Did not finish first segment. In terms of plot it's a jigsaw puzzle. A piece here, a piece there.Filled with hidden menace and foreshadowing. But also long stills of not much happening. Background sound enough to make conversation hard to hear. Music atonal. Lighting low contrast, and low level. There is not a sharp edged shadow in the entire show. If designed to give the impression of dirt, and sordidness it was successful. Camera height is consistently at chest level. This adds to menace, but it all seems so pointless. Yawn.

"Hidden" is a four-part British thriller starring Philip Glenister and Thekla Reuten.The story is wild, one of those government corruption tales. Government corruption is feasible, and in real life there were riots in Britain and resignations of officials. But there were other elements of this plot that put it on the fanciful side.Glenister is Harry Ven, a solicitor, is asked by attorney Gina Hawkes (Reuten) to find a alibi witness for her client. This witness also has information about Ven's late brother Mark 20 years earlier.The plot takes off from there into a political conspiracy. This includes a plan to take over the government by a billionaire. He has an assassination bureau that gets rid of anyone in their way.David Suchet plays Sir Nigel Fountain, a relative of Hawkes', and he's amazing. At first I didn't recognize him.The end is a downer because it really doesn't end. There's ambiguous and there's nothing - this was nothing.The acting was good, with Philip Glenister attractive in a disheveled kind of way and totally believable.Okay.

Someone asked what the murder 20 years earlier had to do with the events in this series. I think it was just one of many hits by the "Help Desk", and it got Venn and his brother into the story. Mark and Hillman hadn't been sitting around waiting for these events. Hillman told Venn that he had been kept around to do jobs for the Help Desk, and was well taken care of for it. I suspect the same was true for Mark (who I also suspect killed Hillman before Hillman killed Venn). Now they were called out to deal with Gina because she wouldn't let her parents' deaths go, and maybe they were after Venn because he wouldn't let his brother's purported death go. Then they were to assassinate Wentworth, maybe to open a way for Morpeth to move in. That part's a bit murky. But Mark took out Morpeth and Styles to, once again, protect his brother. I suspect that Venn went back into the prison at the end because he didn't want to be on the run for the rest of his life, but it would have wrapped things up nicely if he'd turned in that direction.The length of this was good (four episodes); plenty of time to build a story and build tension, but not so long that it dragged out (like the French series Spiral that carries one case through about a dozen episodes).

Having recently enjoyed one fairly convoluted but excellent thriller in the BBC; Namely 'The Shadow Line' I thought I'd give this one ago too. As things stared I was quickly drawn into the story; Solicitor Harry Venn is approached by a lawyer, Gina Hawkes, claiming to represent a man who has information about his brother and another man, Harry is understandably curious as his brother died twenty years previously! Flashback show that Harry wasn't always on the right side of the law. He had once been the driver for an apparent armed robbery where the householder was killed along with two policemen. Intertwined with Harry's story we see that things aren't going well in the country; there are riots in the capital, the government is on the brink of collapse and there are allegations that the Prime Minister has been involved in some sort of financial irregularity. Of course as this is a thriller the two events aren't entirely unconnected. Over the course of the series Harry and Gina must try to find out what is going on and stop the villains from achieving their ultimate goal without being killed.For the most part I really enjoyed this series; Philip 'Gene Hunt' Glenister and Thekla Reuten where great as Harry and Gina and the rest of the often well known cast did well in their roles… the problem however was the ending; far too much was left unexplained; we learn that various people were killed twenty years before and others we thought were dead aren't but there is no explanation about why; maybe I missed something but twenty years seems an awfully long time to plan a coup! Still there was enough good stuff before the end to mean I didn't regret watching it.