Now the even better news. Hidden Assets looks as if it’s going to be in a different class.
The only survivor from the dreary original is Angeline Ball, who played detective Emer Byrne. For reasons unknown, the character has been renamed Emer Berry.
The other change – and a far more significant one – happened behind the camera. Kin co-creator and writer Peter McKenna, who had no involvement in Acceptable Risk, developed the series and penned the first three episodes.
The remaining three are by Morna Regan.
The difference is vast and immediately apparent. Hidden Assets, an Irish-Belgian co-production set in Clare and Antwerp, is everything its predecessor wasn’t: crisply written, pacy, engrossing and persuasively acted.
Inside the opening 10 minutes there’s the murder, by drowning in an overflowing bath, of a young woman in Antwerp and a suicide bombing at a packed fashion show in the city – one of several terrorist attacks in recent weeks.
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Both events seemed to be linked to a relatively low-level Irish drug dealer called Darren Reid (Desmond Eastwood) and possibly to wealthy, Antwerp-based Irish businesswoman Bibi Melnick (Simone Kirby), who runs a company that services ships in the city’s port and is married to a high-powered lawyer (Charlie Carrick).
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A routine raid on Reid’s home turns up a couple of unexpected items hidden in, of all places, the bottom of a monkey cage: a bag of rough diamonds worth €600,000 and the deeds to a luxury apartment in Antwerp, the diamond capital of the world.
Knowing diamond smuggling would usually be out of Reid’s league and figuring the Belgian police will be too busy with the bombings to cooperate in a joint investigation, Berry decides to cut a few corners and take an unauthorised trip to Antwerp to scope out the apartment.
While she’s nosing around, a unit of heavily-armed Belgian anti-terrorist cops, led by commissioner Christian De Jong (Wouter Hendrickx), burst in on her.
It transpires that the fashion show bomber stayed in the apartment, which De Jong and his team have been staking out, the night before detonating the bomb. De Jong, however, didn’t know about the young woman’s murder, so he figures he owes Berry one and squares things with her superiors back in Ireland, and the two begin to work together.
The victim was an illegal immigrant from Syria who’d been working for Melnick, who claims she met her in a coffee shop and took pity on her because her father drowned during the crossing and her brother was whisked off to a detention centre.
De Jong agrees to follow Barry to Shannon to sit in on her interrogation of Reid. As Reid is presenting himself at the station, however, a motorcycle roars into view and the pillion passenger pumps three bullets into him.
We get a brief glimpse of a right-wing, anti-immigration Belgian politician called Victor Maes (Steve Geerts), who immediately points the finger for the bombings at Muslims and is sure to figure more prominently in coming episodes.
The presence of Ball aside, Hidden Assets owes absolutely nothing to Acceptable Risk.
If anything it has more in common with Scandi noir. Ball and Hendrickx have good chemistry, and McKenna injects some pleasing humour into their exchanges.
This was a solid opener – and the great Michael Ironside is still to show up.
Episode 1 of ‘Hidden Assets’ is on the RTÉ Player. The series continues next Sunday at 9.30pm.
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