayed contempt for their story, their characters, their viewers and—justifiably—themselves.

And the audience knew it. Viewing figures collapsed from 5.69 million to 2.59 million. Faced with popular indifference to their lavish production, the BBC cancelled the second series. “Hunted hasn’t found the mainstream audience it was hoped,” a BBC spokesman said. He had no right to be surprised.