In a certain way the new Halifax completes the circle of Australian television trends. In recent years murder has been the preserve of mystery shows where amateurs – some of whom are very into having extramarital affairs – are galvanised by a suspicious death in their circle. But Retribution takes us back to the blaring sirens, rival theories, and corkboard-pinned photos of the police procedural. Welcome back to the interview room, true detectives.

Living with her long-time boyfriend, musician/luthier Ben (Craig Hall), and his university student daughter Zoe (Mavournee Hazel), who the couple has raised together, Halifax and her on-point winter coat game don’t want to go back to consulting for the police. There’s a suggestion that she misses the work – it’s challenging and risky – but any undercurrent of psychological intrigue is crushed by Ben’s bloody death, which compels Halifax to plunge back in even as she’s assailed by grief.

Bluntness can pay off if it hooks you in, but the storytelling here is literally caught out red-handed – at one point a guilty Halifax, fearful her professional past caused Ben’s death, has a vision of blood on her palms. It doesn’t help that individual episodes generate side-plots to spike the narrative. A sojourn with a far right gang lacking in basic security protocols and an undercover operative in the third episodes is worryingly cursory.

That’s particularly noticeable because there’s a parallel strand in Retribution that intriguingly bubbles away underneath. Having lost Ben, Halifax unexpectedly has to deal with the long absent Mandy (Claudia Karvan), Ben’s former partner and Zoe’s mother. Karvan is the show’s best asset, needling Halifax with fake compassion – “oh, you look terrible,” she’ll note with almost accusatory consolation – and forcing her to imagine a lonely middle-aged future.

Karvan’s domestic infiltrator is a welcome seam of subtlety, a necessary antidote to the burnt-out cop clichés that LaPaglia expertly carries on his broad shoulders. But the show needs his Tom to fail, because the crux of Halifax is her layered interaction with the antagonist, which is not easily put together when they’re an unknown tech whiz-slash-killer instead of an already identified or court assigned suspect.

Halifax: Retribution shows its investment at every turn, whether it’s paying the sync rights to a Billie Eilish hit or staging a technically exact chase sequence in the fourth episode, but too often it feels lodged in the genre’s past even as the title character tries to move forward. Oddly enough the background chatter of complaints over a lockdown to curtail the sniper’s targets is an echo of Melbourne’s current Coronavirus reality. If this show does earn another season, maybe Halifax could apply her expertise to Melbourne’s need for contact tracing.