Is 'Harper's Island' worth a visit?

An intriguing new series called Harper's Island starts its 13-episode run on BBC Three this Sunday, several months after it was mercilessly axed in the United States due to very poor ratings. Does the show - best described as a horror-themed murder mystery - deserve a new lease of life on these hallowed shores? Well, judging by the vastly underwhelming season premiere, certainly not.

The opening episode begins promisingly enough, with a procession of gloomy and foreboding imagery of the island interweaved with captions telling us that six people were murdered there by a certain John Wakefield seven years ago... and they will not be the last. The action then jumps to the frolics of a wedding party on board a boat heading towards the island, with plenty of suspicious glances and dodgy goings-on lurking beneath the surface. An unknown man is strapped to the propeller of the boat and is swiftly sliced up, with the surrounding water turning a grim shade of red. So far, so good.

Yet very quickly it becomes evident that the show is too reliant on toying with the audience and appears to have taken it for granted that we'd be automatically interested in the events that unfold. It's clear that a huge amount of time has been spent by the makers of Harper's Island intricately planning the backstories of all the characters and how they intersect in various seditious ways, like some kind of venereal Venn Diagram.

Though sadly for fresh objective eyes, much of the interaction between the secretive characters is too much of a tease and alienates viewers instead of drawing us into the mystery. Cryptic text messages, evil-looking tattoos, sepia-tinted flashbacks of unexplained incidents and a procession of knowing glances between the wedding guests seem to have been foregrounded ahead of a coherent and focussed plot and characterisation. Plenty of 'red herring' shocks - hammered home by the ridiculously intrusive score - only succeed in eliciting groans instead of jolts.

It's a huge task to successfully establish a large ensemble cast within the space of a show's first hour. Harper's Island resoundingly fails in this respect. The figure of Abby, the haunted young lady returning to the island after several years, is supposed to be our way into the action and a spate of scenes try to drum up some empathy for her tormented predicament. She certainly fares better than those around her, but it's ultimately too hard to sustain much interest in her story and future affairs because it's too bogged down in hints about her true nature instead of something concrete to latch onto.

We don't know where we stand with anyone, which is not helped by the episode frequently and frustratingly crosscutting around the concurrent events on the island. It would have been far wiser to concentrate on a small number of key characters and gradually weave the rest into the mix over the following episodes. In that sense, Harper's Island is a victim of its own ambitious nature by trying to achieve too much, too soon.

Nonetheless, the creepy camerawork deserves to be commended and the grizzly deaths are well executed, containing a fair degree of invention and crowdpleasing elements. If only there was more of a hook to compel us to tune in to the next episode, rather than leave us wondering which one-dimensional slab of meat will be killed next.