Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Holding’ On Acorn TV, Where A Small-Town Irish Cop Uncovers Secrets While Investigating A Murder

How many small-town murder shows have we seen, especially on services like Acorn and BritBox, which serve up British and Irish series that are small iterations on that theme? Sometimes the tweaks work, though, as they do in Holding, which takes place in a tiny Irish village whose only cop is very happy being in this stress-free outpost.

HOLDING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Clouds and wind loom over a seashore. A middle-aged man sleeps with crisp and cracker wrappers on him. We hear a lot of stuff going on in the background, then he suddenly wakes up.

The Gist: Garda Sargent PJ Collins (Conleth Hill) has been the cop on duty in the tiny Irish village of Duneen for the past three years. Nothing much happens in Duneen, aside from town busybody Eileen O’Driscoll (Pauline McLynn) complaining to him about a neighbor painting his house’s façade brown (the downtown is supposed to be colorful). But this is just the way Collins likes it. He laments over his weight, but he also stress-eats constantly, trying to quell some sort of PTSD he’s suffering from.

Elsewhere in town, Brid Riordan (Siobhán McSweeney) takes care of her two kids and her super-critical mother Kitty Harrington (Olwen Fouéré). She has seemingly never recovered from when an old fiancé, Tommy Burke (Ethan Dillon) left her at the altar in 2001 and disappeared. She is starting to drink almost as much as her mother does.

The Ross sisters — Evelyn (Charlene McKenna), Abigail (Helen Behan) and Florence (Amy Conroy) — are dealing with their own issues. Florence is looking to move with her girlfriend Susan Hickey (Eleanor Tiernan) to San Francisco, and she’s also tired of dealing with the constant drama around Evelyn. Evelyn is also haunted by Tommy’s disappearance; they were close 20 years ago, and she acts out by screwing Susan’s underage son Stephen Chen (Sky Yang) in an abandoned ambulance.

The Burke family farm is being torn down in favor of new development. Everything comes to a halt when human bones are found buried on the site. Collins fumbles around to try to figure out what to do, but eventually calls into the Garda station in Cork for forensics and for a detective to come out. Who he gets is young DI Linus Dunne (Clinton Liberty), who runs roughshod over Collins, despite the fact that Collins knows the village well.

Even though nothing has been confirmed, speculation runs rampant around town that the body is Tommy’s. Of course, this sends both Brid and Evelyn over the edge. Neither will give Collins much information, and when tensions escalate, the sergeant turns to his old reliable: a bag full of food he can cram in his mouth.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Holding is one of many small-town murder series that populates Acorn TV’s service, but the issues that PJ Collins has is more akin to a less-serious version of what Kate Winslet’s Mare Sheehan had in Mare Of Easttown.

Our Take: Holding is based on a novel by talk show host Graham Norton (did you know he was a novelist? Neither did we), and writers Karen Cogan and Dominic Treadwell-Collins have done a good job keeping the lightly comedic tone of the novel intact.

PJ Collins isn’t your typical troubled British or Irish cop in this series; he’s perfectly content with being in this rural outpost doing his job in a way that doesn’t stress him out. Even though he’s gotten himself in this low-stress situation, though, his housekeeper still makes him breakfasts that would take down a rhino and his uniform pants are so tight that, when he gets on the site of the farm demolition, he unhooks the button and sits down.

It’s obvious that his troubles are rooted so deep that he medicates with food, and the writers have to tread a fine line to show that he’s self-medicating and not just a case of “fat cop eats when he’s stressed.” But as much as he half-asses his job, he also knows Duneen and its recent history well, and that’s going to be the key to this four-part series.

We always love the underestimated cop or detective outsmarting the big-city detective or the seemingly genius murderer. Here, Collins’ ability to ingratiate himself into the town’s business will be helpful, and he’s not shy to let DI Dunne know whether he’s making a bad decision. Dunne might not listen to him, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the young detective starts to listen more to Collins when it gets better results.

McKenna and McSweeney are both fun to watch as Evelyn and Brid, who deal with their trauma in wildly different ways. They’ll factor into the mystery for sure, and it’s even more apparent by the end of the first episode that the two of them may have had something to do with Tommy’s disappearance.

Sex and Skin: Only implied sex, like when we see Evelyn getting dressed after another ambulance encounter with Stephen.

Parting Shot: Collins sees Evelyn and Brid fighting in the ocean just off shore; instead of intervening, he retreats into his patrol car, and saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I just can’t.”

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Pauline McLynn as Eileen, the town busybody who basically thinks Collins is a poor cop and she should butt into the business of everyone in town.

Most Pilot-y Line: “It’s just bones. It’s not like seeing a fresh one,” Evelyn tells Collins when he encounters her smoking outside the pub where she works.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Holding tweaks the small-town murder formula a bit by giving the mystery to a middle-aged, out-of-shape cop who is self-medicating with food instead of booze or drugs. Between that tweak and the performances of the main characters, it makes for an enjoyable, lightly comedic mystery.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.