By Karl Quinn

Copyright smh

But if you watched the second episode on its own, you’d have an entirely different take. Here Robert Carlyle stars as police detective Dave Cook, a man we first meet as he is being arrested for alleged breaches of the Privacy Act. From there we travel back in time to his investigation of a cold case murder, which is where his troubles begin. This narrative thread unfolds as a standard mystery thriller, fascinating and entirely without gimmicks.

The two strands interweave occasionally, and towards the end substantially, but the effect is strangely disorienting. I can’t help feel that The Hack would have been a more successful production if it had ditched the trickery and played a much straighter bat altogether.

That said, there are good reasons to want to bring a little pizzazz to the Nick Davies strand. Journalism is a wonderful profession when supported by adequate resources and a strong editorial culture, but it largely consists of sitting at a keyboard and staring at a screen, typically alone. It can be fascinating to do, but to watch? Not so much.

Davies has lots of interactions – with his editor Alan Rusbridger (played by Toby Jones with a shockingly bad wig); a lawyer for the hacked, Charlotte Harris (Rose Leslie); and The Guardian’s in-house lawyer Gill Phillips (Nadia Albina) – but it’s mostly talk-talk-talk.