Harry and June are two lovestruck teenagers in search of something better. Harry’s homelife is a depressing one involving helping care for a catatonic father, and June lives under a strict regime of tight rules imposed by an overbearing father. But when this pair of young lovers decide to run away together to start a new life, they will face challenges above and beyond what you might expect.

On the surface, The Innocents presents an interesting core concept – a twist on the staple ‘Young lovers run away together and then find life isn’t all milk and honey just because you left your parents behind’ story, being ‘what will those young lovers do when confronted with the reality that one of them is a shapeshifter with little control over the ability?’ It’s a bizarre enough concept that you feel it has to work on sheer audacity alone.

And to be fair, the show does a lot absolutely right. The opening hour spends much of its time building up a sense of verisimilitude with the relationship between our protagonists, as well as a lot of sympathy. June is heavily controlled by her father, literally walked to her locker at school by him, only given a simple mobile phone in the car on the way to school and having it taken away immediately she’s picked up again. Harry seems to be the default carer for his mostly catatonic father, his mother apparently content to leave it to him. It’s not abusive, or even uncaring, it just seems to be the developed status quo for him, and Harry seems to take it. There’s a real sense of the claustrophobia that two such characters might feel, and therefore a corresponding sense of realism to their objectively mad plan to simply run away together in a £100 banger to start a new life together.

Where it falls down slightly is in the actual genre part. Guy Pearce plays… well, it’s not really clear from the episode itself but according to the series synopsis he is a ‘mysterious professor’ and he seems to be working with a small isolated colony of ‘shifters’, although to what purpose is at this stage unclear. What does come across is that his rules seem to be as strict and repressive for his colony as June’s father’s were for her, so when they finally come together, it’s difficult to see how he might persuade June that she’s better off with him.

There’s not much to hang the genre hat on here though. We get a couple of examples of shifting, a few glimpses of various parts of the professor’s colony/facility, and one action scene. There’s a bit of a 28 Days Later feel to the action – very visceral and oddly real when juxtaposed with the fantastic nature of the central premise – and there’s a danger, if anything, that the opener overplays this feeling of reality a little, making the pacing drag a little more than it needs to. It doesn’t help that we don’t really get anything to sink our teeth into in the way of the actual mythology behind the fantastic bits here – there’s just vague conversations which imply the participants know more, but leaving the viewer a little lost.

Verdict: It’s too early to make any concrete impression, but on the strength of the opener, this may well be an interesting entry in a fairly crowded genre. Certainly it makes a nice change to have a supernatural romance show that isn’t just a moon-faced girl making eyes at some mysterious undead guy. But it needs to pack in some actual genre stuff quick, lest it just become another teen romance drama. 7/10

Greg D. Smith