There’s a new detective on AcornTV and as “Inspector Ellis” she’s the formidable force known on stage and screen as Sharon D Clarke.
Clarke has recently been lionized for two award-winning Broadway and West End revivals: the musical “Caroline, or Change” and “Death of a Salesman.”
In this first season’s three two-hour “Inspector Ellis” episodes, we meet Ellis, discover how she partners with Detective Sergeant Harper (Andrew Gower) and learn that each case is in a different local police station.
That means Ellis must win over obstinate, even obstructive local detectives and, mostly, solve these homicides by herself.
This journey began years ago when Clarke, 58, “saw a network was commissioning a new series with a Black detective female lead — and I immediately said Yes. It was an absolute no-brainer.
“I’ve grown up in London, which is a very multicultural society. My school was very multicultural. But I have never seen a Black female lead with her name in the title role on my television. So for me, yes! I wanted to be a part of that.”
She spent 18 months working with Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, the writer, developing Ellis’ background, talent and purpose.
“Sian had met Irene Ethel, the first Black female DCI in Liverpool. We both chatted to her.
“We talked about the kind of music Ellis liked, what she liked to drink, where she was from, where she grew up. We’ve got her Bible next to her phone charger. We just had her bits and pieces.”
There was also, “The police as an institutional racist organization. When I was growing up, being a member of the police force was not something people did. Because they were on the other side. They were the enemy.
“In Ellis’s backstory, she gets a social psychology degree, works for the local Crime and Public Protection Department and excels with real investigative skills that go with her love of the mind and emotions: how people tick, what makes them tick, what joins their dots together.”
That leads to Ellis being recruited for the police. “At first she resists because of her experience. But then she thinks, ‘Had I been someone in an organization like that at that time, could I have helped from the inside? Would the case have turned out differently if a Black person had been on it?’
“So she starts thinking, actually, Yeah, I’m going to join the Met. And she does.
“What I love about her is the way her mind works, the way she pieces things together, and the way she cares about the case: Through the people, not through the evidence. That’s Ellis’s key. She’s tough, but she’s tender.”
“Inspector Ellis” streams on Acorn TV Nov. 4