Boat Story’s shocking opening leans on one of TV’s most irritating clichés

Some prologues use epilogues.” So declares Boat Story, BBC One’s violent new primetime crime drama, in an intertitle card at the start of its first episode. We open in the middle of a vast, desolate field where three children happen upon a grisly find: the decapitated head of Samuel (Paterson Joseph). How did it get there? And why is it detached from his torso? Stay tuned and find out, the series seems to bellow.

From this macabre beginning, Boat Story lurches backwards in time to the start of the story. Samuel – head now enthusiastically conjoined to body – is a solicitor and down-on-his-luck gambler, who, along with maimed ex-factory worker Janet (Daisy Haggard), discovers a boatload of unattended cocaine. The story spirals downward from there, with the involvement of sadistic crimelord “The Tailor” (Tcheky Karyo) throwing another spanner in the works. But always, we know where the story is heading: Samuel’s severed head, left in a field. All roads lead to what Se7en fans know as a “Gwyneth Paltrow haircut”.

Historically, this trope – revealing the violent but mysterious end of a character at the very beginning of a story – has been used to great effect in the past, most famously in Sunset Boulevard, which opens with William Holden’s Joe Gillis face down in a swimming pool. Lawrence of Arabia did it wonderfully. Breaking Bad proved masterful at this kind of foreshadowing, with flash-forward cold opens offering just enough of a glimpse of the future to provoke intrigue, while leaving it so visually abstract as to obscure what was really going on. But all too often, the device has become a cliché – a cheap and lazy way of grabbing the audience’s attention, at the cost of narrative integrity. Recently, it’s been used in everything from Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, to Disney+’s Mike, to the theatrically released Deadpool films, to pick three arbitrary examples.